| Emotional
Intelligence | Stevehein.com
Some Letters From Readers
From Pam
Hi Steve,
I just discovered your web site. I am so
excited to have found it. My beliefs and your
own are very similar. I work with at risk
people and relationships utilizing equine assisted growth
and development programs. To learn more about
this modality visit www.eagala.org.
Funny, I too avoided going to college for a degree in
Psychology and am thankful for that
decision. Always good to trust your
vibes...even if you can't make sense of it at the time!
Thank you for so generously sharing your insights and
philosophies. I intend to share your site with
the therapist that I work in conjunction
with. It will give her a better understanding
of the approach I would like to take in guiding
folks.
Much appreciation, Pam
From Cathy
Hi Steve,
I came across your site tonight as I was surfing the net
for information on narcissism. I read your
invalidation page and was relieved that someonecould put
into words what I have been feeling for a long time with
a dear friend of mine. In short, I finally
felt validated! Thank you!
I have been confused and distrustful of my own feelings
in this friendship, yet could never quite figure out
why. When I read your piece on "I
Honestly Don't Judge You as Much as You Think," the
bells started going off. I too have held back,
and still do, from sharing things with my
friend. For me the trust has been damaged, and
I do not feel safe anymore to confide in
her. After so many responses about how I'm
being illogical, emotional, hyper-sensitive, delusional,
etc., not to mention the numerous times my confidences
have been used against me at later dates to further
invalidate any position I may take in a debate, I've
learned to not expose any tenderareas of myself with her.
I too have been told, "Get over it
already. Move on." But
interestingly enough, when the shoe is on the other foot,
it's a case of do as I say, and not as I do.
I'm coming to realize that I've been in the grips of a
person who has some severe personality dsyfunction, and
I'm grieving about that. I'm also grieving for
myself, for beating myself down for so many years, having
allowed her to instill such distrust in
myself. I'm also coming to realize that she is
a person that I will never be able to fully trust
again. It's not that I don't want to, since I
miss that trust we had in the beginning years, and I was
holding out hope it could be rekindled, but I now know
that her personality disorders make it very difficult to
re-establish that trust.
Thank you so much for sharing your
experiences. Thank you for helping me to
regain my self-trust. Thank you for validating
what I've been feeling!
Sincerely,
Cathy
From Kimberley
Dear Steve
Thank you so much for the feeling
words list and thank you for your website. We are a
not for profit school located in Negombo, Sr Lanka. Most
of the teachers are here voluntarily as well as myself.
We are trying to educate the teachers, children about EI.
Your site has provided a tremendous amount of
information. Thank you for that.
I have given the address to dozens of teachers,
parents and more importantly students. I am so very
grateful that this site is available to anyone and
provides such a wealth of information.
All the Best
Dr. K.
Principal
From David
Hi, Steve
You asked about my site ----- so here is the
URL: http://ahlec.net
That will give you an idea of what I am "up to these
days".
Should you ever have the time and/or inclination to do a
bit of exploring,
this website introduces a little "treasure
chest" of -- alternative --
"teaching/learning tools" that (in theory) can
be used by children -- and
adults -- to enhance the quality of their personal
existence.
David
From
Chris - On Goleman's book
Your critique of Daniel Goleman’s work confirmed
my suspicions when I
read the book.
I found the language confusing. Dressing things up in
psychological
terms helped me very little. I see no benefit in having
to understand
another language to learn how to do something. For
example, I do not
consider it sensible to have to learn Swedish to be able
to read the
assembly instructions for a coffee table.
I felt that the works of people like Edward DeBono to
be much more
useful and efficient. They were also a much more
enjoyable way of
exploring my feelings around an idea or course of action.
So, I thank you for saving me a lot of trouble.
Chris
Telling
errors in the 1995 Goleman book?
Here is a letter I received from a reader. Note that I
use the term "telling" a bit sarcastically
because it is one of Dan Goleman's favorite words.
| Jan 22, 2007 Steve:
I apologize beforehand for intruding on your
privacy, and respect the fact that you help those
who are suicidal, in particular. They are in fact
more important than anything else that anyone
might do. I will be as brief as possible.
I took Emotional Intelligence as a course in
college recently, and I was never able to make it
beyond the first paragraph before finding
inherent flaws in the so-called "facts"
Daniel Goleman professed to be true, yet were
proved so blatantly false. Call me anal
retentive, but my difficulty goes to the heart of
Mr. Goleman's integrity as a former journalist
and present day author/psychologist.
I must quote the entire first paragraph verbatim
in the hope that someone, somewhere, can see the
oxymoron or hypocritical content as proof of a
"lack of emotional intelligence," under
the very convoluted yet verbose definition of the
phrase espoused by Mr. Goleman himself.
Under Chapter 1 - What Are Emotions For?
"Ponder the last moments of Gary and
Mary Jane Chauncey, a couple completely
devoted to their eleven-year-old daughter
Andrea, who was confined to a wheelchair by
cerebral palsy. The Chauncey family were
passengers on an Amtrack train that crashed
into a river after a barge hit and weakened a
railroad bridge in Louisiana's bayou country.
Thinking first of their daughter, the couple
tried their best to save Andrea as water
rushed into the sinking train; somehow they
managed to push Andrea through a window to
rescuers. Then, as the car sank beneath the
water, they perished."
This is drama at best, and unadulterated
nonsense at worst. It sounds good, looks good on
paper, but is as fictional as Sasquatch or Loch
Ness.
The first error was as obvious as the nose on my
face, which was conceived and born in Mobile,
Alabama [I love irony and sarcasm]. The train
accident did not occur in the Louisiana bayou as
claimed in the paragraph; it occurred on the
Mobile River in Alabama. If I check a map
carefully, I likewise notice that he missed the
entire state of Mississippi as well, before
pronouncing the area of the accident. He was two
states off, and it left me to wondering about the
entire book's authenticity. If that had been the
only error, I might have ignored it altogether as
a "human emotional intelligence error."
It was not.
So as any good student might do when writing a
paper on this chapter, I researched his
reference. It's rather vague, yet likewise in
error. It simply states, "Associated Press,
September 15, 1993." I used the university
library, and searched for the article. It did not
exist.
The accident in fact happened on Wednesday
September 22, 1993, and was reported Thursday and
Friday of the same week. It appears that Daniel
Goleman was either too lazy to research his
former employer's archives, or just wrote from
memory solely; or was in fact Nostradamus
reincarnate. Okay, you might say, that's
"two errors in remedial journalism."
Nope.
The parents of the aforementioned child were in
fact Gary and Mary Jane Chancey, not
"Chauncey." Another minor error, but it
shows a pattern. Andrea Chancey was later
interviewed, and although she did believe it to
be a miracle, she had no idea how she was removed
from the train. It was certainly not "into
the arms of rescuers" as noted above. The
wreck occurred in the dark, and divers/rescuers
were not on the site until the next morning--as
many as 6 hours after the crash. The car sank
beneath the water, and 43 people perished long
before rescuers arrived, and no one is certain
how Andrea was able to make it out of the
wreckage, or when. However, it sank beneath the
waters at least 6 hours before rescuers arrived.
It was unadulterated "fiction."
Sure, it tugs at the heartstrings, and it may
have been in fact a miracle. However, it did not
occur as claimed, at the time purported, the
names were incorrect, and no one "pushed
Andrea through the window to rescuers." It
simply did not occur as Mr. Goleman claimed. It
would have been better served if it had been a
Lifetime Movie of the Week, but at least it would
have been noted that it was in fact fictional.
Emotional Intelligence? Your call. Fiction?
Without a doubt.
I have watched as this book has been flourishing
in today's academia, and I have always been
puzzled as to how no one has ever noticed,
mentioned, or confronted Daniel Goleman with his
account. However, if the man cannot research his
own newspaper, get the facts accurate, then how
is anyone to believe anything beyond the very
first paragraph, on page three?
I am still astounded. Pop-Psychology may make for
good TV ratings, or best-selling books, but
integrity and good journalism is supposed to have
a foundation of facts, not speculation. If you
speculate about a factual event, then you can
most certainly expect to speculate on the deeper
topic of Emotional Intelligence itself.
I withdrew from the course after submitting this
information in a thesis. I was given an F/W. I
can live with that. I told the truth. Mr. Goleman
blatantly lied. Emotional Intelligence? Bah
humbug.
Thank you for your time.
Warmest personal regards,
Samuel D. Fondren
Birmingham, AL
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