Musical - Sound Smart

• Ease in forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships and in ‘fitting in’ to group situations.
• A better understanding one's own psychological state, which can include managing stress effectively and being less likely to suffer from depression.

There is no correlation between IQ and EQ scores.

IQ has no connection with how people understand and deal with their emotions and the emotions of others (EQ). 

You simply can’t predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is.

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is a system comprising of three well-connected components:

1. Cultural Knowledge: The content and process knowledge of the various cultures.
2. Cross-cultural Skills: A wide range of skills that pertain to the various facets of a culture, like relational, tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, adaptability, empathy, and the ability to understand other people's feelings.
3. Cultural Metacognition: Also called cultural mindfulness, is the art of being aware of the cultural context, the subtleties of various situations, and the kind of strategies that can be taken.

One can develop cultural knowledge through newspapers, movies, travelling to various countries, and interacting officially or personally with people of different cultures, learning new traditions, customs, cuisines, and rich new ways to live life.

One can identify and analyse the different cultures and utilize the knowledge in future.

The behaviorist perspectives of learning originated in the early 1900s. The main idea of behaviorism is that learning consists of a change in behavior because of obtaining, strengthening and applying associations between input from the world, and observations of the individual.

• Learning is reinforced by exercise and repetition, followed by a positive reward.
• Learning takes place when the right parts of more complex behavior are rewarded.

Cognitive psychology started in the late 1950s and contributed to the move away from behaviorism.

• Instead of viewing people as collections of responses to external stimuli, people are viewed as information processors.
• Cognitive psychology was influenced by the computer that processes information, that became analogous to the human mind.
• Cognitive psychology understands learning as absorbing knowledge, acting on it, and storing it in memory.
• The main teaching methods are lecturing and reading textbooks, where the learner receives knowledge passively.

The emotionally intelligent person knows how to stay calm during stressful situations. 

They don't make impulsive decisions and understand that in times of conflict the goal is a resolution.

Emotionally intelligent people make sure they understand what is being said before responding. 

They also pay attention to the nonverbal details of a conversation. This prevents misunderstandings, allows the listener to respond properly and shows respect for the person they are speaking to.

In a fundamental sense, workplace happiness comes when:

• We enjoy doing the tasks assigned to us
• We feel right about the people we are working with
• We are happy with the financial benefits we get from the job
• We have the scope of improving our existing skills
• We feel respected and acknowledged at work

Happy employees are compulsory for a growing business.

A study on organizational success revealed that employees who feel happy in the workplace are 65% more energetic than employees who don’t. They are two times more productive and are more likely to sustain their jobs over a long period of time.

The synchrony between the brain activity of a performer and his audience shows insights into the nature of musical exchanges: we dance and feel the same emotions together, and our neurons fire together as well. This is especially true when it comes to the more popular performances.

Synchronous brain activity was localized in the left hemisphere of the brain (temporal-parietal junction). This area is important for empathy, the understanding of others’ thoughts and intentions, and verbal working memory used for expressing thought.

The right brain hemisphere is most often associated with the interpretation of musical melody.

In the right hemisphere, synchronization is localized to areas involved in recognizing musical structure and pattern (the inferior frontal cortex) and interpersonal understanding (the inferior frontal and postcentral cortices).

The best way to talk to strangers is to ask for their opinion on a matter. People love expressing their views. We can then focus our attention on what they say and use it to discover further what they think.

Asking open-ended questions is the key to developing this type of communication.

The more challenging we find it to talk to strangers, the more we will grow in that area when we take action, and the easier it will become.

When we challenge ourselves and move out of our comfort zone, we experience personal growth.

• Think outside the box when defining the format that works best for all team-members;
• Avoid activities where people are singled out and might feel embarrassed. These create the opposite of the trust-building effect needed to build strong teams.
• Effective teambuilding allows teams to tackle an achievable challenge together. Working through a challenge together increases oxytocin and group cohesiveness.

There's no age at which humans are performing at peak on all cognitive tasks - our various cognitive functions peak at different times and past a certain age it might make more sense to view adult intelligence not through the lens of youthful general processing speed and reasoning, but through the lens of expertise, wisdom, and purpose.