Quotes About Emotional intelligence

you will deal, every day, with people who have "mirror neuron gaps" because the world isn't giving back to them what they're putting out. (My guess, in fact, is that this is a nearly universal condition of humankind.) Understanding a person's hunger and responding to it is one of the most potent tools you'll ever discover for getting through to anyone you meet in business or your personal life.

It is not a guilt tripping, it is empathy training

1. Recognize that the person you're dealing with isn't able to think rationally in the current situation.

3. Realize that the crazy behavior isn't about you. Instead, it's all about the person you're dealing with.

The key fact to know when somebody goes nuclear is that the person is stuck in attack mode, so rational, reasonable, intelligent conversation won't work. A guy who's throwing a computer at the boss or waving a gun around can't listen to reason, because he can't access the higher thought processes that say "Hey, calm down—this is crazy.

Your task, if you're facing a person who's running amok, is to break that lock. How? By talking the person up gradually from "I want to hurt someone" to "I'm terribly upset" to "I need to find a smart way to handle this." These stages correlate with the three levels of the brain: the primitive reptile brain, the emotional mammal brain, and the logical human brain.

Stage 2 At this point, you're dealing with someone who's no longer striking out wildly but is still venting—better, but still a problem. So your next goal is to move the person from the emotional middle (mammal) brain up into the rational upper (human) brain.

Fail #2: Criticizing

Think of the sanest people in your life, the people you'd describe as poised, wise, emotionally intelligent, kind, or good. In my experience, most of these people had childhoods that made them strong and resilient.

Step 1: Increase physical awareness. Impulses begin as physical sensations. Stop and notice what you feel and where you feel it. In your stomach? Head? Neck? Chest? Step 2: Increase emotional awareness. Try to connect the physical sensation to an emotion. Why do you feel tense? What do you feel angry about? What are you afraid of?

One explanation for the effectiveness of making a person "feel felt" lies in the mirror neurons I talked about earlier. When you mirror what another person feels, the person is wired to mirror you in return. Say "I understand what you're feeling," and the other person will feel grateful and spontaneously express that gratitude with a desire to understand you in return. It's an irresistible biological urge, and one that pulls the person toward you.

If you achieve triunal agility, you become adaptable and resilient. As a result, you can deal with whatever life throws at you—even big upsets and tragedies. Occasionally you'll slide into crazy when an upset causes your three brains to temporarily misalign, but you won't live there permanently.

before you tackle the bruising challenge of talking to "crazy," make sure you have a good reason to go there.

But other times, you'll discover that you're sticking with an irrational person simply because you don't want to feel like a bad person yourself.

The trick to this approach is to ask the question ("Do you really believe that?") not in a hostile or degrading manner, but very calmly and in a straightforward way. Your intent is not to antagonize the other person, but rather to make the person stop and realize, "I really am making a mountain out of a molehill. I must sound like a jackass.

there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others.

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.

Listening is crucial for any novelist. Stories & ideas abound. We too often talk about ourselves & block out the richness others may offer.

Right there—listening and complimenting—you're ahead of eighty percent of every guy on the face of the earth.

Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have.

I don't like to do anything that's mean spirited just because I don't find it funny. I'd rather be the jackass than makes fun of somebody else. It just seems too cheap and easy.

Sometimes he hated that voice in his brain, the one that slapped him upside the head anytime he got too stupid. Funny, it happened a lot with Sienna.

Nothing is as irritating to a shy man as a confident girl.

Our response to an offense determines our future.