The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives
Scientific American Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Mayer’s new theory of personal intelligence is a welcome starting point for analyzing “how people think about themselves and one another.
In 1990, Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey published the article that introduced a new intelligence of emotions – defining it as the ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought. It was a breakthrough concept, an idea that would lead to a groundswell of research, and would make waves in publishing when Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence hit the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for 80 weeks.
In the years since, Jack Mayer has been exploring another, as yet largely unremarked human intelligence. The concept of a separate personal intelligence¬–the ability to sort through, consolidate, and prioritize the information that we have about ourselves and other people¬–is a notion with vast implications. Personal intelligence is what enables us to create a sense of ourselves that is accurate, flexible, and resilient. It is an intelligence we can cultivate, and there is evidence that it contributes significantly to our health and well-being.
In Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives, Jack Mayer introduces a major new way of thinking about human capability, a new intelligence that is essential to our ability to integrate the various aspects of our personalities into a whole that is “who we are.” This is a profound and original way to think about how we make our way through the world.
Foreign editions of Personal Intelligence
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