Equity Inclusion Leadership

5 July 2021

Empathy, teamwork, leadership of self: these categories of emotional intelligence are how we’re going to navigate a changing world with kindness and learning.

Breaking any sort of behaviour down into categories comes with all sorts of difficulties.

Categories assist our brain to make quick sense of lots and lots of stimuli. It’s easier for us to categorise, say, ‘people on LinkedIn are looking for a new job’ and ‘people on Instagram like pretty pictures’ because trawling through every social media platform and interacting with every type of human would be exhausting.

It’s easier for brains to stick to categories, then we can just stick to the same types of stuff (and unfortunately, the same types of people) we know and like.

I guess bringing it back to the social media example, if your brain made the categorisation of “LinkedIn is for job-seekers”, the behaviour you may predict from me posting on LinkedIn is that I’m looking for a job.

Your brain uses a shortcut – a heuristic to assume something about me from my behaviour. I actually just love talking about emotional intelligence, I’m not job-seeking at all. Our short-cut-loving, lazy brains can be wrong a lot of the time. In this example, that’s not really an assumption that hurts my feelings – but lots of the time our assumptions are incorrect and unkind.

We can harness this preference of our brains to categorise in useful ways too. Mentally filing information as ‘work’, ‘fun’, ‘family’, ‘mental health tools’ can mean we can access important information quickly when we need to. I’d highly recommend every human to reflect what’s in their own personal mental health toolkit. We often don’t have the time to learn new stuff when we’re in crisis, after all.

Try using these emotional capability categories as a tool to assist a conversation with someone who is kind and unrelentingly honest about how you could work better with others (at home, or in a paid or volunteer position).

Even when things are tough (and we’re still in a pandemic, so things are still tough, if you needed reminding) I reckon it’s important to focus on what’s in your own locus of control and plan your own path to a fantastic future.

Anyway, hope you’ve enjoyed my wee earnest (so very earnest) post and you learn more about Daniel Goleman if you’re not already aware of his emotional intelligence work!