Emotional Intelligence and compassion, and  other skills in understanding emotions are highly powerful in coaching,. This is why we decided to include it as part of our NLP Master Practitioner training in January 2009. We have been succesfully training our NLP students at emotional intelligence based coaching for over a year now with great success.

Last Christmas it was 5 years ago when the Tsunami hit. True acts of compassion came in from all over the world, it dragged us away from our christmas dinners and family time, to help, to act and to donate. Compassion in some cases reaching it’s highest form, many people for the first time in their lives went out on the street to collect funds, or even flew to Asia to help. One has to wonder how much compassion there would have been if it wasn’t for the fact that live footage was shown 24/7 on TV, directing our focus to the affected areas of the world.

Emotional Intelligence and Compassion – Daniel Goleman

I am not sure if Daniel Goleman, writer of the bestseller book “Emotional Intelligence” can be called the grandfather of EI. He surely has been the driving force behind making the term “Emotional Intelligence”  known among the general public. I came across the below video about his take on compassion.

The fact if we choose to be compassionate or not in a given situation seems to be determined by where we put our focus. On to ourselves, or on to others. It isn’t until we notice suffering or that someone needs help that we decide to aid someone. This explains why sometimes we are compassionate in donating money for a tsunami, yet not offering a hand to the homeless person leaning against the subway wall as we speed by on our way to work.

Watch the below video by Daniel Goleman on emotional intelligence and compassion.