For most of your life, you might have been told o get your feelings under control. To think before you react. To not take things personally. To be professional, which is another way of saying: leave the emotional part of yourself somewhere else before you walk in here.

The advice to be reasonable and rational above all else sounds well-meaning, but it’s backwards. And, dare I say, out of touch.

In 1995, a science journalist named Daniel Goleman published a book called Emotional Intelligence that would go on to sell five million copies and put a new phrase into the common vocabulary. Goleman had spent years covering behavioral and brain sciences for the New York Times, reading research that most people never saw, and he had developed a particular skill: recognizing when an academic finding was pointing at something larger than itself.

What he found, and what he spent the book arguing, was this: IQ, the measure of analytical and reasoning ability that the twentieth century had decided was the primary index of human intelligence, predicted somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of success in life, depending on the study and how you defined success.

Which means that between seventy-five and ninety percent of what determins how a life goes has nothing to do with IQ at all.

So what was that something else?

Goleman called it emotional intelligence.

The term had been coined five years earlier by two psychologists, Peter Salovey at Yale and John Mayer at the University of New Hampshire, in a 1990 paper published in Imagination, Cognition and Personality, a quarterly academic journal focused on inner mental life and behavior. Salovey and Mayer defined emotional intelligence as the ability to identify and understand emotions in yourself and others, to use that emotional information to guide thinking, and to regulate your own emotional states in ways that serve you and the people around you.

Goleman built upon Salovey and Mayer’s framework by separating them into five components.

Component 1: Self-awareness: knowing what you are feeling while you are feeling it, and understanding how that feeling is shaping your behavior. Without this foundation, nothing else in the framework is possible. After all, how can you regulate something you haven’t noticed, or communicate something you haven’t named?

Component 2: Self-regulation: the ability to manage your emotional responses rather than be managed by them. This relies on a capacity to pause between feeling and reaction, to hold yourself accountable when you get something wrong, and to choose your response rather than simply following through on the impulse.

Component 3: Motivation: the internal drive to pursue goals despite frustration and setback, the ability to persist when things are difficult, and the refusal to let a failure be the end.

Component 4: Empathy: the ability to sense what another person is feeling, to take their perspective seriously, to respond to what is actually happening in them rather than what you assum or need them to feel. An empathetic person does not gaslight, dismiss, or condescend. They validate.

Component 5: Social skill: the capacity to manage relationships well, to communicate clearly, resolve conflict, inspire, listen as well as speak, and work alongside other people without leaving a path of destruction.

A person with developed emotional intelligence is, in Goleman's portrait, someone who is awake to the full texture of their experience and their environment, not just to the intellectual content of situations, but to the feeling underneath them, the relational dynamics running through them, the emotional information that is constantly available to anyone who has learned to read it.

This is a person who can sit with discomfort and uncertainty and gather information from it, rather than trying to evade or avoid what wants to be known.

Neurocience, Goleman tells us, found that the brain developed in a specific order, and that order is vital to our understanding of how we think and feel.

The emotional brain came first.

The limbic system, the cluster of structures deep in the brain responsible for processing emotion, memory, and threat, predates the rational brain by hundreds of millions of years. In evolutionary terms, our emotional brain is ancient. Every mammal has one. It was running the organism, encoding experience, generating response, long before anything we would recognize as rational thought was possible.

This makes sense, since as babies, before we have words, we have sensations. Which are—spoiler alert—emotions!!

The outer layer of the brain responsible for language, abstract reasoning, planning, and deliberation is called the neocortex and that came much later. And it grew from the emotional brain. This means that our rational brain is, in the most literal neurological sense, a structure that arrived on top of emotion.

What this means is that the story we tell ourselves about the relationship between reason and emotion, reason being the adult in the room, emotion being the unruly child that needs managing, has the history exactly wrong. Emotion is not a corruption of thought. It is thought's origin. The feeling brain is the older, deeper system. The thinking brain is the elaboration.

Which is why Antonio Damasio says, “We are feeling machines that think, not thinking machines that feel.” (As a writer, I quibble with the relative pronoun “that” when it should be “who”, but that’s a digression for another time.)

For the first 25 years of my life, I suffered from an undiagnosed panic disorder. For a long time I understood it as a malfunction, a nervous system misfiring, generating alarm where there was no fire. The work, as I understood it, was to override it. Get the rational brain back in control.

What I came to understand, through decades of therapy, was that I had the relationship exactly backwards. The signals were not interference; they were information, coming at me from a physical, pre-verbal state. My system had been working over-time since before I had language to describe my internal stress and terror. What I had been taught to pathologize was the older intelligence trying to communicate in a voice I’d been taught was my “brokenness.” The message was that it wasn’t worth listening to—it was only worth fixing.

Because I was constantly inside a feeling state, I had, without knowing it, spent years developing the very capacity Goleman describes in his book. I had learned to read emotional information carefully, because I had no choice. What I had not learned, what took much longer, was to trust it.

This is the part of Goleman's argument that can get lost when emotional intelligence is reduced to a workplace nicety.

Emotional Intelligence isn’t niceness, and it’s not a performance. It’s an accuracy within the self; a congruence. They know what they are feeling and they know what you are feeling and they know, often before you do, how the situation between you is developing. And this ability to perceive, understand and regulate emotional information is a high form of intelligence.

IQ, on the other hand, is resistant to change. It stabilizes in early adulthood, while emotional intelligence can be developed at any age. The capacities Salovey and Mayer described are skills. People raised to believe that feelings are a problem to be solved will find the work of growing emotional intelligent counter-intuitive. To begin, you must be willing to understand what you feel instead of trying to manage feeling.

The oldest intelligence in the world is emotion. It’s what everything else about us grew from. We invented tests to measure our rational brain, and decided that only reason mattered. And we did this, most likely, because emotions are uncomfortable, and not often logical. But dismissing them in lieu of imposing a rational structure is not the work of a fully examined life; it’s the work of an avoidant one.

Listening to, and sitting with the discomfort emotions demand, is the work of a congruent, and deeply realized existence. Anything hard is worth it.

Until next week I remain…