Book SummaryEmotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Emotional Intelligence

For decades, IQ was considered the primary predictor of a person’s success. However, in Emotional Intelligence (1995), Daniel Goleman challenges this assumption, arguing that emotional intelligence—the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions in ourselves and others—is equally, if not more, important for success and fulfillment. Emotional intelligence (EI) determines how well we navigate relationships, handle stress, and make decisions. Without it, our emotions control us, leading to behaviors that hinder success. Fortunately, unlike IQ, Goleman contends that emotional intelligence can be learned and developed.

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist and best-selling author whose work on EI transformed how we understand success. He’s also written many other books, including Focus, Primal Leadership, and Social Intelligence. Goleman cofounded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which brings emotional intelligence programs to schools worldwide. His work has shaped leadership development, education practices, and personal growth strategies globally.

This guide explores emotion, the components of emotional intelligence, and why EI matters. We’ll discuss the nature of emotion and its effects on behavior, examine the five components of emotional intelligence and how to strengthen them, and explore practical scenarios where EI is crucial so you can apply these skills to your own life. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Goleman’s discussion with input from sources like Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves and studies from other psychologists.

How Emotions Impact Our Behavior

Goleman explains that emotions are impulses rooted in fundamental needs like survival—they’re neurologically designed to propel us into action without overthinking. For example, fear motivates us to run from a predator immediately rather than sticking around to contemplate our options.

While emotions are natural and often helpful, Goleman says they become problematic when they overwhelm us and negatively affect our behavior—a phenomenon called emotional hijacking. For example, you might feel so angered by someone cutting you off in traffic that you ride their bumper for the next mile—getting angry is OK, but getting so angry that you act inappropriately is not. In modern times, situations that upset us tend to no longer be matters of life or death, so letting your emotional mind take over often creates problems instead of solving them.

In the next section we’ll discuss the science of emotions and why emotional hijacking occurs.

(Shortform note: In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F∗ck, Mark Manson adds to Goleman’s argument, explaining that emotions urge us to take action by telling us what’s good or bad for us. For example, you fear predators because they can harm you, and you enjoy food because it nourishes you. Beyond emotional hijacking, Manson identifies two additional ways emotions hinder success: when we fixate on them or repress them. Fixating on emotions leads to disappointment, since we chase fleeting positive feelings and try to avoid inevitable negative ones. Repressing emotions prevents us from addressing underlying problems—ignoring persistent anger, for instance, means never identifying or resolving its root cause.)

The Science Behind Emotional Hijacking

Goleman writes that humans essentially have two minds—a thinking one and a feeling one. Emotional hijacking takes place when the limbic system (the feeling part of our brain) urges us to react before the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) can rationalize what’s happening. When the limbic system takes control, it sends out an emergency signal that puts your body into panic mode, making it more difficult for the neocortex to control your emotion-driven actions.

According to Goleman, the limbic system can overtake the neocortex because it developed in the brain before the neocortex. This makes us naturally predisposed to feel before we think—it’s how we evolved. However, despite the limbic system’s overwhelming abilities, Goleman emphasizes that it’s entirely within our control to feel our emotions while also responding to them effectively—this is precisely what emotional intelligence enables.

The Duality of the Mind

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt reiterates that the human mind is divided into two components—the thinking part and the feeling part—and that we often engage in negative behaviors because our emotional impulses override our reason. However, according to Haidt, the tension between the limbic system and the neocortex is only one aspect of this duality—there’s also the head brain versus the gut brain, the left and right hemispheres, and the conscious versus the unconscious, with the former being linked to logic and reason and the latter being linked to emotion, creativity, and intuition.

The head brain and the gut brain create the duality between conscious thoughts and actions versus involuntary bodily reactions—for example, you might get shaky when you’re anxious even if you don’t want to. The left side of the brain controls language and analytical tasks while the right recognizes patterns and makes new connections. Our conscious brain...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Shortform Introduction

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is a tricky book to summarize: it clocks in at 384 pages and is packed full of interesting ideas and information, practical advice, and anecdotes.

Goleman’s career as a psychologist and New York Times reporter on the human brain and behavioral sciences gives him a lot of research to pull from, and the book is chock full of data from academic research studies. We’ve chosen to cut most of those examples due to 2 reasons:

1. This is already one of our longer summaries just based on information alone.
2. Goleman recounts most of the studies anecdotally and without rigorous supporting evidence.

Readers who revel in research should consider reading the original book to make use of Goleman’s extensive examples.

We’ve also done some reorganization for this summary: though the rough structure of our summary follows the rough structure of the book, the individual chapters in the original book sometimes meandered or jumped around in ways that could cause a reader to get lost. Much of the useful content in Emotional Intelligence is either scientific information or practical advice, and...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 1: Introduction to Emotions

What Are They

Emotions are strong impulses that urge us to take immediate action. The root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb meaning “to move.” Watch children or animals: they act almost immediately upon getting a feeling, before they know what they’re doing.

It’s a widely-held belief that emotions aren’t rational. But passionate emotional responses are designed to overwhelm reason. The more intense the emotion, the more it takes over.

Emotions have developed over centuries of evolutionary history. They’re based on fundamental needs, and designed to prevent our brain from thinking about tasks that are too important to leave to intellect alone. Our most powerful emotions want us to:

• Avoid danger to survive.
• Suffer loss but survive.
• Reach a goal despite obstacles, usually to survive.
• Find a mate and bond with them, for ultimate survival in the form of children.
• Keep the family alive to ensure survival of genes.

These situations repeated over and over again throughout the history of humankind, and if the reactions kept us alive, then they got embedded more deeply into our systems and became automatic responses. Most of them involve...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 2: Emotional Hijackings

Have you ever looked back on an emotional response you had and thought, “I don’t know what came over me!” This is what Goleman would refer to as a limbic or emotional hijacking, where the emotional center of your brain takes over without notice. We usually associate it with negative emotions, but it can be positive, too—if you’ve ever laughed uncontrollably and felt like you couldn’t stop, that’s a hijacking.

Research shows that we unconsciously understand what something is and make a value judgement as to whether it’s a good or bad thing in the first few milliseconds of perceiving it.

• When people who are afraid of snakes are shown photos of snakes, their skin breaks out in sweat even if they say they aren’t afraid. Their skin still does this even if the photos are flashed so quickly they don’t register they’ve seen it.

This has to do with how the brain is set up, and the balance between the epicenters of our two minds: the amygdala (the center of emotions) and the neocortex (the center of reason).

The Amygdala

There are two amygdalas on either side of the brainstem, at the base of the limbic system. The amygdala is the command center of our emotions,...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 3: Phases and Physiological Symptoms of Emotions

Emotional reactions can feel very different to us, based on how long they last, how intense they are, and how they affect our bodies.

Emotional Phases

Goleman describes 4 different phases of emotional response: impulses, moods, temperaments, and on the extreme end, chronic disorders. We can distinguish between these phases primarily based on how long they last.

Emotional impulses are strong and immediate, but only last a few seconds. These are the knee-jerk reactions that happen before our conscious mind understands what’s going on. (Shortform note: Think of “crimes of passion”—most of them were probably committed in these few, brief seconds where the emotional mind is in complete control.)

Moods are muted forms of emotions and last for much longer than the immediate emotional impulse. You’ve probably never been in a full, terrifying rage for a whole day—but you might have been grumpy all day, where normal things make you angry that much faster. That’s a mood.

Then, there’s temperaments. Goleman suggests that temperaments are a product of nature, a predisposition from birth based on brain activity patterns, and that **people generally fall into one of four...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 4: Trauma and the Brain

PTSD occurs when the brain has lowered its setpoint for alarm due to traumatic experiences, making emergencies out of anything remotely resembling either a single, impactful traumatic event or prolonged periods of suffering cruelties.

PTSD also generally stems from traumatic events in which the victim felt helpless. The helplessness is part of what makes the initial traumatic event so overwhelming to the limbic system—it increases the strength of the emotion because the brain feels like there’s no action to take.

Here’s how PTSD affects the brain:

• Key changes in a brain affected by PTSD happen in a structure that regulates adrenaline and noradrenaline, which are emergency hormones. This system turns hyperactive in PTSD, releasing extremely large doses of those hormones in situations that pose little to no threat to the person but resemble the traumatic event.
• But not only does the brain go into hyperactive threat mode as a result of PTSD, the opioid system in the brain also becomes hyperactive. In a healthy brain, the opioid system secretes endorphins to dull any feelings of pain. When this system goes into overdrive, not only does it dull feelings of...

Shortform Exercise: Identifying Your Temperament

It’s useful to know what your default temperament is so that you can appreciate it or work against it when necessary. Use this exercise to explore your default mood and how it affects your life.

Reviewing the four basic temperaments (timid, bold, upbeat, melancholy), which one would you say you fall into?

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 5-1: Identifying Your Emotions

Now that we know what emotions are, we’ll discuss emotional intelligence, break it down into 5 key skills, and then review those skills in greater detail. For clarity, each of the chapters will be numbered as 5-1, 5-2, and so on, to denote their relation to the major subject of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence encompasses the 5 following skills:

• Knowing your emotions.
• Managing emotions, specifically negative ones like anger, anxiety, and sadness.
• Motivating yourself.
• Recognizing emotions in others, or empathy.
• Handling relationships.

Someone with high emotional intelligence can regulate her moods, control her impulses, motivate herself, empathize with others, and hope, within reason, that things will turn out all right. Emotional intelligence is really a meta-ability, an ability that determines how well we can put all our other abilities to use, including IQ.

Identifying Your Emotions

Knowing your emotions is really a form of self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you. Being able to monitor our feelings as they’re occurring helps us understand ourselves and our...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 5-2: Managing Anger, Anxiety and Sadness

Once we are aware of our emotional responses as we’re having them, we can start to regulate them, working past emotions when they’re not appropriate to the situation, soothing ourselves when we’re experiencing negative emotions, and bouncing back quickly from setbacks. People who cannot manage their emotions expend a lot of energy fighting their emotional reactions.

There are 3 main emotions that are difficult to manage: anger, anxiety, and sadness.

Here are general rules for managing any negative emotion:

1. Don’t dwell on the emotion and keep mulling it over. Ruminating on an emotion doesn’t manage it—it actually extends the emotional reaction and can even increase the emotional distress.
2. Self-awareness helps you catch a negative emotional response early and identify it correctly.
3. Most negative emotional responses are built on thoughts or assumptions that confirm the response—so you can manage almost any negative emotional response by challenging the thoughts and assumptions that made you feel it in the first place.

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Anger

What It Is

We get angry when we feel attacked. It could be someone actively threatening our physical...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 5-3: Motivating Yourself

Being able to identify and manage our emotions makes it easier to motivate ourselves to finish tasks and achieve goals. We also need to be able to delay gratification and overcome our impulses to be more productive and effective.

Controlling Your Impulses

Goleman says this is the most fundamental psychological skill. Because emotions are impulses, being in control of your emotions is resisting the urge to fulfill impulses that are harmful or counterproductive.

The ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal is necessary to achieve almost anything. Very little of what we do on a moment-to-moment basis is gratifying—most of us have obligations we have to meet, big-picture goals we’re working towards, or personal improvements we’re looking to make. All of these require us to delay immediate gratification in favor of doing something that will be beneficial down the line.

• Think of eating a sweet versus working out. One will give us immediate gratification; the other takes time and energy but will ultimately be better for us.

The Marshmallow Experiment

There was a famous experiment done in the 1960s with children. They were left in a room with...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 5-4: Empathizing with Others

Empathy is the fundamental people skill, allowing us to interpret what others want or need. This skill is especially important in what Goleman refers to as the “caring professions,” such as sales, management, or teaching.

How Empathy Develops

In the early stages of our development, we cannot tell ourselves apart from anyone else around us—we interpret everything outside ourselves as part of ourselves. This is why babies mirror our facial expressions. Up until about one year of age, infants perceive any distress around them as if it were their own distress.

At around 2.5 years, toddlers can recognize that someone else’s pain is not their own—now, toddlers can begin to develop the skill of comforting someone else. This is generally the point where babies begin to diverge from one another: some babies become very sensitive toddlers, while others become less sensitive.

Something that seems to have a big impact on which direction toddlers go in is how they get disciplined by their parents.

• Discipline that hinges on negative judgements of the offending child—”That’s naughty, you’re bad, don’t do that”—don’t teach empathy, they teach punishment.
• Discipline...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 5-5: Building Relationships

The culmination of all the previous skills combined, when we recognize our own emotions, manage them, motivate ourselves to do better, and can empathize with others, our personal relationships are bound to improve. Managing someone else’s emotions is the key to successful relationships.

As children, we imitate others’ emotions, and this tendency never really leaves us—we do it throughout our lives. Emotions are contagious. Whoever’s mood is stronger or whoever expresses their mood more forcefully will win out. This is called entrainment.

• You might be in a good mood at work, but if you get home and your partner’s in a horrible mood, whoever’s mood is stronger will start to sway the other one to their side.
• Good public speakers do this: they sway the emotions of the crowd by demonstrating their own emotions.

How in tune our emotions are with someone else’s can also speak to how close we are to that person—the stronger the emotional connection we feel with someone, the more tightly we will mirror their physical movements and emotional moods when we’re with them.

Social ineptitude is an inability to interact successfully with one’s peers. It usually begins in...

Shortform Exercise: Improving Your Emotional Intelligence

Since emotional intelligence is a collection of abilities, most people aren’t totally devoid of any emotional intelligence skills. Use this exercise to analyze your own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to emotional intelligence.

Considering the five basic skills of emotional intelligence--knowing your emotions, managing emotions, motivating yourself, empathizing, relationships--which would say you’re currently strongest in? List 3 ways you use this skill in your everyday life.

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 6-1: Applying Emotional Intelligence in Love

Freud said, “To love and to work are the twin capacities that mark full maturity.” Goleman would most likely add “to learn” and “to take care of yourself and others” to that list, and emotional intelligence is the key to loving, working, learning, and taking care of yourself and others to the best of your abilities.

We’ll go through each of these categories—love (romantic and familial), work, school, and health—exploring their difficulties and some ways emotional intelligence can help overcome those difficulties. Similar to the last chapters, these chapters will be numbered 6-1, 6-2, and so on to denote their relationship to the major subject of using emotional intelligence.

Since social pressures are no longer the main catalyst for marriage, much more importance is placed on the emotional bond between two people. The current trend in divorce rates suggests we need a little more emotional intelligence in our marriages.

• In 1890, about 10% of all American marriages ended in divorce. In 1920, the rate went up to 20%. It went up to 30% in 1950, and 50% in 1970. By 1990, it shot up to 67%.

**One primary factor in the dissolution of marriage is differing...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 6-2: Managing Emotional Intelligence in Families

Our family is the first place we learn about emotions and how to handle them. Children learn not just through the things parents say, but the things they see parents do as well.

There are 3 common parenting styles that are harmful:

• 1) Ignoring feelings completely. This method leads children to believe emotions are inconveniences. These parents don’t use emotional moments as teaching moments, and they don’t usually develop closeness to their kids.
• 2) Being too accepting. These parents acknowledge their children’s emotions but don’t teach them acceptable and healthy ways of controlling their reactions to those emotions.
• 3) Treating emotions with contempt. These parents are harsh critics and disapprove of any emotional display. Ironically, they usually deal emotionally with their children, punishing out of anger and meeting emotional responses with bigger, more overwhelming emotional responses of their own.

We’ll look at 3 common issues parents face with their children—anger, depression, and eating disorders—and the danger of letting these issues go unmitigated.

Anger in Children

Angry kids usually become bullies who, incapable of handling...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 6-3: Bringing Humanity into the Workplace

Many jobs require people to work together, and good teams require harmony between the members and strong leadership.

It takes a lot of top-level teamwork to fly an airplane. When a crash occurs, 80% of the time it’s because of a mistake made by a pilot that could have been prevented if the team had worked together better. Because of this, pilots in training must learn certain social intelligence skills, like open communication, listening, cooperation, and speaking up.

Of course, in everyday jobs, someone making a mistake isn’t going to result in a plane falling out of the sky and potentially killing people—but teams that are poorly managed experience low productivity, an increase in mistakes, missed deadlines, and the loss of team members to other, better workplaces.

Emotional intelligence is particularly important to the leaders in business—CEOs, managers, and the like—and yet these people are usually the biggest believers in cutting emotions out of business.

• One study in the 1970s surveyed 250 executives, and found that most of them thought their jobs required intellect but not emotion, “heads but not hearts.” They thought compassion would directly...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 6-4: Teaching Kids to Be Better Humans

In 1990, the US experienced the highest rates it had ever seen of juvenile arrests for violent crimes, teen arrests for rape, teen murder rates, suicide rates, and murder victims under the agen of 14. Children at the time were also reported as doing worse in school, socialization, and mood. Wealth made no difference, and neither did ethnicity or race—the problems were universal.

Internationally, families are plagued by financial worries and other stresses, meaning parents can’t spend as much time with their children to teach them emotional intelligence. The need to make money has also increased mobility—people move to where jobs are—so kids have less connection to their extended family, another source of learning.

Since family life doesn’t necessarily offer the same connections and instruction it once did, schools have become the one place communities can depend on to educate their children and correct their behaviors. It’s the one place most children go, and it presents a big opportunity to positively impact upcoming generations.

**Emotional literacy is a bigger challenge facing today’s students than any low scores in math or reading, and yet most schools do nothing about...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Chapter 6-5: Emotional Intelligence for Your Physical Health

Emotions are deeply connected to sickness and health, how vulnerable a patient is to disease, or how fast a patient recovers—and yet medicine and medical care often lack any trace of emotional intelligence.

• This is partially because of the high volume of patients any given facility or practitioner sees: caregivers are often overloaded with patients and must rush through their visits to see everyone, or they feel indifferent towards any one patient because they see so many in a day.
• Institutional imperatives—timing the amount of care given, pricing out how much every step of the treatment costs—put a greater emphasis on time and money saved than emotional care given.

Emotional interventions should be routine practice in medical care.

There’s a subtle difference between disease and illness: disease is the thing a doctor can cure, but illness is the thing a patient suffers. Emotional wellness might not seem to have a correlation to how well a disease is cured—but it has a great impact on how little or how much or just how a patient suffers through their illness.

This is not to say that emotional well-being can, on its own, cure a disease--there are a...

Emotional Intelligence Summary Conclusion

The issues discussed here are not simple issues and can’t be written off as having a single source that causes them. They’re complex, stemming from biological characteristics, family status, parental nurturing, class, location, and many other factors. Emotional intelligence won’t solve all these problems by itself--but alongside other solutions, emotional intelligence is a necessary component and should be more widely taught.

Research psychologists also can’t make the change on their own: we need better emotional intelligence training in our school systems, our homes, and our hospitals....

Shortform Exercise: Responding to Emotions

Self-awareness is one of the first major steps towards controlling your emotional responses. Use this exercise to help analyze your own emotional responses and improve the way you act on them.

Think of a situation where something small seemed to set off an overwhelming emotional response in your brain. Briefly summarize the situation, what it was that set you off, and what emotions it sparks in you (refer back to the list for emotion words in Chapter X).

Shortform Exercise: Identifying Your Top Priority

Once we begin improving our emotional intelligence skills in any arena of life, they translate over to other arenas--but we have to start somewhere. Use this exercise to explore which of the 5 life areas you’d most like to improve in, and how to start.

Which of the 5 arenas (romance, family, work, school, and medicine) would you like to improve your emotional intelligence in first? Why is that arena important to you?

Shortform Exercise: Articulating Your Biggest Takeaway

As we know, putting thoughts and feelings into words is one way to process them, reflect on them, and take ownership of them. Use this exercise to help solidify your biggest takeaway from the book.

In a few sentences, what was your biggest takeaway from the summary? What idea lodged in your brain, or what’s the first idea that jumps into your brain when you think about this summary?