The Five Steps to Emotional Competence

Post #2

Not being one to judge and hang back, I'll own my judgments about Goleman's contributions and offer this up:

There are five distinct steps in developing our emotional competence:

1. Acknowledge how profoundly we have been and still are being programmed by mother culture to devalue our emotional experience.

2. Learn to recognize a basic set of primary emotional families in myself and others
(We recommend Mad, Sad, Scared, Peaceful, Powerful, Joyful as a good starting point.)

3. Learn to understand the meaning of each family's signal, what the purpose of each emotion is.

4. Engage the action behavior appropriate to the meaning of each emotion.

5. Repeat each of these steps regularly with a group of intentional and supportive colleagues.

That is the crux of it. Beyond this basic rehearsal there are practically an infinite number of applications. More to come on that.