How Focus Changed my Thinking about Emotional Intelligence | Psychology Today
The prefrontal circuitry that focuses the mind has another role: It also calms the body from stress arousal. These children were training their brains to be both more concentrated and to recover more quickly from upsetting emotions (which is the operational definition of resilience).
Those two skills heighten a child’s readiness to learn. They also enhance their emotional intelligence (EI). Here’s why.
EI refers to two kinds of focus. First: an inward awareness of our thoughts and our feelings, and applying that in managing our upsets and focus on our goals. Second: a focus on others, to empathize and understand them, and on the basis of this to have effective interactions and relationships.
What I had not realized until now was how essential the basic skills of attention—focus—are in building these skills.
Linda Lantieri, head of the Inner Resilience Program, which brought the breathing exercise to the school along with a host of other emotional intelligence skill-builders tells me that when children strengthen their focusing abilities in this way, it speeds up by a year or two their acquisition of the rest of the EI skill set.
When I spoke to the teacher of these second-graders, she told me about a day when scheduling glitches made them skip the breathing exercise. The result: the kids were all over the place.
With young people growing up in a world of distractions as never before, it’s time to teach attention skills, the fundamental ability in readiness to learn.
