There’s a good argument for teaching children basic social and emotional skills, from which they can draw on through their lives.

When psychologist Daniel Goleman wrote his 1995 New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, he wanted to debunk the theory that IQ is the sole measure of a kid’s ability to learn.

The book’s success helped make improving EI a widely recognized means of enhancing learning. Methods employing EI focus on the emotional aspects of our makeup rather than cognitive abilities alone.

“It’s not that IQ doesn’t matter,” Goleman told the Georgia Straight by phone from his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. “But you can’t change a kid’s IQ. You can change a kid’s ability to learn. That is what this does: it helps kids learn better. Achievement scores are up. I think there is about an 11-percent improvement. The nice thing about emotional intelligence is it is not something that is set at birth—it is something you learn. If we give kids the right lessons, they actually get better at it and it helps them with life.”

Goleman has buttressed those 1995 findings with the contents of his latest book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Bantam, 2007).

“Social intelligence means being effective in your relationships and being able to have mutually agreeable interactions with people, getting along, and having good rapport,” he said. “So that could be being a good lover and spouse, for example, how to be good at those things.”

There are various definitions of emotional intelligence. However, according to Yale University psychologist Peter Salovey, whose prior work on EI inspired Goleman’s own research, “Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought.”

Those wanting to get a close-up look at Goleman can head to UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts next Friday (April 4) at 8 p.m. for a talk he will give on both social and emotional intelligence. The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education is presenting the event.

According to Goleman, when Emotional Intelligence came out it presented “an argument for teaching kids basic social and emotional skills”. He said that at about that time, he cofounded an organization called the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (www.casel.org/ ), which was based at Yale University and is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A 49-page CASEL report published last year assesses the results of after-school programs that promote social development.

“[The programs] teach kids from kindergarten to university all of the basics of self-awareness, knowing what you are feeling and why, and how to handle your disruptive emotions, and how to manage anger, get over being afraid, and how to recognize what’s going on with other kids emotionally,” Goleman said. “So it’s how to put all that together and get along better and work out conflict in a positive way and not a negative way. It is quite ingenious that way.…There are thousands of programs around the world. What CASEL did was a comparison of schools’ output when they did have the program and when they didn’t have the program. As I said, the kids get better on all the pro-social behaviours. They like school, cut class less; they are better-behaved in class.”

Added Goleman: “Once this gets into schools, teachers love it because they spend less time trying to get kids to pay attention and calm down. They are already there. So it is a huge, huge favourite for teachers in terms of the classroom climate.”

Kitsilano-based coaching consultant Juhree Zimmerman calls Goleman “the guru” of her field. She has been in coaching—from personal and familial to business and organizational to leadership—for 10 years. She is certified in EI. She told the Straight by phone that it seemed to be “a really good fit” with the leadership coaching she had been doing, along with her degree in nursing and master’s in counselling psychology.

“I chose EI because it made the most sense,” she said. “It really is quite down-to-earth, and I think that it is the kind of skill that everyone needs to know about, whether you are the head of a big company or just managing your family or working on your family. I think that is really important.”

All the various aspects of EI—how flexible you are and how much stress you can handle, for example—“interact with every situation” in your daily life, Zimmerman added.

“If you believe positive things, they come to you,” Zimmerman said. “That is a part of the EI that I am trained in, which is slightly different to Daniel Goleman’s. I am trained in the Reuven Bar-On [school of EI]. Reuven Bar-On was one of the originators of EI—and set up the original EI testing—and Daniel Goleman took a slant on it.”

The names may make the topic sound esoteric, but Zimmerman insists the opposite is the case: EI is proof of the interconnectedness of all of us. Any actions we put out into the world are felt by one and all. An awareness of that can be helpful around the workplace, she added.

“What I have seen over and over again, and it relates back to my training in team systems, is that teams and work groups take on their own personality,” Zimmerman said. “So somebody may leave, but the way of being within that team may well live on, even though that individual has left. That is what I call the voice of the system. The system has a voice, and it is expressed through different people.…So teams function in a very interconnected way.”