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Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman would be a good start for EQ. Here's a list of all his work https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Goleman/e/B000APZC9O/ref=pd_si...
His work touches everything around EQ

Free to Choose - Milton Friedman

Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman

Read Goleman's Emotional Intelligence and maybe "Intuition at Work" to get started on this. You have to learn it straight from experience. I wrote a detailed description here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10578474

Book suggestion thread: Go.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-Matter-More-Tha...)

I'll suggest Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (for empathy) and Pirsig's Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for quality and values).

You should read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Sounds like you could use some.

I think most of the self-help is full of jargon and find what is valuable to you. I recently got a copy of Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence and it is a long, laborious read with barely 1 page of actionable items.

I quite like Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I struggle a lot with connecting with my emotions and that book really helped me intelectualize them.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26329.Emotional_Intellige...

Books Read:
Never Split the difference by Chris Voss (FLIPPING AMAZING! This book is so good I didn't want to share it here.)

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
(Fantastic Look into how we as humans work and how to deal with each other and ourselves)

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
(Enjoyable and entertaining)

The Martian by Andy Weir
(The Audiobook of this was AMAZING! The book is still amazing especially for technical people)

The Hard thing about Hard things by Ben Horowitz
(I think it would be a great book for people who are already running companies.)

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
(It had some interesting parts. Wasn't a bad book, but also not crazy memorable)

Boundaries in Dating by Henry Cloud
(I found the advice for the christian dating relationship to be a honest eye opener. This book taught me a lot about myself.)

The Launch Pad by Randall Stross
(How I found Y Combinator and Hacker news. I really enjoy the startup community and love the fact that this introduced me to it)

The richest man in Babylon by George S Clason
(OMG EVERYONE SHOULD OWN THIS BOOK!!! It teaches you about handling money in one of the most entertaining ways I've ever read. It was crazy good and I reread it often.)

Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull

(Great read about the interesting problems solved and the fight for survival to one day bring about a worthy ideal)

> While studying social psychology of what makes a kid popular vs unpopular (on Coursera), one significant factor was that an unpopular kid came into the group and tried to play a new game. Whereas a popular kid just went along with whatever the group was doing and then after a while suggested they play a different game.

I remember reading about such a case in Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. So, curious what is this course?

Although the findings in my previous comment are my own extrapolations from years of dabbling, I'm confident most people can become very healthy by having diet rich in helpful cultures (party in your tummy), all the essential amino acids (that will become good neurochem), and letting the body rest in an aware and balanced state without forcing anything (zen out and in) regularly.

There being no concise source on the matter of general health, diet, good neurochemistry, and mood, I can but offer a collection of disparate books:

Principles of Neuroscience (Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell) is a great textbook.

Emotional Intelligence (Bradberry)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Suzuki Roshi)

I also read a lot of personal experience vault essays on erowid.org (regarding "experimental medicine," for lack of better terminology)

The best thing that I can recommend is "Blueprint" by RSD.
It is not a book but a video course, and you may at first think that it is a bit weird suggestion, because it is about pickup, but I strongly encourage you to check it out. It is the best explanation of how social dynamics works, and it is also the best "personal development" course I've ever encountered.

You can also go on youtube and watch RSDTyler channel. It is fantastic, I can't recommend this enough, even if you are not interested in learning pickup - it will be one of the most influential things you've ever watched.

About books - I've heard that Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is great.

My current box of books that I recommend to new managers on my teams:

Technology Specific:

* An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)

* Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Teams (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)

* Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)

* Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan)

* The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford)

General:

* The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)

* Turn the Ship Around! (L David Marquet)

* Just Culture (Sidney Dekker)

* Leadership on the Line (Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky)

* Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)

I am not surprised because Mindfulness is not a cure-all.

I recently read Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. One of the key takeaways for me was the nature of mindfulness/meditation. To paraphase Goleman Mindfulness/meditation works by alleviating your mood. So, if there is lot of anger or you tend to get worried a lot, meditation works.

But, if you tend to be more dispirited most of the time then meditation actually doesn't work for you. A better solution is to try and get into an upbeat mood. Exercise, exciting adventure sports etc might be a better option.

Exactly. Some of the scientific studies are interesting, but it's not anything that you wouldn't know already after reading Emotional Intelligence and other similar books. Yes, choosing from twenty different types of toothpaste may be a pain, but that's hardly a good reason to adopt a religion to artificially limit your choice.

I'm currently working my way through a book called Emotional Intelligence 2.0.

http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-2-0-Travis-Brad...

It breaks down emotional skills into personal competence skills -- self-awareness and self-management -- and social competence skills -- social awareness and relationship management. It's accompanied by an online assessment that gives you a score in each of the four areas, and helps you devise a plan to improve in the areas you need. It also discusses over a dozen strategies in each area that you can practice to improve.

So far, I really like it, it's very straightforward and the strategies it offers are really concrete and not terribly difficult to practice. My partner is also reading it, to support my own efforts (I need it more than he does), he is further along into it than I am and he's also been really impressed with it so far.

Marriage definitely made me prune bullshit from my life. I can only imagine what children would do.

I would include Anger as a subcategory of bullshit. It promotes irrationality and the after effects hamper you. In the renowned book "Emotional Intelligence" the author says that the best thing to do when angry is to focus on controlling it. The more it grows, the harder it is to escape.

I haven't read the article so this is more off the cuff.

I read Emotional Intelligence by Goleman couple of months ago. And one of the bigger takeaways for me was that "meditation" or calmness was not an answer for everything. While meditation works on anger, stress (which are heightened emotions) etc it is not a good option when you are feeling sad/down. The better option will be to go out, have fun and get your emotional state up a bit.

So, IMO is meditation pill for everything? No but if you are stressed it is the best thing you can do.

I did a deep dive on this a few weeks ago. If you're interested, the following is what I what I think were the most interesting studies. Sorry for my personal citation style. My conclusion is that there are differences, some of them not as big as claimed in popular media and for the majority we don't know their origin.

Buss. 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures

Feingold. 1994. Gender Differences in Personality: A Meta-Analysis

Grijalva et al. 2014. Gender Differences in Narcissism: A Meta-Analytic Review

Hall, Canterberry. 2011. Sexism and Assertive Courtship Strategies

Joseph, Newman. 2010. Emotional Intelligence: An Integrative Meta-Analysis and Cascading Model

Lukaszewski, Roney. 2010. Kind toward whom? Mate preferences for personality traits are target specific

Oliver, Hyde. 1993. Gender Differences in Sexuality: A Meta-analysis

Snyder et al. 2008. The dominance dilemma: Do women really prefer dominant mates?

Su, Rounds, Armstrong. 2009. Men and Things, Women and People

Wood, Eagly. 2002. A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences

"There is no compelling evidence that the mind can create healing simply through will or belief."

IIRC Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence cites studies showing that if you swap out a person's medicine with a placebo, their body will actually keep producing the same antibodies or whatever.

I think the same book also cites studies showing that how many calories a person's body absorbs depends as much on the taste of the food as it does on the caloric content. So, for example, if you put steak and mashed potatoes in a blender then the person drinking that will gain less weight than they would if they ate the same caloric amount in normal form.

What's more, just recently there was an article showing that hotel maids actually start losing weight if you tell them that their jobs count as exercise, even though they weren't actually exercising any more than they were before:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1779251...

The book Emotional Intelligence references a bunch of scientific studies about both the effect of mental health on physical health, and also about the placebo effect. The opening of Gladwell's new book is also about the effect of mental health on physical health.

There have been many studies done that show clear health benefits to joining civic organizations or participating in church. As the opportunities for civic participation decline, participating in medical studies may increasingly make people feel like they are giving back to society, which causes a change in brain chemistry that ameliorates the underlying physical symptoms.

Clearly both of my (related) hypotheses need testing, but at least they are falsifiable, unlike some of the dubious theories posed by the original article.