Beyond Emotional Intelligence

11Reimagining Emotional Intelligence

Reimagining emotional intelligence (EI) would first mean arriving at a definition of what it is. Since we've established EI doesn't consist of just one thing, nor does it describe or point to a singular form of intelligence that can be pinpointed or tied to specific circuitry within the brain, we can say it consists of various capacities, skills, and means we can employ to detect, interpret, and respond to our own and other people's emotions in ways that improve our ability to make sense of and connect with how our own emotions make us and those around us feel. We can think of EI as a conceptual framework and set of methods that when consistently practiced and applied lead to “emotionally intelligent” habits, behaviors, and outcomes. To the extent our concept of what it means to be emotionally intelligent includes being able to respond with the same level of skill to other people's emotions as our own, which historically it has, then it requires we take a much broader stance relative to what will be required of us to do so. But, I suspect we will need to rely upon many of the same capacities, skills, and methods we've been introduced to in the book along with a host of new ones.

An Emergent View of Emotional Intelligence

What this amounts to is a paradigm shift that takes the exclusive spotlight off of our emotions and instead situates our experience of them within the broader context of the brain's mechanisms of perception and sense-making. ...