External Resources

Articles, stories, and research regarding the latest advancements in Emotional Intelligence

About Happiness

Richard Branson: My Metric for Success? Happiness

Probably one of the best articles out there!  One of the most successful people on earth, Richard Branson, will change how you perceive and judge success.
“Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.”

Sydney Morning Herald: the pursuit of happiness can be a dead end

Dr. Susan David, the author of the book Emotional Agility, about the importance of “bad” emotions to our mental health and happiness.
“What they are failing to recognise is our emotions, our sadness, our frustration, our anger, our emotions, contain really useful data. So when you are feeling guilty as a parent – it doesn’t mean that guilt is right, emotions are data not directions”

Big Think: Sam Harris on Happiness

In the following video, the neuroscientist, philosopher, and author, Sam Harris shares why he believes that happiness isn’t the accumulation of pleasure and positive feelings, but actually the absence of fear, anxiety, and neurosis. Making happiness to simply be the lack of complications and a calm, balanced and peaceful state of mind.

Dealing with Negative Emotions

Quartz: Accepting your darkest emotions is the key to psychological health

Brett Ford From the University of Toronto about the acceptance of negative emotions as an inseparable part of the human experience. “acceptance involves not trying to change how we are feeling, but staying in touch with your feelings and taking them for what they are.” “acceptance of one’s dark emotions is now backed by a body of evidence connecting the habit to better emotional resilience, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety.”

Susan David: “Choosing” to Be Happy Doesn’t Work: Here’s What to Do Instead

Dr. Susan David, the author of the book Emotional Agility, gives us a taste of what science has to say about Tony Robbins and his latest advice on happiness.
“The reason strategies to avoid negativity fail is because the internal struggle to control our thoughts and emotions actually amplifies them”

Berkeley News: Feeling bad about feeling bad can make you feel worse

“We found that people who habitually accept their negative emotions experience fewer negative emotions, which adds up to better psychological health,” said study senior author Iris Mauss, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Scientific American: Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being

An interesting article, written by a psychotherapist, about the negative effects of fighting negativity.
“In recent years I have noticed an increase in the number of people who also feel guilty or ashamed about what they perceive to be negativity. Such reactions undoubtedly stem from our culture’s overriding bias toward positive thinking. Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time.”

PLUS ONE: Positive Emotion Is Associated with Increased Self-Reported Empathy but Decreased Empathic Performance

I don’t know if that comes to you as a surprise or not, but when feeling blue, positive thinkers just aren’t good to have around. PLOS ONE study finds that positive thinking makes people believe that they are being more empathetic towards others, while in fact, they show a lower sensitivity to the emotions of others.

Huffington Post: The Emotional Dark Age

“Over the course of history, the ‘emotional climate’ of a household, has not even played a role in our concept of good parenting. The time has come to emerge from a new dark age. In today’s world, we tend to struggle with negative emotions the most. The way we approach negative emotions is fueling the emotional dark age. The way we approach negative emotions ultimately dictates how healthy or unhealthy our relationships are emotionally. So the first step we can take to end the emotional dark age is to approach negative emotions from a different angle.”

Self-Reprogramming

Harvard Business Review: Why the Problem with Learning Is Unlearning

Mark Bonchek will try to shift your thinking and explain why nowadays, our main problem isn’t learning, it’s unlearning, and how can you improve yourself by forgetting.we are operating with mental models that have grown outdated or obsolete, from strategy to marketing to organization to leadership. To embrace the new logic of value creation, we have to unlearn the old one.”

NewCo Shift: How I Unlearn

We’re caught in between the structures of the future, which are still self-assembling, and the structures of the past, which are being disassembled. When it comes to getting things done, what we think we know about the how the world works is not always useful. To keep things moving, we have no choice but to unlearn.
Beth Comstock shares some of her methods of Unlearning as and the tools she uses to thoroughly and consciously disprove her own assumptions about the world.

Reprogramming Yourself

Your thoughts influence your emotions, and too often these thoughts are either inaccurate, out of context, or plain wrong. Here are the 3 basic steps you need to take in order to validate your thoughts, improve your emotional reactions, and fix the dripping faucet.

Psychological Conditions

Big Think: The Bad News: Trauma Can Be Inherited. The Good News — So Can Resilience

Philip Perry about the transference of neurosis and anxiety through the generations. “What Prof. Meaney hypothesized was that a parent who experienced a trauma could have certain changes in their brain which might lead to epigenetic changes that were passed on, inhabiting the neurons of their children’s brains or even their grandchildren.”

TED: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

Johann Hari and his phenomenal TED talk regarding the true causes of addiction. Explaining Professor Alexander’s “Rat Park” experiment and the effect it should have had on our understanding, and the methods we use to treat addiction.

Blog: If You Experienced Emotional Abuse As A Child, You Probably Do These Things As An Adult

People who have suffered abuse as children often suppress these painful memories, and at times, even find ways to cope, and manage to regain normal appearance. Due to that, you may not realize that you’re acting out due to childhood trauma until you read some of these behaviors.

Share This