the 4 domains. Self-awareness, knowing what we're feeling, why we're feeling it, which

is a basis of, for example, good intuition, good decision-making. Also, it's a moral compass.

Say, in part, is self-management, which means handling your distressing emotions in effective

ways so that they don't cripple you, they don't get in the way of what you're doing,

and yet, attuning them... to them when you need to so that you learn what you must. Every

emotion has a function. Also, [marshalling] positive emotions, getting ourselves, you

know, involved, enthused about what we're doing, aligning our actions with our passions.

The third is empathy, knowing what someone else is feeling. And the fourth is putting

that altogether in skilled relationship. So that's what I mean by emotional intelligence.

There're many definitions out there. The part of the brain, it turns out, that supports

emotional and social intelligence is actually the last circuitry of the brain to become

anatomically mature. And because the neuroplasticity of the brain shapes itself according to repeated

experiences, so my argument is, hey, we should be teaching kids regularly overtime, in a

systematic way, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skill. In fact, there,

now, enough programs and they've been around enough in schools that they're about to publish

a huge meta analysis, looking at hundreds of schools and kids that had the program versus

those that don't. Guess what? All anti-social behavior, you know, disruption in class, find

that... it goes down 10%. Pro-social behavior, liking school, well-behave, up 10%. Academic

achievement scores, up 11%. So it really pays. Executive function, which is mediated by the

prefrontal lobe, both helps you manage your emotions and helps you pay attention. So as

kids learn these skills, they also learn learning... basic learning skills. I think that the fact

that that was an argument was one thing that caught people's attention. Then, there was

a little chapter on... called managing with heart, which argued that leaders who were

sons of a bitch were actually defeating the company's own mission. And I think that made

a lot of people happy because they work for people like that. I don't know... Some people

gave it to other people because they thought they needed help in this domain. I'm sure

there're a zillion reasons why people like the book.

I hope more. I know IQ has been going up for a hundred years as children encounter more

sophisticated cognitive environment as they grow. I don't know that we're becoming more

emotionally intelligent. I like to hope we would but I think that the number of intergroup

wars going on, the intergroup hatred going on, the, you know, levels of familial abuse,

in other words, indicators of emotions out of control in dangerous ways don't look that

great, which is why I'm a very strong proponent of getting these social, emotional learning

programs in every school worldwide.

Well, I get asked that question in a different way, which is, are women more emotionally

intelligent than men? And you have to remember that emotion intelligence is a range of abilities,

self-awareness, emotional self-management, empathy, social skills. Women tend to be better

than men on average at empathy, particularly emotional empathy, sensing in the moment how

the other person is feeling and also, at social skills, at keeping things feeling good between

people in a group. Men, on the other hand, tend to be better on average at self-confidence,

particularly in group, and at managing distressing emotions. But what's very interesting is if

you look at leaders who were in the top 10%, there's no difference between the men and

the women on any of those variables. In other words, you have a whole human being. So I

would say that on average, there probably are differences men and women in this domain

of ability. But as people develop their skills, as people become more effective, they pick

up strengths in areas that they need.

Well, I think that emotional intelligence as a universal but it looks different in different

places. You know, Japan has a very rigid set of rules of social interaction, lots of subtleties.

Americans typically blender in to the Japanese system, don't get what's going on. And, you

know, it's embarrassing but they wouldn't recognize, necessarily, emotional intelligence

in Japanese setting. Brazil is a very different culture. It's very outgoing, you know, kind

of like an Italian culture. And so, it will look different there but I think the fundamentals

are the same.