The Rich History and Future Potential of Emotional Intelligence

Dr. Laura Belsten is an internationally known expert in the field of social and emotional intelligence. The founder of the Institute for Social and Emotional Intelligence in Denver, Colorado, she's the author of the widely acclaimed social and emotional intelligence profile and toolkit.

Laura has studied extensively with international EI experts and she's certified in four other leading emotional intelligence instruments. She has been on the faculty of the University of Denver for over 20 years where she teaches graduate courses in leadership and communication, including a graduate course in coaching emotional intelligence.

Laura had been an Executive Coach in private practice for well over 20 years. She's a Master Certified Coach (MCC) with the International Coach Federation (ICF) and she earned her PhD in leadership and organisational communication from the University of Denver in 1996.

Laura will be speaking about the genesis of the most up-to-date research approach and model of social and emotional intelligence, and how it came to be a major factor contributing to the growth of the most successful people around the world. She will also offer a look ahead to the future of this exciting field.

03:11 - Review of the leading SEI methodologies and instruments

06:50 - The 4 Quadrant Model explained

08:25 - The evolution of Emotional Intelligence

14:00 - The Future of Emotional Intelligence as it integrates with Positive Psychology

To learn more about the 26 competencies of Social and Emotional Intelligence and how they work hand in hand with Positive Psychology, watch the full session video below.

Now that you understand the value of developing your Social and Emotional Intelligence, perhaps it's time for you to start your own journey of self-awareness and to rebuild your personal power. If you are ready to take back control of your life and escape the performance trap, join Grant Herbert in the Emotional Intelligence Online Bootcamp.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

I'm going to be speaking on the rich history of Social and Emotional Intelligence -- its evolution,  model, and a little about the future.  

So, let's go ahead and take a look at this image:  

I like this image because if you look at the picture, you can see that the writing on the cellphone screen is not in English, which goes to the point that Emotions and social and emotional Intelligence are universal. 

In every culture, country, and language, emotions exist. Emotions are central to the human experience. It is what makes us human. Emotions come to us – they are information that comes into our lives, and it's universal.  

So, what we did at the Institute was we took a look at the leading instruments and models of Social and Emotional Intelligence. This was about 20 something years ago: 

The Emotional and Social Competency Inventory which was based on the work of Daniel Goleman and is now published by the Hay Group. 

The EQ-I 2.0 (Emotional Quotient Inventory) based on the work of Reuven Baron and published by Multi-Health Systems.  

The MSCEIT (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso) which was also published by Multi-Health systems. 

The Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso Emotional Intelligence test.  

The EQ map based on the work of Robert Cooper and Esther Orioli, and published by Essie Systems.  

This is a very busy slide: 

But what we did was we took a look at all of the leading instruments available at the time: the ESCI, the EQ-i 2.0, the MSCEIT, and the EQ map. We looked at what these instruments measure and the model of Social and Emotional Intelligence. As you can see, there are similarities: All of them measure Emotional Self-Awareness. This competency is what's coming up for us at this very moment. 

They typically measured something called personal, but some of them called it something else, like self-confidence, assertiveness, or positive self-regard ( we kind of liked the term Personal Power.) 

Behavioural self-control was another common thing. Others called it emotional self-control or impulse control. We, however, like the term behavioral self-control. Emotional self-control suggests that we can control our emotions to the point of repressing or stuffing them. And we don't want that. As I mentioned, emotions come to us- is just part of being human. We want that information, and emotion is a valuable source of information. So, what we did is this (we're not going to get into all of this): We filled the gaps in the assessments and created a toolkit to help people learn to put these principles into practice. We came up with a four-quadrant model out of all this research and integration of all of this information.  

In the model, “Self” is at the top-left. 

“Other/Social” at the top-right.  

On the right side are “Awareness and Management.” This defines what Social and Emotional Intelligence is. It's about self-awareness: what's coming up for you in the moment.  

What is the other awareness? 

What might be coming up for another person that we're interacting with? 

What can I do to manage myself? 

What should I do with this information? 

And emotion is a very valuable source of information.  

If we pay attention to what's coming up for other people and us, we can manage ourselves and our relationships. So, Self-Awareness is really foundational. It leads to being:  

“We can't be aware of what might be coming up for other people if we're not aware of what's coming up for us. We can't also can't manage ourselves if we're not aware of what's coming up for us.” 

All of these leads to Relationship Management, which leads to thriving, flourishing, and greater well-being.  

Our concept of Intelligence has evolved over the past 120 years or so. Prior to the 1900s, we haven’t really scientifically defined what Intelligence is. But in the 1900s, a French psychologist named Albert Binet created the very first IQ test and administered it to French school children. The way that he defined Intelligence was primarily verbal and mathematical skills. And that was our definition of Intelligence until about the mid 1980s when a gentleman named Howard Gardner came along. He was a psychology professor at Harvard University.  

He said, “You know what folks, there's a whole lot more to intelligence than simply verbal and mathematical skills.”  

This was a concept that in turn led Mayer and Salovey coining the term Emotional Intelligence in 1990. Just very shortly, Reuven Baron coined the term Emotional Quotient or EQ. Then, mid 2000 the term Social and Emotional Intelligence came into play.  

So, let’s touch on just for context in terms of the history of all this and how this all came about. Before, it was thought that Intelligence was limited to linguistic (verbal) or logical (mathematical). So those are what defined Intelligence until Howard Gardner came along. Gardner believed that there's a lot more to it, and that's where he came up with the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. 

Let’s take a look at some of the intelligences stipulated in this theory: 

There's spatial, musical, and kinesthetic Intelligence.  

Some of you may have had the good fortune to travel to Florence, Italy, and see the “David ."David is like spatial Intelligence personified. 

Michelangelo took two years to carve this. The statue of David stands about 17 feet high. On a pedestal that's about five feet high.  

Michelangelo took this big, huge block of marble. He was somehow able to visualise an image in his mind, carve and chip away and reveal the “David.” 

The curls of the hair.  

The eyebrows.  

The eyes, hands, veins in the hands, ear lobes, and musculature. Wow! What an amazing form of Intelligence that allows us to see something before it's even built.  

Builders, architects, and artists have this form of Intelligence. 

Musical Intelligence. An example of a person with this Intelligence is Beethoven. Beethoven wrote the ninth symphony when he was deaf. He could no longer hear the music, but he had a mind and Intelligence that knew how to put the notes together. 

kinesthetic Intelligence. This is a mind body connection form of Intelligence. Olympic athletes who win the downhill by 1/100th of a second; there is a mind- body connection/intelligence there. 

Then there’s intrapersonal Intelligence and interpersonal Intelligence. These are the two forms of Intelligence that gave rise to Social and Emotional Intelligence. 

Intrapersonal Intelligence means knowing myself, what’s coming up for me. While interpersonal Intelligence is knowing what might be coming up for someone else and managing relationships. 

Later on, Naturalistic Intelligence was added. Naturalistic Intelligence is a form of Intelligence that some people have to distinguish between trees, animals, rocks, and geology. 

Existentialistic Intelligence is a form of Intelligence that some people have who really look at why we are here and the bigger questions of life.  

In this article, we’re going to be focusing on Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Intelligence. We will look at these intelligences as a means and a path to thriving, flourishing, and greater well-being; which is at its heart, Positive Psychology.  

So again, “self” and “other.”  

“Awareness” and “Management.”  

Being aware of what's coming up for us in the moment. 

Being aware of what might be coming up for someone else, and using that information to manage ourselves and manage our relationships leading to thriving, flourishing, and greater well-being.  

So that's a bit of a history of how we got to this point of Social and Emotional Intelligence 

The future of Emotional Intelligence is its integration with the field of Positive Psychology. 

What is Positive Psychology? 

There's certainly nothing wrong with traditional psychology. But Positive Psychology is this: 

Rather than looking at mental illness and pathology, Positive Psychology is the scientific study of what goes right with people who are thriving and flourishing. This is so we can teach: 

What makes people thrive and flourish? 

How can we optimize human functioning and well-being?  

How can we help people become more resilient, optimistic, empathetic, and connected to others? 

This is a version of Positive Psychology: 

This is one of the leading models that came from Martin Seligman.  

Martin Seligman, a professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and some of his colleagues have been doing some research on what makes people thrive and flourish. In his study, Seligman came up with the acronym PERMA. He didn't come up with V which makes the model in the video a little controversial. However, some people have added that in. Let me just mention what this is so you're going to have the opportunity to get into this in much greater detail. 

Positive Emotions. It’s about being positive. It’s about choosing positivity. Positivity is a choice which is also a self-regulation and a behavioural self-management thing. We can choose to focus on what's wrong; we can choose to ruminate (which is what psychologists call it when we spiral down into clinical depression or we can choose to focus on what's right and what's working.) 

I sometimes tell people about my 106-year-old grandmother. She was born before world war one. She lived through world war I, the great depression and, World War II, the first man on the moon, the invention of the first computer, and so much more.  

We are amid a pandemic -- a worldwide pandemic -- and it's a very serious thing. Yet, we still have something we can be grateful for.  

My grandmother could not stomach the smell of turnips. She did not know she would talk about it. She did not know how her mother kept her and her brothers during World War One. And I think it was the turnips. That’s all they had to eat.  

Nowadays, you are fortunate to go to the grocery (even with our masks on) and buy some fresh produce from all over the world, and you are not going hungry. So, you can choose to focus on the negative or choose to focus on the positive. It is a choice. A self-regulation and self-management type of choice. Now, that's not to say that you should ignore negative emotions. In fact, far from it. As I mentioned, emotions come to us unbidden, and there's usually a reason you need to stop and listen for that.  

So, if you’re upset, angry, or frustrated, you need to pay attention to that. It's just that you don't want to ruminate and go into a downward spiral. You want to pay attention, make some decisions about what you’re going to do about that, and then move forward, preferably with positive emotions.  

By the way, some of the research from Sonya Lubomirski suggests that about 40%  (that’s almost a full-half) of our emotional state is a choice; it's what we choose to be.  

Engagement. Engagement is about flow. It's when we're so focused and engaged on what we're doing time flies. If we are engaged in life, we can be engaged in work. Again, it can be a choice, and we can design our lives around what engages us. 

Relationships. In positive psychology, it has been studied that the number one factor for people to thrive and flourish is having sound relationships. People who have sound relationships are deeply connected to other people. Research suggests that people who don't exercise who are overweight are 20% more likely to have a shorter lifespan. To heavy drinkers, it's 30%, while to those who smoke, it's 50%. However, people who are lonely have a 70% chance of dying premature death.  

Some of you may be familiar with the story of Rosito.  

Rosito is a little town in the 1960s in Eastern Pennsylvania, USA. The town had a population of about 2000 people. Amazingly, the town had almost zero incidents of heart disease and stroke. Most of the people living there were of Italian-American descent and they were a very close-knit community. They'd get together on Wednesday nights for spaghetti dinner, Thursday nights for botchy ball, Friday nights for fish, and Saturday nights for pig roast. In short, they were always together with other people.  

When researchers made a study about them, they discovered that it wasn't their diet or exercise that contributed to their good health and long life. In fact, they ate and drank too much. They even smoked but they outlived the general population in the United States.  

The researchers found that it was because of their close connections, relationships, and close-knit community. 

M-eaning.  

Meaning stands for being connected to something bigger than ourselves. It is one of the factors that make people thrive and flourish. Meaning can come from a variety of places. It can come from our work, raising a family, having a garden plot, doing volunteer work, and all those kinds of things.  

When we look for it, we can find it. 

I live in Colorado, and we have high mountain passes that are two-lane roads that get snowed in the winter. The only time they can really work on these roads to do repaving and fix potholes is during summertime - when everybody wants to be up there because that’s when the roads are open. 

Because it’s a two-lane road, they have to shut down the one-lane that they are working on and they have to let two lanes go on a single lane.  

So, they have a flag person who stops people and the other side gets to go. So, you get the picture.  

This guy comes up, he drives up, and he gets stopped. So, he's at the front of the line, ha has got his arm out the window and he's just tearing into the flag person: 

“Why did you stop me?!”  

“What a horrible job. How can you stand it? It’s going to be the most boring job on the planet. I don't know how you can possibly do it.” 

And the guy looks at him and he says: 

“You know, I actually like my job. I look around and I see beauty all over. This is God's country. Look at the mountains, the blue sky, the wildflowers. It's beautiful here. And you see those guys over there, those are my buddies. I make sure that they are safe.” 

So, his job had meaning for him. 

A-ccomplishment / Achievement 

People who are thriving and flourishing also have this sense of accomplishment and a sense of achieving something which goes back to self-management, setting goals, and achieving them. 

Vitality 

This is not part of Martin Seligman’s original theory but some people have added it. They believe that we can thrive and flourish 

 if we have our health.  

Seligman doesn't necessarily buy that because he knows people who have been in horrible accidents and are now in wheelchairs but are thriving and flourishing. So, he's not sold on this. 

In any case, I think the future of Social and Emotional Intelligence is its integration with Positive Psychology, happiness, and well-being.  

We take the study of happiness and well-being seriously: 

What creates well-being? 

What makes some people thrive and flourish? 

What makes life most worth living? 

How do human strengths and virtues come into play? 

How do human emotions factor into thriving and flourishing?  

Can all of this be taught?  

Going back to our four-quadrant model: 

There is self-awareness, other/social awareness and management.  

Self-Awareness is asking yourself: “What’s coming up for me at this particular moment?” 

Other/Social Awareness asks:  "What might be coming up for another person?”  

Using that information to stop and think about it, manage ourselves and manage our relationships. Doing so can give us valuable information that it can lead to thriving, flourishing, and greater well-being in our lives. So. let's take a quick look at these four quadrants: 

There are 26 distinct emotional intelligence competencies. However, in this article, let’s focus on the most important ones.  

Let’s start with Emotional Self-Awareness.  

Emotional Self-Awareness is about being aware of our emotions in the moment as they arrive. One of the ways to really understand our emotions is to have a strong emotional vocabulary. 

Should you like to have an emotional inventory with a comprehensive list of the emotions you might feel in the moment, you can send People Builders an email by submitting an inquiry using the form below.   

A good healthy emotional vocabulary helps us stay in touch with our emotions. So Accurate Self-Assessment is accurately assessing what's coming up for us.  

Then we have Personal Power. 

Personal Power has got something to do with an inner knowledge and an inner knowing that we can handle what life is throwing at us. It is having that positive self-regard and self-confidence. It is the taming of the saboteur and the self-critic. 

Then there’s “Other-Awareness.” 

Under this quadrant is Empathy.  

Aaron Feuerstein was the CEO of a company that manufactured synthetic down that you put on blankets, pillows and jackets. This plant/operation is located in Massachusetts, here in the United States. It was very rural area, and the building itself was an old mill. It was a large wooden structure. It was built in the 1800s. 

However, the building caught fire one cold December night. Imagine this building that had all that synthetic down, just blew up to a huge fireball that took the whole plantation down.  

The plant was located in a very small community with only 5,000 people living in the area. And almost half of the populace worked for him. So, Feuerstein was a major employer in the community. 

So when the volunteer fire department came out, all the people could do was watch their livelihood burn up in flames. And Feuerstein stood there shoulder to shoulder with his employees and the townspeople -- he felt empathy. This is what we call other awareness. He understood very clearly that they relied on the paycheck from his business to feed, clothe, and house their families. He understood the situation. Situational or organisational awareness is kind of like empathy on steroids. Like one to many, the townspeople including himself knew that this community will shut down if they don’t rebuild. From that moment on he decided moment to be of service.  

And this is part of Other Awareness.  

If we have empathy and we understand the situation, we can be of service to other people. Because of what he did, Feuerstein got an award for best corporate citizen, because what he did was he looked around at all these people and he said, we will rebuild. Not only did they rebuild, he kept everyone on the payroll for the two or three months that it took. They didn't put up a nice, beautiful wooden structure. They put up a steel metal building that did what it needed to do. And they were back in business.  

He could have taken his insurance money and hightailed it to someplace nice and warm on that cold December night and retired. But instead, he decided to be stick around and be of service. 

Self-management has to do with behavioral self-control.  

Some of you are probably familiar with the marshmallow studies. I love these studies.  

This study started during the 1960s. So the researchers brought these little four-year-old kids into the psychology lab and got them settled on these little child-size chairs and tables.  

Then the researcher would say, “Oh, I have to run an errand. Would you wait for me? I'll be back in about 15 minutes here. Here's a marshmallow. If you can’t wait, you can have this now. But if you can wait until I get back, I'll give you two.  

And these little kids are so cute. They’ll squeeze and sniff the marshmallow. They'll close their eyes, so they don't have to look at the marshmallow. Some will even get under the table. 

The kids did not know that the researchers did not have any errand to run; they were watching and filming the kids and studying behavioral self-control. These kids wanted that marshmallow. They replicated this study many times. 

Then they studied these kids over the next 40 years, and they found that those kids who could wait until the researcher got back so that they could have two marshmallows (those who had better behavioral self-control) did far better in work and life. They did far better on their college entrance exams,  had better grades in school, and had far better relationships in their marriage and in the workplace.  

Behavioral self-control and self-management really counts for a lot. These are a bunch of the other competencies under self-management. Integrity is also one of them. Integrity is having a feeling in the pit of our stomach about what's right and what's wrong. And we can choose to act on it or not.  

Self-management is a choice.  

Some of you are familiar with Victor Frankl’s quote about stimulus and response. There is a pause and a gap. And in that gap, we have the opportunity to choose our response. So rather than simply react, we can choose a response. We can choose to act under our sense of integrity or not. We can choose to innovate or be creative.  

People will say: “I don't have a creative bone in my body.”  

However, research says quite the opposite. It's a choice of getting into action and taking the initiative or procrastinating, striving and achieving, being optimistic, being resilient, being intentional, and managing our stress. Personal agility is how we deal with change that's thrust at us.  

So, these are all part of the self-management competencies in the self-management quadrant.  

Finally, relationship management.  

It all points here. And that starts with communication. You may remember from the PERMA model what R stands for relationships. It was the number one factor that contributed to longevity, happiness, resilience, lower heart disease, and lower incidence of stroke.  

So, relationship management really integrates very well with Positive Psychology. Here are all of the different competencies that we measure in relationship management: 

Interpersonal Effectiveness – is our ability to influence. Even if we're not in sales, we still influence every day; we try to sell somebody our good ideas in business meetings. 

Conflict Management – Conflict is inevitable. Whenever you get more than one human being in a room, sooner or later, there will be conflict. It is how it is managed that makes all the difference- whether it’s managed positively or negatively.  

Inspirational Leadership – is our ability to lead and inspire people to move in a new direction. 

Catalyzing Change 

Building Bonds 

Teamwork and Collaboration 

Coaching and Mentoring Others 

Building Trust.  

These are all the competencies with Relationship Management. 

So, going back to effective social and emotional functioning leads to all of these wonderful things. This is where they integrate these two fields of Emotional Intelligence and Positive Psychology. This is the future of Social and Emotional Intelligence is where is it going, as it relates to positive psychology: 

1. It leads to an enhanced ability to understand other people leading to better, stronger relationships and a deeper connection.  
2.  It leads to an enhanced understanding of our own emotions, which leads to greater self-regard and self-acceptance. 
3. It enhances self-regulation, leading to greater resilience, increased positivity, optimism, and greater success in the workplace and in life.  
4.  It leads us to a greater sense of well-being and positivity. And a sense of thriving and flourishing. I would also argue that it leads to longer life longevity, better health, and boosts our immunity.  

I'll tell you one quick story: 

In one study, they brought 299 undergraduate students into the psychology lab. The students did not know what they were being called for. They gave the students a test. They didn't know what they were being tested on. It turns out they were being tested on how positive or negative they were feeling at this very particular moment.  

One by one, they took the students into the next room and administered the rhinovirus to them. I mean they shot the cold virus directly up their noses, sent them home and made them come back after seven days.  

I don't know how they managed to get this study through the university ethics committee, but they did (and this has been replicated.) But what the researchers were after is (which the students didn't know) to know the correlation between how positive and or negative a student felt, and whether or not they came down with the common cold. And there was indeed a very strong correlation. Those individuals who were feeling more positive came down with the common cold far less frequently than those who were feeling negative. 

It seems that emotions had the power to positively or negatively influence a whole cascade of hormonal responses and chemical responses in the body, which influence our immune systems.   

So, happier people live longer. They get fewer colds and illnesses. They have fewer heart disease and stroke incidences (as we saw in the Rosita effect study.)  

So, Social and Emotional Intelligence is an integral part of Positive Psychology. It significantly impacts our happiness and positivity, engagements in work and life, relationships, well-being, and the quest for meaning in life. It influences character development which is also a big aspect of positive psychology, and it influences human performance and accomplishment. It even influences our vitality.