Emotional intelligence – Adult learning and development.
Two Types of Learning Training and development efforts in industry have not always distinguished between cognitive learning and emotional learning, but such a distinction is important for effective practice. For instance, consider the example of the engineer whose career was stymied because he was shy, introverted, and totally absorbed in the technical aspects of his job. Through cognitive learning, he might come to understand that it would be better for him to consult other people more, make connections, and build relationships. But just knowing he should do these things would not enable him to do them. The ability to do these things depends on emotional competence, which requires emotional learning as well as cognitive learning.
Emotional incompetence often results from habits deeply learned early in life. These automatic habits are set in place as a normal part of living, as experience shapes the brain. As people acquire their habitual repertoire of thought, feeling, and action, the neural connections that support these are strengthened, becoming dominant pathways for nerve impulses. Connections that are unused become weakened, while those that people use over and over grow increasingly strong.
When these habits have been so heavily learned, the underlying neural circuitry becomes the brain’s default option at any moment with what a person does automatically and spontaneously, often with little awareness of choosing to do so. Thus, for the shy engineer, diffidence is a habit that must be overcome and replaced with a new habit, self-confidence. Emotional capacities like empathy or flexibility differ from cognitive abilities because they draw on different brain areas. Purely cognitive abilities are based in the neocortex. But with social and emotional competencies, additional brain areas are involved, mainly the circuitry that runs from the emotional centre’s particularly the amygdala deep in the centre of the brain up to the prefrontal lobes, the brain’s executive centre.
Effective learning for emotional competence has to re-tune these circuits. Cognitive learning involves fitting new data and insights into existing frameworks of association and understanding, extending and enriching the corresponding neural circuitry. But emotional learning involves that and more, it requires that we also engage the neural circuitry where our social and emotional habit repertoire is stored.
Changing habits such as learning to approach people positively instead of avoiding them, to listen better, or to give feedback skilfully, is a more challenging task than simply adding new information to old.
