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Chapter 2: An Emotional Blueprint
If there is one theme that captures the primary message of this book, it’s this: emotions are important. They are relevant to our everyday lives. They are not merely vestiges of our evolutionary past, like our wisdom teeth or appendix. Nonetheless, for all the importance of emotions, they receive so little attention in our formal education that we are woefully inadequate when it comes to understanding and dealing with them.
A Blueprint for Thinking and Feeling
We believe that it is difficult, yet possible, to become an emotionally intelligent manager. At first, learning to identify and use the data in feelings might be somewhat awkward and mechanical. It might seem like following a difficult schematic diagram or a set of instructions for assembling a complex machine. Whereas some of us learn the underlying principles over time and can dispense with detailed assembly instructions, others of us will always need the schematic or explicit steps. The good news we offer all managers is that we have developed a schematic diagram for emotions—a set of detailed, how-to instructions. We call this an Emotional Blueprint (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1: Emotional Blueprint.
The Emotional Blueprint is based on a chapter by John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey in a 1997 book called Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence. The original work on emotional intelligence in the scientific literature was published in 1990 by Salovey and Mayer as a journal article in Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. Their research was motivated by the gap between the importance of emotions and the level at which the average person understands them.[Figure I.1):
Read People—Identify Emotions: This refers to the ability to identify accurately how you, and those around you, are feeling and your ability to express these feelings. More than awareness, this ability stresses accuracy of awareness.
Get in the Mood—Use Emotion: This special ability helps you determine how emotions help you and how they work in harmony with thinking. Your ability to use emotions changes your perspective, allowing you to see the world in different ways and to feel what others feel.
Predict the Emotional Future—Understand Emotions: Emotions have their own language, and they have their own logical moves. The ability to understand emotion means that you can determine why you feel the way you do and what will happen next.
Do It with Feeling—Manage Emotions: Emotions convey important information, so it is valuable to be open to our emotions and to use this information to make informed decisions.
Emotional intelligence, then, consists of these four abilities: to identify how people feel, to use emotions to help you think, to understand the causes of emotions, and to include and manage emotions in your decision making to make optimal choices in life. Each of these four abilities is separate from the other abilities and can be defined, studied, measured, developed, and used independently. But the four abilities also work together. The fourpart model provides a blueprint for leading more effective lives. The model applies to almost any realm of our life, as we tap into these emotional skills to understand ourselves and other people better.[3] [1]Mayer, J. D., DiPaolo, M., and Salovey, P. “Perceiving the Affective Content in Ambiguous Visual Stimuli: A Component of Emotional Intelligence.” Journal of Personality Assessment, 1990, 54, 772–781; Salovey, P., and Mayer, J. D. “Emotional Intelligence.” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 1990, 9, 185–211. [2]Gardner, H. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. (10th Anniversary Ed.) New York: Basic Books, 1993 (originally published 1983). See also Sternberg, R. J. The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin, 1985. Sternberg, R. J. Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life. New York: Plume, 1996. [3]For more thorough descriptions of the four-skill model, see Mayer, J. D., and Salovey, P. “What Is Emotional Intelligence?” In P. Salovey and D. Sluyter (eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications. New York: Basic Books, 1997; Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., and Caruso, D. “Models of Emotional Intelligence.” In R. J. Sternberg (ed.), The Handbook of Intelligence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Salovey, P., Bedell, B. T., Detweiler, J. B., and Mayer, J. D. “Current Directions in Emotional Intelligence Research.” In M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones (eds.), Handbook of Emotions. (2nd ed.) New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
