Name: Emotional Intelligence- The Skills Our Students Deserve | Ronen Habib | TEDxGunnHighSchool
Uploaded: 2024-09-11T01:17:16.000Z
Duration: 18 min 18 s
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Past simple

When I was a senior in high school, I applied to seven colleges and got rejected by all of them except for my safety school, which was UC Santa Cruz.

To-infinitive

And to make matters worse, I have a terrible sense of direction.

Now I'm not sure if you're familiar with the UC Santa Cruz campus, but if not, I want you to imagine a huge forest with a bunch of classes stuck in different parts of it.

As a joke, my high school friends actually gave me a watch with a compass on it so I get from place to place.

I needed a compass that year, but not one that would get me from class to class.

One that would help me find my way to live a more happy and more fulfilled life.

You see, when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, I was lost and unhappy.

I was taking courses in computer science that I hated because I was told, major in computer science, you'll get a good job, you'll make a lot of money, and you'll be rich and happy.

I was following this motto, suffer now so you can be happy later, and most importantly, don't question it.

But my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, she did question it.

And she asked me, why are you taking these courses?

And she's like, no, actually, you don't have to take these courses.

You can choose to drop these courses and major in something you enjoy learning about.

Because you see, up until that point, I never asked myself what I enjoyed learning about.

Luckily, she pushed me to take a class called Personal Empowerment, taught by Professor

And Frank taught me that paying attention to what makes me feel alive, what makes me feel happier, is not wrong, and it's not a luxury.

It's actually critical to my happiness and also to my success.

Most importantly, Frank taught me that paying attention to my emotions and using this information to make decisions in my life was the compass that I needed to live a more fulfilled and happier life.

I thought getting into UC Santa Cruz was the worst thing ever.

Because after that class, I started to live a more fulfilled and happier life.

I actually started to do things that I enjoyed more, that I was drawn to.

Now fast forward about 10 years, I find myself teaching AP Economics to 17 and 18 year old kids who are really smart, really hard working, and a lot of whom are actually also really detached from their emotions.

All of whom are really stressed, and some of whom lack social and interpersonal skills.

And I wanted my students to have the skills that so fundamentally changed me.

These skills that amount to what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence.

And he defines emotional intelligence as the ability to monitor one's own and other people's emotions, to label these emotions appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide our own thinking and ultimately our behavior.

It includes components such as these, self-awareness, social skills, empathy, self-regulation, motivation.

If you haven't used at least one of these in the last 24 hours, we really need to talk.

Because we use these things all the time.

Ten minutes ago, when I was backstage, I looked like this.

Because it's scary to speak in front of a thousand people and be recorded, right?

I had this negative self-talk telling me, oh, no one's going to want to listen to this, you're going to make a fool out of yourself, no one cares about this, right?

So I had to take a deep breath and remind myself why this is important to me, try to shift my focus as much as I can away from that voice.

And I decided to visualize something that makes me feel calm and centered, that puts me in the present moment.

And for me, it's the incredibly cute pictures of my kids.

And so they helped me remember why this message is so important.

So this is my way, right, of self-regulating to do this.

But look, these skills come in handy in so many different ways.

Have you ever procrastinated because you didn't want to do something, right?

Have you ever been in conflict with someone?

We need to notice when we're triggered, when we're flooded.

We need to be able to actively listen to the other person.

We need to be able to empathize with their emotions and their feelings.

We need to be able to assert ourself in a non-blameful way.

And by the way, these are skills that companies such as these highly, highly value, okay?

In education, teachers around the world ask themselves, do we provide 21st century skills to our students?

But this question is never answered in the world of education.

All the conferences I go to, it kind of like floats there.

And so I ended up going to a conference where top HR executives from these companies listed the skills that they want people to possess before they work for them.

They want people who can work well with others.

They want people who have basic knowledge of subject matter.

They want people who can persevere through adversity.

And they want people who can be ruthlessly intentional with their time.

They also said that it's very, very difficult to find people who possess these skills.

And these are rooted in emotional intelligence.

Very difficult to find people who have these skills.

And so let me paint this picture to you right now.

These companies are offering emotional intelligence courses, like at Google, they offer a course called Search Inside Yourself.

And they're offering these courses because our educational system is failing to provide these courses that offer the skills the private sector so dearly wants.

But what if we did offer these skills in our education?

What if we offer these courses in schools?

Imagine the benefit to our society well beyond the workforce.

Imagine the benefit to our society, like for marriages and child rearing, if we had emotionally intelligent parents who could attune to their kids' needs, who could emotion coach their kids.

Imagine the benefit to our nation if we had lawmakers who actually knew how to self-regulate and be empathic and active listen.

And the thing that's crazy to me is that these skills are completely trainable.

You know, we assume that second-graders don't know how to multiply, how to divide, and how to read, and that's why we teach it to them, as we should.

Why do we assume that second-graders know how to self-regulate or self-manage or even be empathic?

You see, schools across the nations have embraced something called the Common Core Standards.

And with Common Core, you know, if you go to their website, there's actually a section in the Common Core Standard that says, what is not covered by the standards?

And in that section, there is a line that says, social, emotional, and physical development are not covered in the standards, which can only make sense if you live alone in a cave.

So why are we not offering, why is there not in the Common Core?

Well, it turns out that Goleman writes in his book that there was a meta-analysis of 668 schools that implemented SEL programs, social and emotional learning programs.

Dr. Weisberg at the University of Illinois found that schools who do implement SEL programs see up to 50% of children improving achievement scores, 38% improving GPAs, suspensions dropping by 44%, and kids showing 63% significantly more positive behavior.

Students are learning more, and schools are safer.

And they're remarkable to the point that the state of Illinois decided to implement SEL standards.

So in Illinois, every student is taught to recognize and accurately label their emotions, and to identify non-verbal clues as to how someone else feels, amongst many, many other things.