Being able to identify and manage our emotions makes it easier to motivate ourselves to finish tasks and achieve goals. We also need to be able to delay gratification and overcome our impulses to be more productive and effective.
Goleman says this is the most fundamental psychological skill. Because emotions are impulses, being in control of your emotions is resisting the urge to fulfill impulses that are harmful or counterproductive.
The ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal is necessary to achieve almost anything. Very little of what we do on a moment-to-moment basis is gratifying -- most of us have obligations we have to meet, big-picture goals we’re working towards, or personal improvements we’re looking to make. All of these require us to delay immediate gratification in favor of doing something that will be beneficial down the line.
There was a famous experiment done in the 1960s with children. They were left in a room with one marshmallow. They were told that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow before the researcher came back, they could have 2 marshmallows. Or they could choose to eat the single marshmallow right away.
The study followed the children into their adolescence, and the kids who had delayed gratification and resisted their impulses to eat the first marshmallow were:
On the other side, kids who ate the first marshmallow were:
Hope, in this context, is the belief that you have the will and the means to accomplish a goal, regardless of what it is. More hopeful people were found to have a variety of traits that made them more successful:
More hopeful people generally deal with less emotional distress throughout their lives, don’t give in to overwhelming anxiety, and suffer less from depression.
Optimistic people see failure as something that can be changed so they can succeed next time they try. Pessimists believe failure is something they’re doomed to experience because of who they are or what they’re (not) capable of -- the failure usually feels outside their control.
Hope is sometimes a better indicator of academic success than IQ. One study found that a student’s hopefulness was a better predictor of how good their grades would be in the first semester of college than SAT scores were.
As a caveat, we’re talking about realistic optimism here. Naive optimism can actually undermine success. It implies a lack of self-awareness or awareness of the circumstances that are necessary for success.
People are naturally born leaning more towards an optimistic or a pessimistic view of life, but temperament can be cultivated with experience and nurturing. Hope and optimism can be taught and learned.
The most successful people in their fields -- masters of a certain subject or ability -- often describe their ideal working mentality as a “flow” state. Flow state is a product of motivation, discipline, and practice. They describe this state as one where you lose your sense of self -- you might as well not exist, or you go into full autopilot -- and your ability to do something seems to come from outside your mind or body. One composer described it as his hand working without him -- that the music just came pouring out by itself.
This state represents the pinnacle of emotional control in the service of doing something--people who get into a flow state are not just controlling and directing their emotions, but their emotions become positive sources of energy that align with the goal they’re trying to achieve.
In this state, our awareness merges with our actions--there’s little to no gap between what we’re conscious of and what we’re doing. Even reflecting on what we’re doing can take us out of a flow state -- it halts the relationship between thinking and doing for a moment of outside reflection like “This is going well!”
It’s the opposite of anxiety. Anxiety is the tendency to step out of the current moment and look down on it from above with worry. Flow state is the ability to be totally in a moment and an action, without any removed opinions, good or bad.
First, it requires long-term discipline. To get into a flow state, you have to have mastered the basics of what you’re trying to do.
Next, it requires high levels of calm and focus. Flow is, in essence, a highly concentrated state, relaxed yet intensely focused.
Lastly, once the first two steps have been achieved, a flow state usually requires the task at hand to be just outside your abilities. In other words, once you’ve mastered something, if you only perform it at that level, you’ll get bored. Flow occurs when you don’t have to think about the basics, but the task at hand is a challenge for you, so you are constantly engaged in performing the skills you’ve mastered to achieve a new level of success.
When people get into this state, they usually describe the emotions they’re feeling as spontaneous rapture. There’s actually little emotional content other than a feeling of ecstasy that serves as motivation. They lose track of time or their surroundings.
Watching someone in a state of flow makes the difficult thing look easy: the performer looks like an effortless natural, despite the task being something of a challenge for them.
And, in one sense, it is easy: the reason why people feel like the flow comes from outside themselves is that their brains are expending minimal mental energy. This is why mastering the techniques involved is crucial, as well as a sense of calm: well-practiced skills require less effort than freshly learned ones, and agitation or anxiety tire the brain out and decrease your ability to be concise in your efforts.
There’s a case for education embracing the idea of flow: people are more likely to master something that they enjoy doing, and since people enjoy doing different things, a one-size-fits-all model of education might not bring out the best in students. When kids get bored in class or overwhelmed by anxiety if the pressure is too high, it becomes harder for them to learn. Motivating kids from the inside out -- letting them find the things that they care about and enjoy engaging in, and then helping them master their abilities to do those things -- might result in a better educated student body, even if their education has a more narrow focus.
But teachers can use internal motivation and the idea of flow state to improve student performance in any subject: schools that embrace this model of education identify a student’s individual profile of natural competencies, then pass those profiles on to teachers, who can use them to shift how a certain topic is presented.
The ultimate goal is to introduce every child to the flow state--once they know what this feels like, it will hopefully motivate and encourage them to take on challenges in other areas, with the hope of achieving the same results in a different subject. Studies reinforce this idea.