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The Optimal State
The optimal state means that you’re performing at your best. A portrait of the optimal state emerged from research at Harvard Business School when they asked hundreds of men and women to keep a journal about their day at work. You know, was it a good day, a bad day? What made it so good or so bad? And from that came a composite of people’s good day, a day where you feel good, a day where you feel satisfied with how you did. You feel really connected to the people around you, you’re maximally absorbed in what you’re doing. You’re not distracted. It’s you at your best, but your voluntary best.
And how do you get in it? Well, we think attention is itself a path into that optimal state. Paying full attention to what you’re doing right now absorbs you, gets you engaged. And then from that emerges the satisfaction, the good feeling, and being in a positive mood helps you perform better.
The Power of Emotions
There are some strong trends in today’s workplace. One of them, of course, is just the sheer rate of change. The velocity has accelerated, so all of us are under more stress. Things have gotten more competitive than ever. This means that we have to be good at managing our own feelings. The brain is designed so that the more emotional you are, the more upset you are, the narrower the range of what you can take in, what you can process deeply, and what you can respond to agilely.
So let’s say you’re an ER physician and people come to you weeping. They’re wounded. Who knows? They’re in a terrible situation. You want to be able to stay cool and calm and not have their emotions flood you in order for the best decisions to be made in that situation. Because of the direct relationship between high emotional levels, particularly negative emotions, and narrowing of the bandwidth for attention, it really behooves us all to be able to handle our upsetting emotions so we can pay full attention to what matters right now, and that is a doorway into the optimal state.
Emotional Intelligence (EI)
When I wrote the book “Emotional Intelligence,” a lot of people had an aha experience like, “Oh, so that’s what’s going on.” It was the first time that for a popular audience, emotional intelligence had become well known. I was a science journalist at the New York Times back then, and I’d been covering a decade of research on the brain and emotion. And I wanted to have a frame for that. I integrated it with the findings from research on outstanding performers, and I saw that people who emerge as outstanding performers or the best leaders have high emotional intelligence.
So from the get-go, I’ve seen emotional intelligence as having to do with leadership, and this was taken up by the “Harvard Business Review.” They’ve done a series of articles starting with one which said, look, emotional intelligence is the core of effective leadership. And now I talk about four domains of emotional intelligence and then twelve particular competencies of people who are high in emotional intelligence. A combination of self-awareness, managing your emotions well, social awareness, empathy, tuning into other people, and putting that all together to have harmonious or effective relationships.
Unlike IQ, which barely budges over the course of our life, emotional intelligence can change. It’s learned and learnable, And it’s learned and learnable at any point in life.