Ask HN: Best Resources on Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (or competence) is highly non-verbal. In my personal path I've tried impro, biodanza, and some variants of therapeutic theater. Biodanza for me was the hardest but also the most rewarding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodanza

It's difficult to explain exactly what it is, but during the sessions you don't speak, you communicate with other people through your eyes, touch and your movements. There's too much personal contact to recommend it in these virus-loaded days, but if you're the kind of person who has difficulty reading people and you're kinda stiff, this most definitely helps.

Here's a book on the topic: https://smile.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Made-Lisa-Barrett/dp/1.... It's one of the better books I've found on cognition and emotional intelligence. The author's interview with Ezra Klein is also very good and gives an overview of the book if you're hesitant about buying it: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/podcasts/.

The pieces of the puzzle fell into place after I read the book because she gives a computational perspective on emotions and how they're related to regulating homeostasis.

I'm a big fan of HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-featured-Leade...

How to Win Friends and Influence People is a good book to read. It was written before people spoke about EI, but it gives good, actionable advice.

Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

I was listening to a presentation about emotional intelligence in the context of working with children based on stuff from the "Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence". The part of it that was life changing for me was the concept of describing emotions based on a 2D graph. One axis goes from "Negative" -> "Positive" and the other from "Low Energy" -> "High Energy". This makes four "quadrants": negative + low energy (including thing like "sad"), negative + high energy (including things like "angry"), positive + low energy (including things like "relaxed"), and positive + high energy (including things like "excited").

They went on to say that there are times when you want to be in each quadrant because each is suited for different kinds of tasks (e.g. low energy + negative for empathy, high energy + positive for productivity). If you can identify what quadrant you're currently in, there are techniques for moving toward any of the other quadrants depending on what you need to get done. There's actually an app I used for a while where you could pick a point on the grid and it would suggest words to describe how you may be feeling as well as these techniques for moving on either axis.