Emotional Intelligence Is Just the Beginning: Five Takeaways from Our Community Meeting with Aakash Chowkase, Ph.D.

What if the real measure of emotional intelligence isn’t how well we manage our feelings, but how we use them to serve the greater good?

At our October Community Meeting, Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Aakash Chowkase, Ph.D., invited us to look at emotional intelligence through a wider lens—one that connects inner awareness with outer impact.

Together we explored how understanding our emotions is just the beginning, and how values like compassion, humility, and curiosity transform that awareness into action for the greater good.

Here are five key takeaways.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, express, and regulate emotions— both our own and others’.

So in the emotion science, we say, name it to tame it. That’s the first way you can regulate an unpleasant emotion, a very active emotion, and by that, I’m not saying that anger is bad. All emotions are great. That’s a part of emotional intelligence. So understand that emotions are information. They’re not good emotions or bad emotions. They’re emotions. All emotions are useful. Without anger, we wouldn’t have gotten any of the civil rights. We wouldn’t have gotten any of the women’s rights. So if there is an ability for us to be able to participate in democracy, it’s because someone got angry, and they got together and channeled it. So how well do you channel it? How did you use that emotion to do the wiser thing? That’s what emotional intelligence is about.

Having emotional awareness doesn’t automatically make us kind. Without values like honesty, compassion, and humility, emotional intelligence can easily be used to manipulate rather than connect.

Emotional intelligence is also a tool. What you use it for, is the question. So from a cognitive empathy perspective, it’s the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person. It’s an understanding, right? Understand what they’re going through. And you can weaponize it. You can use it to gaslight someone. You can use it to manipulate someone, right? Especially our colleagues and our close ones. They become victims of our high emotional intelligence. And that’s why just talking about emotional intelligence is not enough. That’s why today we are talking about emotional intelligence as the cornerstone of something bigger, character development, something bigger like for the greater good. Unless we embed it in that greater framework, just talking about emotional intelligence is not going to help.

Polarization, loneliness, and even climate inaction share a common root: our sense of who we care about has grown smaller. Expanding that “circle of concern” through empathy and compassion helps restore a sense of shared humanity.

It is becoming a norm that we are actively alienating others that we don’t agree with…That doesn’t mean I should call for violence. That doesn’t mean I should shut you down. Differences are natural. They’re ubiquitous. Disagreements are fine. They are a part of a healthy society. That’s how we got our democracy. But the last part, that divide, is not acceptable, and what is the root cause? Why do you hate someone so much that you can’t think of them as humans? Why do you have to dehumanize someone? What happens when you dehumanize?

You forget that you’re fellow human beings.

That’s when you narrow your circle of concern so much that you forget they’re part of a bigger humanity, and you don’t then extend your love. You don’t think they’re worthy of your love, you don’t think they’re worthy of your attention or kindness. And that’s the root cause of a polarized world. And the same can apply to climate change, and the same applies to the pandemic of loneliness. So I think at the core of most of our social problems is a lack of concern for others.

The goal of building character isn’t perfection, but to build a rich, balanced mosaic of character strengths that guide how we use our emotional intelligence.

Think of character as a mosaic. What does a mosaic have? It has different tiles, and what are those tiles? Courage, compassion, empathy, perseverance, responsibility, discipline, humility, honesty, integrity, principle, all of those parts are those little tiles of that mosaic. Now someone has more tiles of courage, someone has more tiles of compassion. That’s why all of those mosaics look different, but they all look beautiful when you have those tiles. So character is like a mosaic made of so many different character virtues and character strengths. The goal should be to build a beautiful mosaic.

In tense or divided moments, instead of acting impulsively, take a deliberate pause to choose how to respond. Imagine your best self and decide whether the moment calls for courage, compassion, or restraint.

So in the TEA acronym, it’s trigger, emotion, and action, right? When we are triggered, we don’t always show up as our best selves. Our actions are sometimes impulsive, right? So what we want is to learn to take a pause before that action. So it’s now T, E, P, A, as in trigger, emotion, pause, action.

Then comes that P for pause. Learning to break that momentum, pause and imagine your best self. How do you best want to show up in this moment? That’s what inspires empathy. That’s what inspires courage. Do I need to speak up in this moment? Yes, I do. And then we make a deliberate choice to act courageously. We make a deliberate choice to act compassionately. We don’t need to make a deliberate choice to be rude to someone. It’s an impulse we act on, right? But for all things character, we need to make a deliberate effort, and that’s why we need to break that chain of T, E, and A, the link between E and A. We need to elongate that link. Add a pause…

We keep coming back to TEPA, trigger, emotion, pause, action and taking that pause is a skill we can take 20 years to master.