Josh Freedman

Josh is the director, and I think founder, of two organizations in the USA. One is a non-profit and one is a for profit. (Links below). When I first visited his main website, about ten years ago now, I wrote something about it having a lot of bells and whistles on it but a little lacking in content, or at least the content was hard to find. Josh then wrote me a personal letter and said something like "I'm sorry you don't like my website." Then he explained why he designed it as he did and then he gave me some direct links to some articles so my readers could get to them a little faster if they wanted. I respected him for writing the letter and I didn't feel resentful. He didn't try to tell me what to write or what not to write, as David Caruso has done, and he showed he was human, as David also had done. He actually wrote something which was pretty emotionally honest, as Dan Goleman seems to be emotionally incapable of doing. If Dan ever writes me and gives me permission to post his letter I will be glad to show that he can use feeling words, but so far, he hasn't shown me that he can.

Anyhow, over the years Josh and I have communicated from time to time. I have had pretty good feelings about him, though I disagree with his definition of EI and how he is promoting tests which claim to measure EI, and a few other things. But overall I have had a pretty good feeling about him.. From time to time he has written me and told me someone posted some really personal attack on one of his web pages, and he at least once took it down before I even saw it. This is really a pretty impressive gesture.

Well, then a couple of years ago when Rob Emmerling started his smear campaign against me, Josh put a note on the review page for my site and said something about the content of my site being "inappropriate" (see my writing about this word) and mentioned what he called "minors". It was a pretty vague comment but it could have easily been interpreted as implying I was doing something which was either unhealthy for someone in a large group of people known by many as "minors", or maybe I was even doing something illegal. It wasn't specific at all. It didn't say that I was sending hugs out to 16 year olds who wanted to kill themselves, or just what the "inappropriate" content was. It didn't offer any evidence of anything at all. It didn't make any specific allegations, and I was never told who complained or what they said or exactly what they complained about. I wasn't ever given a chance to remove or edit the content so it would no longer be considered "inappropriate" by whoever makes such moral judgments. Nor was I ever asked if I wanted to say something in my defense. Eventually I did, but I was never invited to. These are some of the reasons I wrote on July 26, 2007 that I feel "injusticed".

What Josh wrote in 2005 didn't bother me much at that time because I was living in Peru, and almost no one there spoke English. Honestly, until recently I never gave it much thought. So to be fair to Josh, I never told him that I felt injusticed or listed things like I have just listed now upon more reflection. In any case, recently I found a place here in Uruguay I'd like to stay for a while and, since many more people speak English here, I started feeling afraid that people people would read what he wrote, get the wrong impression, and thus basically be afraid of me. So I asked him to reconsider it. After a few emails Josh did change what he wrote and he also put the link to my site back which he had taken down in 2005.

I am guessing that one of the main reasons he wrote what he did and took the link down in 2005 was because Rob Emmerling wrote to him, as he wrote to many other websites around that time. I don't know the exact date Josh put up the comment (which is another thing I had a problem with, since it could have been a week ago or ten years ago for all people know), and I don't know if Emmerling influenced him or not. But either way Josh and I seem to have reached a new level of mutual respect and understanding. We don't agree on everything about EI but we listen to each other and consider what the other has to say. That is more than other people do in the so called field of EI.

It seems Josh has a pretty high awareness that no one is really sure what EI is, even though he does often promote the idea, and related products and services, as if it definitely does exist and we are now sure what it is!

In some ways the whole battle for the control over the definition of EI is a little entertaining, but in other ways it saddens me. If you follow what is happening over on the Wikipedia page on emotional intelligence you will get an idea of just how unstable the concept of EI is. And an idea of how many people are trying to profit from it. Josh is aware of this battle and he finds it interesting, which I guess is a feeling I share with him. So I feel a bit more connected to Josh now, he seems to get a little satisifaction in stirring things up and bucking the trends himself, though maybe that is partly projection on my part! Or let's say wishful thinking to bring it down to earth a bit more.

As for my feelings on this date I feel encouraged by what has happened between Josh and I over the past couple of weeks. I have been writing about him a lot in my personal and not so private, ha ha, writing, so I thought I'd create this page so I have something to link to.

S. Hein
July 27, 2007

Here are two links to the Six Seconds sites.

Six Second Non Profit Page

Six Seconds Consulting Group

Here is a copy of a posting he made on the Wikipedia talk page.

Here is what I wrote about the Six Seconds website back in 2002

Promote knowledge, not products

It bothers me that the article keeps ending up with numerous links to a couple of particular publishers. So I have 2 challenges for anyone editing this page: 1. Any time you edit ensure you are providing information, links, and references to your own work, ensure you do 3x that for others' work, and 2. If you are referencing your own work, sign your edits with your real name.

I am not going to put them back in myself, but if some neutral party sees them as important to this entry then please do.

I have criticized this site pretty harshly in the past because it seems to stretch the definition of a non-profit site in its commercial orientation, but I am feeling less critical of it these days, partly because I am feeling less critical in general and also because the director, Josh Freedman strikes me as a very open, genuine, well-meaning person. My main concern is that with so much promotional information on the site and with so many graphics it is hard to get to the useful information.

I am also concerned that he is not following the Mayer-Salovey model of EI and that he has defined and presented EI in his own way. He defines EI as "the capacity to create positive outcomes in your relationships with others and with yourself." This definition adds to the confusion about EI rather than helping clarify it, and it diminishes the value of emotional intelligence as an intelligence. If he were to it emotional literacy or social emotional learning, I would feel better.

Six Seconds is also very active in trying to put on workshops and conferences related to emotional literacy, SEL and EI.