10 books like Emotional Intelligence

This book is a classic in the field of persuasion and influence and it is a must-read for anyone looking to improve their ability to influence customers in a business setting.

The book provides a comprehensive understanding of the psychological principles of persuasion and how they can be applied in a business context. It covers topics such as social proof, authority, scarcity, liking, consistency, and commitment. Each principle is explained in detail with practical applications that can be used in a business setting. The principles discussed in the book are based on decades of research and experiments, making it an authoritative source of information on the topic.

Epictetus is the Stoic who inspired the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism is the intellectual origin of cognitive behavioral therapy and a way for leaders to train themselves to focus on the things they can change, rather than breaking their hearts over things over which they have no control. The Enchiridion has the virtue of being much shorter than Aurelius’ Meditations, and contains pithy observations and advice like ‘it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgment concerning them,’ and ‘don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.’ Leaders need to be good at detachment, and Stoicism can provide valuable tools to help.

I like how William James—the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States—distinguished reasoning from mere knowledge by the following sentence: “Reasoning helps us out of unprecedented situations—situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all the ‘education’ which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us without resource.” With the authority of a Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman uses his terminology of fast and slow thinking to popularize the distinction between “associative wisdom” and “reasoning.”

I recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow because it is important to understand this distinction and Kahneman provides many examples that illustrate it. However, I disagree with the interpretation of examples such as people’s choices between the certainty of taking $400 and a 50 percent chance to win $1,000. The 50 percent chance is better if we could make this choice many times, but we usually have only one bite at a… show more.

Machiavelli is often despised as the man who promoted both authoritarian leaders and the notion that the ends justify the means, but this is to misunderstand the importance of the context within which he was writing: 16th century Florence – which was besieged by enemies on every side who proclaimed adherence to the Christian faith but acted as monsters. Machiavelli’s writing made two things clear to me. First, leaders and leadership cannot be understood if you abstract them from their context – when political morality is a contradiction in terms then leaders must be wary of sacrificing their followers for the sake of that same fallacious morality. Second, he lays out how dictators obtain and retain power – and in doing so establishes what we need to do to stop them or remove them. 

The Divided Self kick-started my search for the truth of the human condition. It taught me that I didn't have to follow the life laid out for me and that I was expected to follow. Through it I discovered that I was not the only person trapped in a world and struggling to make sense of the bizarre and contradictory reality around me, that lied and lied about existence continually. Further books by him reinforced this awareness of the illogic of it all, including The Politics of Experience, The Self and Others, and Knots. I was Brer Rabbit, caught in the honey trap of the tar baby and this book showed me that.

There isn’t a book that I feel can make a larger impact on human interaction. This book has helped mold my ability to have meaningful interactions with people in all different types of settings. It is one of the few books I recommend reading at the start of every year regardless of how many times you have read it in the past. This is a true classic and a must-read for everyone. 

An Anthropologist On Mars taught me that I was not alone in being different. The world was full of other odd characters like me, including those who were autistic, a term I had never come across before. Temple Grandin, who was featured in the book, also wrote Thinking in Pictures, which I could fully sympathise with and recognise because I too thought in images and not words. In the same way that Simon Baron Cohen's book Zero Degrees of Empathy told me that I wasn't psychotic or dangerous to other people, just that I lacked an emotional relationship with them. I was the little professor observing everything but not getting involved in the lives of others, Mr. Spock-wise.

Whether you are selling yourself or a product, communicating your message effectively is a key to success, and it doesn’t matter if you are trying to influence people through logical persuasion or appealing to their values. Storytelling is as old as humanity and has been a moving and lasting way to communicate. Kindra Hall’s bestselling book on storytelling is a fascinating textbook on the art and science of creating and delivering stories that resonate with audiences and influence people’s decisions. This is one of the best books I’ve read on how to craft compelling messages.

Art Janov's book, The Primal Scream and its follow-up Primal Therapy, provided a means of breaking down the walls of this mental prison, by expressing the sheer sense of helplessness you feel when the world is presented to you as a screaming baby. In my case this was the stunned silence that I later learned was autism and the little professor syndrome, which meant keeping your eyes open and your mouth shut, in order to understand the strange interplay I saw expressed before me. Meaningless shouting and screaming at the frustration of what I faced was a new experience for me.

Stanislav Grof co-authored The Stormy Search For The Self with his then-wife Christina. It was a follow-up to his earlier work, Spiritual Emergency, which emphasised that this was a global transformation in the understanding of mental illness and included contributions from other professionals in the field. It also indicated that more primitive societies viewed this situation with more sympathy than Western medicine did at the time. It was also the start of inclusion about how other phenomena related to this subject, including drug-induced states and UFOs. Current thought in recent years has also brought into the near-death experience and understanding has linked them all under the umbrella of consciousness studies.