PROJECT POKER: How smart are you…emotionally?

As poker players we’re always trying to improve our “mental games.” There are lots of ways to work on that side of things that don’t necessarily have to happen at the tables. For example, I just completed a very interesting course concerning emotional intelligence that I think was very beneficial for me – not just for poker, but for life in general.
The course lasted for one week. The first part covered emotional skills and competencies, and the second part had to do with evaluating truthfulness and credibility.
There was a small group of us in the class, about a dozen people coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. I liked that they weren’t all from the business world, but from such a variety of backgrounds. Most were entrepreneurs who had their own businesses. I think the others were kind of fascinated by my job, too, when I presented myself. That happens a lot, of course – people hear you are a professional poker player and they want to hear more about it.
Going into the course, I think everyone knew already that emotional intelligence was important. But we learned a lot more about it, including how there are so many variables that make emotional intelligence much harder to quantify and therefore harder to understand than traditional intelligence. We also learned how improving one’s emotional intelligence can help so much in all aspects of a person’s life.
I just loved it. While some of what we learned was certainly applicable to situations that come up at the tables, I think most of it was more beneficial to do with developing a good, stable mindset for being a poker pro and being able to deal with the emotional ups and downs that are part of the job than necessarily “reading” players’ emotions during hands. The fact is, having a strong emotional foundation is crucial for full-time players.
Something else the course helped me understand better was how so many of us instinctively interpret others’ emotions via our own experiences – the “me theory,” you might call it.
We often tend to assume others feel things similarly to the way we feel them. But having that as a first reaction tends to make it harder to appreciate the fact that other people don’t always experience emotions the same way we do.
Since the course ended, I’ve tried to avoid those sorts of assumptions with others and it has really opened my eyes to the differences we all have. You can be so much more receptive to what others are feeling just by avoiding making those judgments ahead of time that others must feel the same way you do about something.
Understanding how other people feel can be very useful, especially if making other people happy is something that makes you happy. It doesn’t even take that much to be more attuned to others and their feelings, but as the class helped me see it can be more complicated than it might seem.
If you’re at all interested in the subject of emotional intelligence, I definitely recommend taking a course or reading more about it. But that’s up to you, of course — I’m not going to assume everyone feels the same way about the subject as I do! Leo Margets