Marcos Salazar - Career Adventurism & Psychological Development for Young Professionals, Gen Y, Millennials

Making Good Decisions: Part 4 - Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Your Decisions

This is the third in a series of posts about the psychology of making good decisions in the contexts of life in our twenties and thirties. In the first post we talked about the good and bad things of having much more freedom after college. In the second post  we talked about the cost associated with an abundance of opportunities. In the third post we discussed how with every opportunity there is a cost and the more choices we explore, the worse we can feel about our decisions. In this post we will talk about how you can begin using emotional intelligence to make better decisions.

During my first week in college, I met Steve. He was valedictorian of his high school and a math wiz who was just a few points shy of get­ting a perfect SAT score. Steve was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met and yet, at the end of the first semester, he was on probation for nearly flunking two of his classes.

The reason Steve had done so poorly in school was because he had spent most of his semester hanging out with friends, drinking, getting high, and sleep­ing until one or two in the afternoon. At the end of the year, he had to leave our school for a year and take classes at a community college before coming back. I still don’t know if he ever graduated.

Whenever I thought about Steve, I always used to ask myself how someone with such a high IQ could act so dumb. Why did he have so much trouble making good decisions? I soon found the answer in Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

What Goleman has found during his years of intelligence research is that things like IQ, the ability to get a high SAT score, or good grades are not always the best ways to predict who will succeed in life. This is not to say that there isn’t a relationship between IQ, SATs, grades, and future success. There certainly can be. However, more and more research continues to show that they aren’t the only factors involved, says Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University who tracks valedictorians. “To know that a person is a valedictorian is to only know that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as mea­sured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.”

Post-College Depression: Part 4 - Using Positive Psychology to Combat the Post-College Blues

This is the fourth post in a series of entries I will be writing on Post-College Depression.

In the first post of this series I talked about what post-college depression is and typical symptoms and causes. In the second post we discussed how a lack of a sense of control over one's life can result in millennials and emerging adults from Generation Y developing post-college depression. In the third we talked about how the tyranny of choice and high expectations can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression after college. Today we will talk about how you can use positive psychology techniques to combat postcollege depression, anxiety, and stress.

What is Your Explanatory Style?
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have met someone who seems to be happy all the time—where their natural state is simply one of consistent happiness. If something bad would happen to this person, such as getting into a terrible accident, developing cancer, or losing a loved one, they would of course suffer a great deal. But if you met up with them a short time later, you would see that they most likely would have returned to their original level of basic happiness.

In contrast, take a person whose natural state seems to one of sadness and gloom and let something wonderful happen in their life, such as getting a good job, falling deeply in love, or coming into a great deal of money. This person would be happy for a while—but check back with them in a few weeks, months, or a year, and you will most likely find that this person has returned to their normal state of melancholy.

One major difference between these two types of people is their sense of life; that is, their general sense of how they perceive and experience the world. People who are generally happy process the events in their lives much differently than those whose natural disposition is one of unhappiness. Happy people hold brightly in the forefront of their consciousness the positive things in life while holding negative things in the background, whereas pessimists do the exact opposite.

What this continues to show is that your own perceptions and attitudes about what you experience have far more to do with your emotional state than any external events do. what’s your explanatory style? No, this is not the latest pick-up line you will hear at a bar on a Saturday night. Your explanatory style is actually the way you describe the events that take place in your life.

In his best-selling book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Seligman describes that one of the most important factors in the development of learned helplessness is how you explain the events that happen in your life: How you think about your problems, including depression itself, will either relieve depression or aggravate it.

A failure or a defeat can teach you that you are now helpless, but learned helplessness will produce only momentary symptoms of depression—unless you have a pessimistic explanatory style. If you do, then failure and defeat can throw you into a full-blown depression. On the other hand, if your explanatory style is optimistic, your depression will be halted.

Pessimists vs. Optimists
There are two major factors that determine your explanatory style. The first is what Seligman describes as permanence. This is when people perceive or explain negatives as permanent fixtures in their life. For example, a person with a pessimistic explanatory style believes that bad events are always going to happen, while someone with an optimistic explanatory style believes that bad events are only temporary and can be changed by their actions.