Why Do Smart People Struggle to Develop Emotional Intelligence?
Imagine you’re in a new role. You want to impress the people around you. Someone makes a negative comment in a meeting in response to something you say, and it catches you off guard. Should it? Could you have seen that coming? And might it be possible to change your behavior so that you get a difference response the next time?
As a psychiatrist, I consistently see the difference between what it means to have insight while lacking self-awareness or empathize while also missing critical social cues. That difference lies in whether someone possesses a threshold level of emotional intelligence. If someone came to me and asked me, how do I find what I’m looking for – in love, work, and life? My answer would be the same every time: cultivate emotional intelligence.
Since my focus here is to delve into the neuroscience and psychology behind modern life, first, let’s define emotional intelligence. In my own experience, this consists of 5 domains:
1) Empathy – for yourself and others
2) Self-regulation – the ability to manage your mood, especially when it feels hardest to do so
3) Social awareness and relationship management – how well you can understand the people around you to maintain mutual support and trust
4) Self-awareness – the extent to which you know your strengths and weaknesses, not just based on self-reflection, but on feedback from others around you
5) Strategic thinking – this about putting it all together. How well do you understand yourself, the people around you, and your environment to anticipate what happens when you make a decision AND THEN change your behavior to elicit the outcome you’re seeking?
Next, let’s understand why emotional intelligence is so hard to build, even among people who are bright, capable, and ambitious. My observation is that such people master #1, #2, but #3, #4, and #5 get harder as they advance, either in their careers, or the depth of their romantic relationships.
In general, people tend to focus on themselves. Their feelings, their thoughts, and their behavior. The structure of our brain that drives this self-focus is the default mode network (DMN). This is by evolutionary design. The DMN enabled us to learn from the past and plan for the future. However, stress, anxiety and depression (often encountered in love, work, and life) tend to increase self-referential thinking. As a result, people cycle in rigid rumination loops. And what do they focus on? Themselves. Their feelings, their thoughts, and their behavior.
Healthy DMN activity is important for self-reflection. But to develop emotional intelligence, you have to expand your awareness beyond yourself. You have to balance self-focused networks like the DMN with other networks in your brain, related to attention and executive functioning (the ability to organize, abstract, sequence, and plan). And here’s the most interesting piece: we tend to think self-awareness comes from looking inward. In reality, much of self-awareness comes from looking outward. By understanding how the world sees us, we can see ourselves more clearly. That doesn’t mean you have to like what you see. But you do have to see it.
My take on one of the major psychological barriers to developing emotional intelligence is the difficulty of empathizing with people who we don’t have a good relationship with. Maybe we experience them as demeaning or controlling or petty. Either way, it’s hard to empathize with such people. In this context, mastering all domains of emotional intelligence is hard!
Now, let’s go back the scenario I started with. Imagine you’re back in that meeting at work. You’re in a new role. You want to impress the people around you. So, you say something that reflects your expertise. But what if, this time, you pause and notice the expression on the faces of the colleague around you when you speak? You observe how people react. That’s the information that helps you develop emotional intelligence.
If you’re reached this point of my essay, then maybe emotional intelligence is something you’re curious about building. Do you need to read a book? Take a course? Hire a coach? Those are all reasonable next steps, but you don’t have to do them.
My own take on what helps people to develop emotional intelligence is simple:
1) Pay attention to yourself while also paying attention to others. When you’re considering how you feel about an interaction, consider how the people around you feel. When you’re in a meeting, don’t just react to a question and plan what you’re going to say, listen to what people are saying around you. Observe yourself and observe other people. You will surprise yourself with how much information you accumulate. How effectively we can toggle back and forth between an understanding of ourselves and others and regulate that dynamic is what’s critical.
2) Reflect. Once you begin to accumulate information on the world around you and yourself, you have to understand it. So the next time, you’re in an elevator, don’t look at your phone. Reflect. When you’re waiting for an appointment, don’t look at your phone. Reflect. And how do you reflect productively? Should you replay your feelings, your behaviors, your thoughts? Nope, that’s often the DMN at work. Take a moment to consider the feelings, thoughts, and behavior of others around you. And once you have a better sense of that, consider how you can change your own behavior to change how people respond to you.
3) Establish relationships with the right people. These could be friends, partners, mentors, or leaders. What all of these people should have in common is they ask you questions that help you think differently about a scenario. And how do they do that? By challenging you on #1-#5 and ideally, with empathy.
A final thought: recognize that emotional intelligence accumulates with time. People tend to have more emotional intelligence in their 30s than they did in their 20s, more in their 40s than in their 30s, and so on and so forth.