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Chapter One

Even an Engineer Can Thrive on Emotional Intelligence

What Emotional Intelligence Is and How to Develop It

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters to what lies within us.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would like to begin our journey together on a note of optimism, partly because beginning on a note of pessimism does not sell books. More importantly, based on my team’s experience teaching at Google and elsewhere, I am optimistic that emotional intelligence is one of the best predictors of success at work and fulfillment in life, and it is trainable for everyone. With the right training, anybody can become more emotionally intelligent. In the spirit of “if Meng can cook, so can you,” if this training works for a highly introverted and cerebral engineer like me, it will probably work for you.

The best definition of emotional intelligence comes from the two men widely regarded as the fathers of its theoretical framework, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer. They define emotional intelligence as:

The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.¹

The groundbreaking book that popularized the topic is Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, written by Daniel Goleman, our friend and advisor. One of the most important messages in the book is that emotional competencies are not innate talents; they are learned abilities. In other words, emotional competencies are something you can deliberately acquire with practice.

Goleman adds a very useful structure to emotional intelligence by classifying it into five domains. They are:

1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions

2. Self-regulation: Management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources

3. Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals

4. Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns

5. Social skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

Salovey and Mayer are not the only people whose work relates to social and emotional intelligence. Howard Gardner, for example, famously introduced the idea of multiple intelligences. Gardner argued that people can be intelligent in ways not measured by an IQ test. A child, for example, may not be strong in solving math problems, but he may be gifted in language arts or composing music, and therefore we should consider him intelligent. Gardner formulated a list of seven intelligences (later increased to eight). Two of them, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences, are especially relevant to emotional intelligence. Gardner called them “personal intelligences.” Goleman’s five domains of emotional intelligence map very nicely into Gardner’s personal intelligences: you can think of the first three domains of emotional intelligence as intrapersonal intelligence and the last two as interpersonal intelligence.

Funny enough, for me, the best illustration of emotional intelligence as a learned ability did not come from a scholarly publication but from the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.² In the beginning of the story, Scrooge presents an example of low emotional intelligence. His intrapersonal intelligence is so low, he is incapable of creating emotional wellness for himself despite his wealth. In fact, his self-awareness is so bad, it takes three ghosts to help him figure himself out. His interpersonal intelligence is, of course, legendarily bad. Near the end of the story, however, Scrooge presents an example of elevated emotional intelligence. He develops strong self-awareness, he becomes capable of controlling his own emotional destiny, and his empathy and social skills blossom. Scrooge demonstrates that emotional intelligence is something that can be developed (in the version I saw, it happened in the space of a two-hour TV movie with enough time for commercials, but your mileage may vary).

Later in this book, we will examine the development of each domain of emotional intelligence in detail. Thankfully, it will not involve visits by Christmas ghosts.

Benefits of Emotional Intelligence

There is an important question that my friends in the training business call the so-what? question, as in, “Yes, very nice, but what can emotional intelligence do for me?” In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.

Stellar Work Performance

The first thing emotional intelligence enables is stellar work performance. Studies have shown that emotional competencies are twice as important in contributing to excellence as pure intellect and expertise.³ A study by Martin Seligman, considered the father of modern positive psychology and the creator of the idea of learned optimism, showed that insurance agents who are optimists outsell their pessimist counterparts by 8 percent in their first year and 31 percent in their second year.⁴

This was not surprising to me. After all, there are many jobs such as those in sales and customer service in which emotional competencies obviously make a big difference. We already know that intuitively. What surprised me was the report that this is true even for individual contributors in the tech sector, namely engineers like me whom you might expect to succeed purely on intellectual prowess. According to a study, the top six competencies that distinguish star performers from average performers in the tech sector are (in this order):

1. Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards

2. Ability to influence

3. Conceptual thinking

4. Analytical ability

5. Initiative in taking on challenges

6. Self-confidence⁵

Of the top six, only two (conceptual thinking and analytical ability) are purely intellectual competencies. The other four, including the top two, are emotional competencies.

Being strong in emotional intelligence can help everyone become outstanding at work, even engineers.

Outstanding Leadership

Emotional intelligence makes people better leaders. Most of us understand it intuitively based on our day-to-day experience interacting with those whom we lead and those who lead us. There are also studies that back up our intuition with scientific evidence. For example, Goleman reported an analysis that shows emotional competencies to make up to 80 to 100 percent of the distinguishing competencies of outstanding leaders.⁶ This is illustrated by the story of Gerald Grinstein, a CEO who had to go through the painful process of cutting costs. Grinstein was tough, but being a virtuoso at interpersonal skills, he earned the cooperation of his employees and managed to keep their loyalty and spirits high while turning around their once-ailing company, despite having to make very tough decisions. In fact, Grinstein performed his magic not once but twice, once as CEO of Western Airlines and again as CEO of Delta. When Grinstein took over Delta amid a crisis, he immediately went about restoring lines of communication and trust within the company. He understood the importance of creating a positive work environment and, using extraordinary leadership skills (emotional intelligence), he turned a toxic work environment into a more family-like atmosphere.

Once again, I did not find any of this surprising, because we already intuitively understand the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership. What I found surprising was this is true even in the U.S. Navy. Another study by leadership expert Wallace Bachman showed that the most effective U.S. Navy commanders are “more positive and outgoing, more emotionally expressive and dramatic, warmer and more sociable (including smiling more), friendlier and more democratic, more cooperative, more likable and ‘fun to be with,’ more appreciative and trustful, and even gentler than those who were merely average.”⁷

When I think of military leadership, I think of tough-as-nails people barking orders and expecting to be obeyed, so it is fascinating to me that even in a military environment, what distinguishes the best leaders from the merely average ones is emotional intelligence. The best military commanders are basically nice people who are fun to be with. Funny enough, the title of the Bachman study was “Nice Guys Finish First.”

The Ability to Create the Conditions for Happiness

Perhaps most importantly, emotional intelligence enables the skills that help us create conditions for our own sustainable happiness. Matthieu Ricard defines happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind . . . not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being.”⁸ And that optimal state of being is “a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions.”

In Matthieu’s experience, happiness is a skill that can be trained. That training begins with deep insight into mind, emotion, and our experience of phenomena, which then facilitates practices that maximize our inner well-being at a deep level, ultimately creating sustainable happiness and compassion.

My own experience is similar to Matthieu’s. When I was young, I was naturally very unhappy. If nothing good happened, then by default, I was unhappy. Right now, it is the reverse: if nothing bad happens, then by default, I am happy. I have become so naturally jolly that it even became part of my job title at Google: jolly good fellow. We all have a set point of happiness that we return to whenever the euphoria of a pleasant experience or the sting of an unpleasant experience fades out. Many of us assume this set point to be static, but my personal experience and that of many others like Matthieu suggest this set point to be movable with deliberate training.

Happily, the skills that help us cultivate emotional intelligence also help us identify and develop the inner factors that contribute to our deep sense of well-being. The same things that build emotional intelligence will also help us create conditions for our own happiness. Therefore, happiness may be an unavoidable side effect of cultivating emotional intelligence. Other side effects may include resilience, optimism, and kindness.

Truth be told, of the three good things enabled by emotional intelligence, happiness is the one I really care about. (Hush hush, but just between you and me and the million other people reading this book, the other points about stellar work performance and outstanding leadership, while useful and true and supported by scientific evidence, are used by me mostly to get a stamp of approval from upper management.) What I really care about is happiness for my co-workers. That is why emotional intelligence excites me. It doesn’t just create the conditions for stellar success at work; it also creates the conditions for personal happiness for everyone. And I like happiness.

Optimize Thyself

If there is a one-word summary of everything I just said (hint: there is), that word is optimize. The aim of developing emotional intelligence is to help you optimize yourself and function at an even higher level than what you are already capable of. Even if you are already outstanding at what you do (which everybody in our class at Google is), sharpening and deepening your emotional competencies can give you an extra edge. We hope the training in these pages can help you go from good to great.

Cultivating Emotional Intelligence

When people come to a course such as ours that advertises itself as an “emotional intelligence course,” most people expect it to be a purely behavioral course. They expect to be told how to play nice, share candy, and not bite their co-workers.

We decided on an entirely different approach, focusing primarily on expanding the range and depth of people’s emotional abilities. We begin with the insight that emotional intelligence is a collection of emotional skills and, like all skills, emotional skills are trainable. We created a course to train those skills. We feel that if we develop skills, behavioral issues automatically go away. For example, if a person acquires the ability to skillfully manage his own anger, then all his behavioral issues involving anger are “automagically” solved. Emotional skillfulness frees us from emotional compulsion. We create problems when we are compelled by emotions to act one way or another, but if we become so skillful with our emotions that we are no longer compelled, we can act in rational ways that are best for ourselves and everybody else.

Emotional intelligence is trainable, even in adults. This claim is based on a fairly new branch of science known as “neuroplasticity.” The idea is that what we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and function of our brains. A very interesting example of this comes from drivers of traditional black cabs in London. To get a license to drive that cab, you need to navigate the twenty-five thousand streets of London and all its points of interest in your head. This is a difficult test that can take two to four years of intense training to prepare for. Research has shown that the part of the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation, the hippocampus, is bigger and more active in London cabbies than in the average person. More interestingly, the longer someone has been driving a cab in London, the larger and more active her hippocampus.⁹

One very important implication of neuroplasticity is that we can intentionally change our brains with training. For example, research by my friend and fellow Search Inside Yourself teacher Philippe Goldin shows that after just sixteen sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), people with social anxiety disorder are able to increase activity in the parts of their brains associated with self-regulation, linguistic processing, and attention when working with their own negative self-beliefs.¹⁰ Think about it, if we can train our brains to overcome even serious emotional disorders, just imagine the possibility of using it to greatly improve the quality of our emotional lives. That is the promise of the science and practices described in these pages.

A fascinating example of the application of neuroplasticity comes from the work led by Christopher deCharms.¹¹ DeCharms had people who suffer from chronic pain lie inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and, using real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) technology, he showed each participant an image of a fire on a video screen. The greater the neural activity in the parts of their brains associated with their pain, the greater the fire became. By using that visual display, he could get people to learn to up- or down-regulate that brain activity and, with that ability, participants reported a corresponding decrease in their levels of pain. He calls this “neuroimaging therapy.”

Brain. Trainable. Good.

Train Attention

How do we begin training emotional intelligence? We begin by training attention. This may seem a little counterintuitive at first. I mean, what does attention have to do with emotional skills?

The answer is that a strong, stable, and perceptive attention that affords you calmness and clarity is the foundation upon which emotional intelligence is built. For example, self-awareness depends on being able to see ourselves objectively, and that requires the ability to examine our thoughts and emotions from a third-person perspective, not getting swept up in the emotion, not identifying with it, but just seeing it clearly and objectively. This requires a stable and clear, non-judging attention. Another example shows how attention relates to self-regulation. There is an ability called “response flexibility,” which is a fancy name for the ability to pause before you act. You experience a strong emotional stimulus, but instead of reacting immediately as you normally would (for example, giving the other driver the bird), you pause for a split second, and that pause gives you choice in how you want to react in that emotional situation (for example, choosing not to give the other driver the bird, which may save you a lot of trouble because the other driver may be an angry old man with golf clubs who turns out to be the father of the woman you’re dating). That ability depends again on having a quality of attention that is clear and unwavering.

To quote Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” What a mind of calmness and clarity does is to increase that space for us.

The way to train this quality of attention is something known as “mindfulness meditation.” Mindfulness is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”¹² The famous Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh defined mindfulness very poetically as “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality,”¹³ which I really like, but I found Jon’s definition easier to explain to the engineers, and I like the engineers. Mindfulness is a quality of mind that we all experience and enjoy from time to time, but it is something that can be greatly strengthened with practice, and once it becomes sufficiently strong, it leads directly to the attentional calmness and clarity that forms the basis of emotional intelligence.

There is scientific evidence showing that improving our ability to regulate our attention can significantly impact how we respond to emotions. An interesting study by neuroimaging researcher Julie Brefczynski-Lewis and colleagues revealed that when expert meditators (those with ten thousand or more hours of meditation training) were subjected to negative sounds (for example, a woman screaming), they showed lesser activation in the part of the emotional brain called the amygdala compared to novice meditators.¹⁴ Furthermore, the more hours of meditation training the expert had, the lower the activation in the amygdala. This is fascinating because the amygdala has a privileged position in the brain—it is our brain’s sentinel, constantly scanning everything we see for threats to our survival.

The amygdala is a hair trigger, which would rather be safe than sorry. When your amygdala detects what looks like a threat to your survival, such as a saber-toothed tiger charging at you or your boss slighting you, it puts you in a fight-flight-freeze mode and impairs your rational thinking. I find it fascinating that, simply with attention training, you can become good at regulating a part of the brain as primitive and important as the amygdala.

Another set of studies comes from the UCLA lab of Matthew Lieberman.¹⁵ There is a simple technique for self-regulation called “affect labeling,” which simply means labeling feelings with words. When you label an emotion you are experiencing (for example, “I feel anger”), it somehow helps you manage that emotion. Lieberman suggested the neural mechanisms behind how that process works. The evidence suggests that labeling increases the activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), commonly associated with being the brain’s “brake pedal,” which in turn increases the activation of part of the executive center of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which then down-regulates the amygdala.

Another related study by David Creswell and Matthew Lieberman showed that for people strong in mindfulness, the neural process just described works even better and an additional part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) gets recruited as well. It suggests that mindfulness can help your brain utilize more of its circuitry, thereby making it more effective at managing emotions.¹⁶

Train at the Level of Physiology

Once we develop strong, stable, and perceptive attention, what do we do with it? We focus it on our bodies, of course. This again seems a little counterintuitive. What have our bodies got to do with developing emotional intelligence?

There are two very good reasons to work with our bodies: vividness and resolution.

Every emotion has a correlate in the body. Dr. Laura Delizonna, a researcher turned happiness strategist, very nicely defines emotion as “a basic physiological state characterized by identifiable autonomic or bodily changes.”¹⁷ Every emotional experience is not just a psychological experience; it is also a physiological experience.

We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind.

More importantly, bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution perception of emotions. High-resolution perception means your perception becomes so refined across both time and space that you can watch an emotion the moment it is arising, you can perceive its subtle changes as it waxes and wanes, and you can watch it the moment it ceases. This ability is important because the better we can perceive our emotions, the better we can manage them. When we are able to perceive emotions arising and changing in slow motion, we can become so skillful at managing them, it is almost like living that cool scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, dodges bullets after he becomes able to perceive the moments the bullets are fired and see their trajectory in slow motion. Well, maybe we’re not that cool, but you get the point. Unlike Neo, we’re accomplishing our feat not by slowing down time, but by vastly upgrading our ability to perceive the experience of emotion.

The way to develop high-resolution perception of emotion is to apply mindfulness to the body. Using anger as the example, you may be able to train yourself to observe your mind all the time and then to catch anger as it arises in the mind. However, in our experience, it is far easier and more effective to do it in the body. For example, if your bodily correlate to anger is tightness in your chest, shallow breath, and tightness in your forehead, then when you’re in an awkward social situation, the moment your chest tightens, your breath shallows, and your forehead tenses up, you know you are at the moment of arising anger. That knowledge gives you the ability to respond in ways of your own choosing (such as leaving the room before you do something you know you will regret, or choosing to allow the anger to bloom if that’s the right response for the situation).

Essentially, because emotion has such a strong physiological component, we cannot develop emotional intelligence unless we operate at the level of physiology. That is why we direct our mindfulness there.

Last but not least, a useful reason to develop a high-resolution perception of the body is to strengthen our intuition. A lot of our intuition comes from our body, and learning to listen to it can be very fruitful. Here is an illustrative example from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink:

Imagine that I were to ask you to play a very simple gambling game. In front of you are four decks of cards—two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don’t know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. . . . You can win only by taking cards from the blue decks . . . The question is how long will it take you to figure this out?

A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and what they found is that after we’ve turned over about fifty cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what’s going on. We don’t know why we prefer the blue decks, but we’re pretty sure, at that point, that they are a better bet. After turning over about eighty cards, most of us have figured the game out and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. But the Iowa scientists did something else, and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins. They hooked each gambler up to a polygraph—a lie detector machine—that measured the activity of the sweat glands that all of us have below the skin in the palms of our hands. Most sweat glands respond to temperature, but those in our palms open up in response to stress—which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous. What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More importantly, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the good decks.¹⁸

There may be a neurological explanation for why intuition is experienced in the body. Matthew Lieberman’s review of research showed “evidence suggesting that the basal ganglia are the neuroanatomical bases of both implicit learning and intuition.” The story behind basal ganglia is, once again, best told by our friend Daniel Goleman:

The basal ganglia observes everything we do in life, every situation, and extracts decision rules. . . . Our life wisdom on any topic is stored in the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity to the verbal cortex. It can’t tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings, it has a lot of connectivity to the emotional centers of the brain and to the gut. It tells us this is right or this is wrong as a gut feeling.¹⁹

That may be why intuition is experienced in the body and the gut, but it cannot be easily verbalized.

From Mindfulness to Emotional Intelligence

Our approach to cultivating emotional intelligence begins with mindfulness. We use mindfulness to train a quality of attention that is strong both in clarity and stability. We then direct this power-charged attention to the physiological aspects of emotion so we can perceive emotion with high vividness and resolution. The ability to perceive the emotional experience at a high level of clarity and resolution builds the foundation for emotional intelligence.

And we live happily ever after.

In the upcoming chapters, we will explore this approach in more detail and then build additional skills on top of it to develop all five domains of emotional intelligence.

Mindfulness in Two Minutes

Most evenings, before we sleep, my young daughter and I sit in mindfulness together for two minutes. I like to joke that two minutes is optimal for us because that is the attention span of a child and of an engineer. For two minutes a day, we quietly enjoy being alive and being together. More fundamentally, for two minutes a day, we enjoy being. Just being. To just be is simultaneously the most ordinary and the most precious experience in life.

As usual, I let my experience with a child inform how I teach adults. This daily two-minute experience is the basis of how I introduce the practice of mindfulness in introductory classes for adults.

In learning and teaching mindfulness, the good news is that mindfulness is embarrassingly easy. It is easy because we already know what it’s like, and it’s something we already experience from time to time. Remember that Jon Kabat-Zinn skillfully defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Put most simply, I think mindfulness is the mind of just being. All you really need to do is to pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It is that simple.

The hard part in mindfulness practice is deepening, strengthening, and sustaining it, especially in times of difficulty. To have a quality of mindfulness so strong that every moment in life, even in trying times, is infused with a deep calmness and a vivid presence, is very hard and takes a lot of practice. But mindfulness per se is easy. It is easy to understand and easy to arise in ourselves. That ease is what I capitalize on as an instructor.

In my classes, after explaining some of the theory and brain science behind mindfulness, I offer two ways to experience a taste of mindfulness: the Easy Way and the Easier Way.

The creatively named Easy Way is to simply bring gentle and consistent attention to your breath for two minutes. That’s it. Start by becoming aware that you are breathing, and then pay attention to the process of breathing. Every time your attention wanders away, just bring it back very gently.

The Easier Way is, as its name may subtly suggest, even easier. All you have to do is sit without agenda for two minutes. Life really cannot get much simpler than that. The idea here is to shift from “doing” to “being,” whatever that means to you, for just two minutes. Just be.

To make it even easier, you’re free to switch between the Easy Way and the Easier Way anytime during these two minutes. Any time you feel like you want to bring awareness to breathing, just switch to Easy. Any time you decide you’d rather just sit without agenda, just switch to Easier. No questions asked.

This simple exercise is mindfulness practice. If practiced often enough, it deepens the inherent calmness and clarity in the mind. It opens up the possibility of fully appreciating each moment in life, every one of which is precious. It is for many people, including myself, a life-changing practice. Imagine—something as simple as learning to just be can change your life.

Best of all, it is something even a child knows how to do.

In the next chapter, we will take a deep dive into mindfulness.