Social Intelligence – at Last

Some time after I read Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, in 2006, I wrote that this was probably the last hugely eye-opening, self-revealing reading I was likely to discover.

And I’d run across any number of eye-opening books – perhaps starting with Pierce Howard’s thousand page The Owner’s Manual for The Brain.  This book – reading parts of it several times and taking about twenty pages of notes – pointed me to Thomas Armstrong’s 7 Kinds of Smart – which drew on Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence work.  My Brain book also pointed me to Dan Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence.

Social Intelligence

I’ve now worked my way two-thirds through Dan Goleman’s newer book, Social Intelligence, and I’ve realized that I was wrong.  This has been an amazingly eye-opening and revealing reading experience.

I had already learned that I was lacking a dismaying array of emotional skills and understanding.  Now I was learning – coming to understand – that my lack of social skills is one more super massive liability.

Mark Pesce is an expert in social media.  In a talk he gave at the Personal Democracy Forum – titled “Hyperpolitics (American Style)” – he said, “Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get ahead.“

Kelly Lambert, in her new book Lifting Depression, in chapter 6 “Our Social Brains,” wrote, “Researchers reported that the feeling of loneliness was ‘the single most important predictor of psychological distress …’”

So I don’t think that my “super massive liability” above is hyperbole.

I find that Dan Goleman’s books do two things for me.

They help me understand how my early years created – or contributed to – the “me” that I’m dealing with now.  They help me see that the difficulties I’m dealing with are not some murky deficiency in the core of “me.”   There were apprehensible contributors to these difficulties.  They are something that I can understand better.  They can be thought about – discussed and explored mentally.

And these difficulties can be improved.  What I can understand I can change.  At least, I can change these things some – if I don’t crash first.

The other thing that Dan Goleman’s books do for me – have done for me – is similar, but subtly different.  They’ve explained those enormous areas of emotional skills and awareness that were not available to me for all those years, but, possibly, could be available to me now.

My social experience

Take, for instance, my social skills.

I’ve been a loner – all my life.  I now see that a large part of this was due to my profound lack of self-confidence and emotional skills.  These emotional gaps were a legacy from good people who gave me what they could.  But these foundational basics were not available to them – these basics were not theirs to give.

Nor were they available to me, until quite recently.

My partner of 35 years and I have been content to be hermits together.  Quite content.  The only people we associated with were circumstantial – people we worked with – people we lived near.  I see now that these associations were shallow.  When the circumstances changed, the associations evaporated.

I never saw that as a problem.  In a small way, it wasn’t.  In another, larger way, it was a huge hint – a clue – that I didn’t have the wit to see or appreciate.

Now my partner is disappearing into the fatal fog of AD. (See my blog Dementia: The Path Beyond the Tears)  I find myself alone – desperately stretching out my hand to my traveling companion of so many years, crying out to him to stay with me a little while longer, as his hand slips inexorably from my flailing fingers.

There are rough days – and not so rough days.  But the man has been good to me.  I will hold on to him – and hold on to his hand – as long as I can.  I will look into his eyes and try to read his verbal and non-verbal cues, and I will try to act on them with love and compassion – which is not easy at times.  I will use, as best I can, the skills that I’ve recently learned about from Dan Goleman in Social Intelligence.

So – looking back, my loner life – my lack of social skills and experience – is much more of a liability than I could ever have imagined.

What if?

How could my life have been different if I’d been in possession of these emotional and social resources?  I suspect that this is a tricky and slippery question.  So many decisions and outcomes could have gone another way.  It’s impossible to calculate what might have been different.

Then I look back to another crossroad – another path not taken.

In 2002, my mainframe application development and support job was reorganized away.  What if I had managed to somehow find a job back then?

Two ideas occur to me.  One: I would have continued to work for people – and with people – and I would still have been working without those basic emotional and social skills.  I shudder to think what my prospects for success might have been.

Two: I suspect that on that path, I would not have found the resources or the motivation to do the reading – to make the changes for myself that I’ve been able to make on the path I did take.

It has occurred to me to wonder how I would have coped with my partner’s AD – if I had taken that other road.  There’s a scary thought.

I occasionally wonder whether I’d have been better off if I had found that other path – found a job – back then.  Perhaps I would now be employed and solvent.  And perhaps not.

Would I have been better off?  I’m not sure.  But I suspect not.

And so …

During this post job-reorganization period of exploration and discovery, I’ve changed – a lot.  I have found gorgeous gems of literature and scholarship and personal growth.

I wonder whether I would have appreciated before, as I now find it sublimely beautiful, the lyrics from Les Misérables, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Social Intelligence – at last.

Better late than never.