Why You Can't Learn Emotional Intelligence

Facebook and YouTube. And this week I want to talk about the question, can emotional intelligence be trained? So if you're on live, type in— I'm going to do it right now— type in where you are from. And I will be watching the comment boxes as you comment in. So if you have questions along the way, feel free to put in where you're from. There's always a couple of seconds delay from when you type your comment in, so I'll backtrack and pick up questions as we go along. So I'm going to flip the image so that you can see the charts a little better. There we go. All right. So the reason that I got interested in this is because obviously I teach emotional competency and got very interested in understanding more about emotional intelligence. And so I've done some, some research, as we'll go through today, about whether or not emotional intelligence is something that is inherent in us and it can't be trained, or something that we really can improve. So emotional intelligence refers to the measurement of emotional competency, and emotional competency consists of emotional self-awareness, emotional self-regulation, and empathy. Empathy has two components to it, cognitive and affective empathy, and empathy is the ability to recognize and respond to and reflect the emotions of another person. Now, these skills are not taught as any part of any kind of curriculum that you're going to find either in K-8, high school, undergraduate, or even in graduate schools, despite the fact that there's been 3 decades of press on emotional intelligence. There's no standardized curriculum and emotional intelligence is not taught in the homes. That's a whole separate topic, but families are generally emotionally not intelligent and parents are generally not emotionally competent and generally speaking cannot teach their children emotional competency or emotional intelligence. So we're left with a different situation. What we have here is a situation where since Goleman's famous 1995 book, EQ: Why It Matters More Than IQ, it's Daniel Goleman, who was a New York Times science writer and a psychologist himself, there's been an overexuberant belief about the benefits of emotional intelligence. And unfortunately, a lot of this is fake news. The, the world of emotional intelligence seems to be broken into two camps from what I can tell. One camp is this academic camp, which is pretty conservative in the claims that it makes about emotional intelligence. And the other camp is the commercial camp, which claims that emotional intelligence is the next crest, next greatest thing to sliced bread. The reality is that on the commercial side, most emotional intelligence training is untested and unverified. There really are no trainings out there that have actually been rigorously studied, and I'm going to show you, show you the science behind that in a minute. Also, the training itself has no basis in science, although emotional intelligence and emotional competency do have quite a bit of interesting science behind them, the training of emotional intelligence or the training of emotional competency really has not been well studied. So we have no idea what the best practices are or what topics should be covered in emotional intelligence training or what emotional intelligence skills are practical and useful and learnable by students. It's all a big guess— guessing game, and we don't know what makes for a really good curriculum, and we don't know what attributes good trainers should demonstrate. Later on, I'll talk about what I think constitutes good training and answer some of these questions, but as a general proposition, there's no credible information out there that answers any of these questions. So the research has yet to establish whether we can successfully train adults to become more emotionally intelligent, despite the claims of all of these vendors on the internet that claim that they can raise your emotional intelligence in a day or two days of training, which to me is ludicrous. So let's talk about what's on the internet. I've done some research so you don't have to. And first of all, I found over 240 vendors who claim to teach some form of emotional intelligence. If you go to, if you put in emotional intelligence training as your keyword search phrase, you're going to bring up 8 first-page ads, which means there's a lot of money in this because that's a lot of competition. 8 ads on the top of a Google page means people are paying a lot of money. To try to get people to come to their sites. And there are 8, 9 organic pages. All of them are offering one form of training or another. So here is, here's what the search results look like. You can see I put into Google emotional intelligence training, and this is just the top 4, 3 or 4 listings that just show you kind of what comes up. What's interesting is that at the top of the page, we can see that there are over 188 million Yeah, 188 million results. That is, there are pages that have the word emotional intelligence training in them. Of course, we're only interested in the, in the first page because that's what most people are interested in. But what did I find out? I found out that the top 8 listings included as trainers an executive coach with no academic background that I could discern, a psychologist with no specific training in neuroscience or modern cognitive and emotional psychology, um, and 6 companies who did not list their trainer's credentials or provide for a detailed curriculum. I'm going to get rid of, uh, let's see here. Yeah, that we— good. So I thought that was pretty interesting. Um, and none of the offered trainings that I could tell from visiting every single one of these websites offered or described a basic set of skills that could lead me to conclude that I would increase my emotional competency if I registered for one of these courses. So that got me curious as a scholar and a practitioner. Was there any empirical study on the efficacy of emotional intelligence training regardless of trainer credentials? And I went out to Google Scholar and spent some time rooting around academic journals. And I found one study that was a meta-analysis of 50 different studies. If you don't know what a meta-analysis is, these are, Basically, researchers will gather up 50 different study— a number of different studies on one topic and then study those studies to see if they can draw any broad conclusions from where the research is taking the field. And in this case, I found a study. Here it is. It was published about 2 years ago, a little over 2 years ago, June of 2019, called "Can Emotional Intelligence Be Trained? A Meta-Analytical Investigation." You can see the citation there in Human Resource Management Review. If anybody's interested in this, you can email me at Doug, DougNoll.com, and I'll send you a copy of the paper so you don't have to buy it. So what did this paper find out? Well, it had 5 interesting findings. The first finding was that emotional intelligence training had a modest effect on improving emotional intelligence. So there is some support for the idea that emotional intelligence training actually improves your score, emotional intelligence score. Now I, I do have to say this because it's one of my little buggers. I claim that you cannot learn emotional intelligence. And the reason that you can't learn emotional intelligence is because emotional intelligence is a test or an assessment. The most famous of what is called the MSC EIT test, the Myers-Loeb Caruso Emotional Intelligence test. All that test does is test you for your various skills and attributes you have around emotions. So you really can't learn a test. So when people say, oh, I can teach you emotional intelligence, they're really lying to you because They can't teach you how to score higher on the test. What can be taught is emotional competency and skills that build emotional competency, primarily skills around emotional self-awareness, emotional self-regulation, and empathic skills. You can learn those. And to the degree that you learn those skills and can practice them and demonstrate them, you will increase your score on emotional intelligence tests. So always remember, you want to learn emotional competency so that you can score well on emotional intelligence. You cannot learn emotional intelligence. The second finding of the paper was that lectures don't work to improve emotional intelligence. You can't tell people what to do. You can't explain it to them. Lectures have no effect on on emotional intelligence, which suggests that just a mere knowledge transfer or knowledge acquisition about emotional intelligence is not sufficient to increase scores on emotional intelligence tests. Kind of makes sense because emotional intelligence is a— or emotional competency are practical skills that demonstration is the best way of, and practice is the best way of learning these skills. Number 3, these, the analysis of these 50 different studies did show that practice and feedback with coaching is effective. So if you can get into an emotional intelligence training course or an emotional competency course where there is opportunity to practice specific skills and to be coached on how, on, on how well you're doing with your skills, that these trainings tend to be more effective than trainings that did not have practice or coaching. Four, training over time is much better than a one-off workshop. So in the study of 50 different emotional training studies, the researchers found that one-offs don't work. And we know this, we know this, that in any kind of corporate workshop situation, A 1-day workshop is not going to change the needle. If you want to change behaviors, it takes at least 6 to 8 weeks of follow-up behavior, uh, follow-up sessions to, um, to embed the workshop material into, say, a workplace population. And that's why, for example, when I do workshops, especially virtual workshops, I insist on at least 4 to 6 follow-up sessions when I'm teaching emotional competency or how to de-escalate angry people, because I know that if I just give either a virtual or in-person workshop for anywhere between 3 and 6 hours, that the next day people aren't going to be shifting. However, if they are held accountable for practicing on each other and in the exercises that I give people to practice, We find that in 4 to 6 weeks, usually 80 to 90% of the people who've gone through the workshop have embedded the skills habitually into themselves, and they're now doing the emotional competency practices automatically and without thought. And usually there's about 10% that take a little bit longer, but usually it's 75 to 85, 80% get it within 6 to 8 weeks. The fifth finding is that there's no moderating effect on gender. I thought this was interesting because I get asked a lot. Well, isn't it easier for women to become emotionally intelligent than men or to learn emotional competency? And it turns out that's not true. It's a myth. Women, women and men benefit equally from this kind of training and women do not have some sort of advantage because of gender-based differences. So what does all of this tell us? Well, first of all, there is no empirically tested method for teaching emotional intelligence. And so anybody that claims to be teaching emotional intelligence is just making a claim, uh, without any data, uh, and it's just a claim. It's untested and unproven. And that includes myself. There's no standardized credentialing of emotional intelligence trainers. Or instructors. So that means just about anybody can hang out a shingle and say, hey, I can teach you emotional intelligence. And you as the student or the buyer have to become brutally aware of who it is that you're learning the training from. And just because somebody says they can teach something doesn't mean that they understand it or practice it themselves. So it's totally caveat emptor. Totally buyer beware out there. And if you think about either bringing in somebody to train a workforce or a team on emotional intelligence, you want to get into their credentials and find out what these people really know. And the fact that maybe they've taught a course for 20 years doesn't mean that they have the skills, the knowledge, and the experience necessary to successfully impart the skills of emotional competency into a team. The other thing that we can take from all of this is that there's no academic agreement on what constitutes emotional intelligence. If you go out like I have and study the literature, you'll find that there are two academic— basically two academic camps. One academic camp says that emotional intelligence can be learned. It's trait-based, so it can be, it can be learned. Another one says emotional intelligence is innate and you only get what you get. And I guess there's an intermediate ground of people that said there's a hybrid model where it's partly trait, partly innate. I will tell you based on my experience and my observations that I think that emotional intelligence can be increased. I think that emotional competency can be trained. And I say that because I've spent the last 10 years working in maximum security prisons, training life inmates how to be peacemakers and mediators. And I watched some of the most dangerous, darkest human beings on the planet literally transform themselves because they learned how to become emotionally self-aware, which I taught them. They learned how to self-regulate themselves, which I taught them. And they learned how to reflect back the emotional experiences of other people, which I taught them. And when they mastered these 3 skills, they completely changed as human beings. So much so that of the 3,000 or 4,000 inmates that we've trained that were lifers or long-termers that have been released, we have zero reports of any kind of reoffending or recidivism, which is quite remarkable. So although there is no academic agreement on what constitutes emotional experience, it's been my observation through practical fieldwork that even the darkest people on the planet living in the darkest places on the planet, maximum security prisons, can literally learn how to become emotionally competent. And that gives me great hope. Um, pretty clear to me that the commercial training business is not based on science. It's just a way to impart fancy training at a high-dollar cost to people who are gullible enough to think that taking the training is actually going to shift the needle and make them more emotionally competent. And finally, I think we can say this is true for just about everything. There's a lot of media hype out there that has fooled people about emotional intelligence training. And again, if you go out on the internet and do searches, you're going to— or you read Harvard Business Review, or you read Forbes, or you read any of the major business magazines, or academic journals, everybody talks about all the benefits of emotional intelligence, but again, there's just no science to support any of the claims that are being made. And so that leaves us as people interested in this, in all of this, sort of having to sort through and sift through all of the media hype to find out what's, what's true and what's really not true. And unfortunately, it really comes down to experience. And like I said, with the work that I do in, with the Prisoner Peace Project, working in prisons, training inmates how to be peacemakers, I can tell you from my experience that, uh, it does work when it's taught the right way, but it's qualitative experience, not quantitative. And that's probably true for just about all types of emotional intelligence training. Okay, so where does this get, get you? So I was thinking, if somebody were to ask me my opinion on emotional intelligence training delivered by a university or delivered by a corporate training outfit, what would be the criteria that I would want to see? And so I've assembled a my list of minimum criteria that I would insist on to be able to determine whether or not the training curriculum and the training methodology is legitimate or not. So here's the list, and if you want this list, if I go through too quickly and you can't copy it down, just email me at Doug@dougnoll.com and I'll be happy to send you the list. So here it is. So first of all, one thing that I've noticed in all of the corporate training offerings and academic training offerings, because Cornell and Harvard and all the big business schools in some way or another try to offer emotional intelligence training as part of their leadership development stuff. The one thing I've noticed across the board is that nobody has a good definition of emotions. And affect. In fact, most emotional intelligence training courses do not distinguish between emotion and affect. And that to me is a big mistake because if you cannot define emotion and you cannot state that all emotion is based on affect and you can't state what affect is and you can't choose one of the major affective models that are out there, I happen to use Sylvan Tompkins' non-affect model myself, then you're starting off on sand because how can we teach somebody about emotional competency or emotional intelligence if we can't even define what an emotion is? And if you're really interested in learning more about this, I would refer you to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett out of Northeastern University, who has written a beautiful book called How Emotions Are Created In the Brain and has some beautiful YouTube videos that are very instructive and basically has sort of revolutionized our thinking around emotions and affect. The second thing that— the second criteria that I would apply to any emotional intelligence training is, does the instructor provide descriptions of the neural foundations of affect, emotion, self-awareness, and empathy? In other words, what's the neuroscience behind all of this? It turns out that there's a lot of neuroscience. Now, there's a lot we don't know, but there's a lot we do know. And I started studying this in the late 1990s when I was in my master's degree studies for— in peacemaking and conflict studies. So I changed careers mid-career from a lawyer to become a peacemaker. And back then neuroscience was brand new and it was pretty easy to follow the literature. Today, of course, it's just explosive. But there is a ton of literature out there, many, many, many brain scanning studies and other technologies out there using, that scientists are using to study the brain. And they're starting to tease apart all these neural foundations of what we call affect, emotion, self-awareness, and empathy. And it's kind of amazing to see what's out there. So at a very, at a minimum, emotional intelligence training should contain a module on the neuroscience of emotional intelligence, even if it's a very high level, so that people can understand that the work is being grounded in empirical science and isn't just woo-woo psychological stuff for which people are just guessing, which is the way a lot of this stuff is taught. There should be a description of the polyvagal system and a description and demonstration of how to improve interoceptive skills. So let me talk about this for a second. The polyvagal system is— the polyvagal system is the vagus nerve, basically. And it's called polyvagal because we have two vagus systems. I don't have a long— I won't take a long time describing all of this. It's somewhat complex, but incredibly important because Emotions often start with what Antonio Damasio calls somatic markers, or they're basically feelings we get in our body. And when we talk about interoception or interoceptive skills, this is our ability to feel what's going on in our viscera. So we talk about gut feelings, but you can feel your heartbeat. Can you count the number of heartbeats? Can you count your respiration? What happens when you get clammy hands or goosebumps? What happens when, uh, you— your stomach clenches up? What happens when your intestines start to clutch? These are all called interoception. It's— and our brain is constantly monitoring the signals that are coming from our viscera, and our viscera are constantly monitoring signals coming from our brain. It's one integrated system that functions as part of the overall emotional and affective system in our in our bodies and bodies and brains. Understanding the fundamentals of this becomes important in understanding all kinds of things about human behavior, human emotion, and how we deal with human emotion and human behavior. And if this is not taught, then it's like taking 90% of the knowledge away from students. So I would say that if you don't have at least a description of the polyvagal system and discussion of interoception and how to build strong interoceptive skills, the training is going to be deficient. The next thing, the next criteria that I have for any kind of credible emotional intelligence training is there should be foundational emotional regulation skills such as self and third-person affect labeling. If people, all they teach you is go out and take a couple of deep breaths or walk around the park, walk around the block or step away for a moment, they're not teaching you anything you don't already know. There are other skills out there that are not widely known, that are quite powerful, that is involved in the field called implicit emotional self-regulation. And trainers should be well-schooled in understanding the science behind implicit emotional regulation and understand the concept of, for example, affect labeling, third-party and self-affect labeling, and be familiar with the brain scanning studies that show why these particular forms of emotional self-regulation work and be able to describe it in a way that a layperson can understand. The next criteria is that, uh, in my opinion again, and based on my 10 years of field experience, that any kind of decent emotional intelligence training should be teaching people how to reflect emotions using reflective listening skills and using you statements rather than I statements. Anybody who is teaching The old active listening that was created by Thomas Gordon in the 1960s is 60 years behind in the science. And I know in my, in my particular field as a mediator and a peacemaker, you'll still find people in mediation and in counseling teaching the use of I statements to try to create empathy. And it doesn't work. It never has worked. It never will work. It's just old, old, old psychology. That just have been handed down as conventional wisdom and nobody's really gone behind it to explore why it doesn't work. I did because it never worked for me. And I got curious as to why, why is it that I'm being taught stuff that doesn't work? And so I did some research and found out. So what does work are use statements. And so you want to make sure that whoever is teaching emotional intelligence is using the proper use of use statements and the proper use of I statements. I statements are appropriate, when you're asserting your own emotional experience. They are not appropriate when you are reflecting back somebody else's emotional experience. Next criteria is that there should be some understanding and uncovering of one's emotional triggers. So I would like to see emotional intelligence trainers schooled in dialectical behavior therapy, for example, which looks at this, looks at these triggers and has a very discrete methodology for uncovering emotional triggers that were programmed in childhood, and then learning how to deprogram or reprogram those triggers so that people become less reactive. I think this is an essential part of emotional intelligence training. And frankly, I didn't see any of this in any of the 240 courses I surveyed, amazingly enough. Finally, there ought to be some option for coaching, preferably in small groups, on a regular basis, once a week, I say 10 weeks here, but my experience has been that depending upon the individual, you can get away with as few as 4 weeks and as many as 10 weeks, but usually after 10 weeks, if the knowledge is properly acquired with the proper skills and proper practice, emotional intelligence assessment scores can go up quite dramatically. In as little as 10 weeks. And finally, uh, the trainers themselves have to be able to demonstrate high levels of emotional intelligence. And basically what they have to be able to do is demonstrate everything that I've talked about here on the screen and show you that they can actually practice the skills themselves. And they should have stories about how they've been involved in intense emotional situations and use their skills to change the direction of a conversation or the direction of an encounter and demonstrate how they use emotional intelligence every day. I mean, their emotional competence skills every day in their life. If they can't do that, how can they teach it? And so in any kind of inquiry that you make of a corporate trainer or a university training, you want to make sure that the people that are going to be doing the training themselves can demonstrate high degrees of emotional intelligence. They're just not spewing out stuff they've read about, but they've actually practiced it and embodied it into their own lives. And finally, there should be self-assessments to track growth. I mean, there are just hundreds of emotional intelligence assessments out there, and there should be obviously a pre-workshop assessment if possible. And then a post-workshop assessment, and then assessments every, every couple of weeks to see whether or not there are changes in these emotional competencies that are being reflected on self-assessments. And that's the only way we know whether or not we're making progress or we're actually moving the needle. So here, this is the list of what I think to be the criteria to establish a credible emotional intelligence training. And to the degree that any of these elements are missing, then I would say be very careful and be very aware that if this stuff is missing, then you are probably not going to see much movement of the needle in yourself. Or if you're thinking about acquiring training for an organization or a team, you're probably not going to see much movement. Emotional intelligence is a fairly complex subject. It, properly taught, it is based on neuroscience and it is skills-based so that it takes time and practice for people to really begin to master the skills of emotional competency. It's not a quick fix kind of situation at all. All right, so just because I'm here, I have, I try to walk my own talk and I've developed two courses that I think meet all of these standards. So here's the link to the course. It's https://www.dougnoll.com/LP, Listen Others Into Existence. And I'm not gonna talk about the course, promote it, but if you're interested in redeveloping emotional competency, at a high level. I've developed these courses for that purpose, and I'm also available for coaching, of course. The reason I'm so passionate about this is for all these years that I've been a peacemaker and a mediator, more than 20 years, I have walked into organizational conflicts, family business conflicts, family conflicts, partnership conflicts, you name it, I've walked into it. And the number one thing that I see across the board and that I reflect upon is that all of this conflict is caused by generally low levels of emotional competency, primarily the inability to listen to each other at a deep emotional level. And once that flaw or that, uh, that hole is filled with proper training and proper skills, people can almost always solve their own problems on their own. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a deep conflict and I've taught people how to listen to each other at a deep emotional level. They calm themselves down and once they're calmed down, they solve the problem themselves and I just sit there. I had one guy once tell me that was the most Zen mediation I've ever been in. You didn't say 10 words in the whole 8, 9 hours we were together. And I didn't, because I know that we all have the human capacity to solve our problems once we've been deeply listened to, once we've been de-escalated. So this training is designed to teach people exactly how to do that with the purpose that when we can go out into the world and listen other people doing into existence by validating them instead of invalidating them, we are giving ourselves a precious gift of peace and transformation, and we're being given the opportunity to give this gift to other people, and it costs us absolutely nothing to give the gift. So that's why I've developed these courses. So let me know whether or not these ideas work for you. You can either comment, uh, on whatever platform you're on, Facebook or YouTube, which is great, or you can email me at Doug@dougnoll.com. And I appreciate all the comments, and I like the feedback because I am trying to do these to help lift people up to a higher place in their lives where they can find true happiness and joy, as I have. So if you like the videos, subscribe so that you can be notified of my upcoming videos. As a general proposition, I'm doing live events every Thursday at 11 AM Pacific time. There'll be some that I miss, but I'm going to be— I'm being pretty consistent about this. Also, in case you're interested, next week I'm going to be covering the 5 levels of emotional self-awareness. And in those 5 levels, I am going to be talking about not only cognitive self-awareness, but also I'm going to go in more into interoception. I won't be talking too much about polyvagal theory, Maybe I'll do a live event on that later on, but I do want to talk about interoception because it is sort of the foundational part of becoming emotionally self-aware. What am I physically feeling inside myself? So we'll be covering that next week, and thank you for joining, and hope to see you soon. I'll hang around just for a second. Any other questions? I'll wait for a second, see if anything— okay, if you have questions and don't want to put them in the comment box or can't put them in the comment box, please email me, Doug, at DougNoll.com, and I will reply right back. All right, everybody, have a great day.