Emotional Competence. Dagmar Rudel-Steinbauer

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СКАЧАТЬ of the work competence is in the ability and the skill to do something; to be able to do something, to perform, to apply oneself to doing it. Competence (Lat. Competere, competentia: to meet (as in meeting a need)) indicates the ability (psychological) or the responsibility (juristic) of a person to perform a task independently.

      In a psychological sense, competence can be understood as a disposition of self-management or organization. In an educational sense, competence is tested ability through scholarly measures.⁸

      Andre Stern⁹ describes competence as something much more important than knowledge, as only through competence one can come to success- and success makes you happy. Andre Stern – a young man that never went to school, (is today musician, composer, luthier, journalist and successful author) couldn´t really read until he was eleven years old and thinks that it doesn´t matter how old you are to learn something. It is only important to be excited about it, and then you will persevere and so develop this competence.

      Everyone can learn competences at any time, no matter of age, educational status, gender or background by means of self-teaching or further education. Competences can be developed alone through experiences and the knowledge collected through these means. Intelligence can be of help but it is not required. This fact should give us courage.

      A person that has enough competence to be able to do certain things is thus regarded as a specialist. This is why in this book we are speaking of emotional competence and not of emotional intelligence, as:

      Intelligence comes from the Latin “intelleger, intelligentia” which according to the Collins Dictionary means to “is the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct¹⁰”. Here we are talking about perceiving, realizing and understanding. However – what is the use of perceiving, realizing and understanding, to have knowledge about these things if one cannot use this knowledge successfully.

      So emotional competence is perceived in the direct application and not alone in its knowledge.

      I want to remind you that only reading this book will not enough to further your emotional competence. You must be ready to use this knowledge successfully in your professional and private life. (You will find more information in the chapter „Nurturing and Developing Emotional Competence.”)

      Empathy – the most important Requirement

      “But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.”

      Honoré de Balzac, French author and novelist (1799-1850)

      Maybe you have been in the following situation, you see persons hurt themselves, e.g. they get their finger caught in a car door. Just looking at the situation, you feel the pain, wince and suffer with the person involved.

      Jerome Littlefield, played by the actor Jerry Lewis has the same experience in the movie: “The Disorderly Orderly”. In this movie, Lewis plays a caregiver in a mental hospital, who wants to be become as well-known as his father: however, this caregiver has developed the psychological peculiarity of feeling the same pain as his patients first hand.

      What is amazing is that this film was made in 1964 and 30 years later, this peculiarity has obtained a scientific background.

      Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered this form of sensitivity through the discovery of mirroring neurons in the cerebral cortex in 1995.¹¹ Mirroring neurons have amazing mechanisms in which different areas of the brain always react the same, no matter if one is carrying out an action or just observing someone else. This is why we involuntarily wince when a person we know well recounts a painful medical intervention.¹² The closer this person is to us, the more we are able to perceive and so mirror their pain. Thus, explaining why feelings are contagious and we can understand what others are going through. Therefore, mirroring neurons contribute to sensitivity so that we can react with empathy.¹³

      Empathy can also be interpreted simply as sensitivity. This sensitivity is the ability of a person to put themselves in the thoughts and feelings of another person, in other words, to relate to the experience and thus to the feelings of the other person. Added to the ability to feel for someone, there must be the willingness to understand other people.¹⁴ It is possible that many people in our society are able to have empathy but are not willing. This describes these “restricted” persons, as Balzac puts it, or more dramatically put “emotional autistic”.

      To feel for others is one of the central “soft skills”, professionally as well as privately. Because only through empathy is it possible to build up relationships with others and to be accepted as socially competent. Without empathy, relationships and partnerships would be very short lived, because feeling for others is essential to friendship and love. Also in the working world, every working person expects a certain amount of sympathy from his or her co-workers, colleagues and supervisors. On the contrary, I do not know of any human relationship or any areas of work, in which a certain amount of empathy would be a disadvantage.

      Developmental psychology recognizes empathy as being the basis for the development of any moral behavior in mankind. Nevertheless, research of the development of empathy is in its early stages.

      Tania Singer- psychologist and neuroscientist - is a pioneer in the area of empathy research¹⁵ and wants to study the core of human relations with this research strategy. In an amazing study, in which she uses magnetic resonance tomography, she can observe emotional infection or influence on many different levels. Mostly her research about empathy concludes that empathy can be learned like working out at the gym to build up muscles, one can just as well develop and train empathy and feeling for others¹⁶- no matter how old one is.

      One can only hope that there will be empathy-training programs in the future- maybe even paid for by social security!

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