Emotional Intelligence (EQ - Emotional Quotient)
"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power."
—Lao Tzu
Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power."
—Lao Tzu
Emotional Intelligence - EQ - is a relatively recent study, rising to prominence with Daniel Goleman's 1995 Book called 'Emotional Intelligence'. It's connected to early work and writings of psychologists Howard Gardner (Harvard), Peter Salovey (Yale) and John 'Jack' Mayer (New Hampshire) in the 70's and 80's. Emotional Intelligence is increasingly relevant because it provides a way to understand and assess people's behaviours, attitudes, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills.
View this TED Talk video of Daniel Goleman speaking on intrapersonal and interpersonal behavior through the concept of compassion.
Emotional Intelligence - two aspects
This is the essential premise of EQ: to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one's own emotions, and those of other people. EQ embraces two aspects of intelligence:- Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses, and behavior.
- Understanding others, and their feelings.
Emotional Intelligence - the five domains
Goleman identified the five 'domains' of EQ as:- Knowing your emotions
- Managing your own emotions
- Motivating yourself
- Recognizing and understanding other people's emotions
- Managing relationships (ie. managing the emotions of others)
Here are a few simple steps for boosting your emotional intelligence:
Watch yourself. Self-evaluation is by far the best way to improve how you communicate your own emotions. Pay attention to your body language, tone of voice, choice of words, and facial expressions. Look for at least one way to improve how you communicate and incorporate it in future conversations.
Show empathy to others. Go beyond listening; be present in conversation. Push everything out of your mind and focus on what the other person is trying to communicate. Don’t provide your feedback until you’ve fully absorbed what the other party has said. And, turn off your cellphone.
Take responsibility. Own up to your mistakes. Emotional intelligence and ethical and moral standards go hand in hand. It’s impossible to have a high EQ if you can’t admit when you’re wrong.
Take a personality test. There are many different types of EQ and personality assessments available on the web. You can take this free EQ Test at the Institute for Health and Human Potential website.
Social Intelligence
Edward L. Thorndike defined social intelligence as the ability to understand others and "act wisely in human relations." This was back in the 1930's, but the in-depth study of the social aspects of intelligence are rather new and tied to the study of emotional intelligence. In the following video we return to Daniel Goleman who followed up his book on EQ with a study of Social Intelligence. Again this study relates to Gardner's theories, but focuses mainly on the interpersonal intelligence.
The value of Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences and the EQ and Social Intelligences is in diverting the heavily-relied-upon IQ test of measuring a person's intelligence into a more holistic look at what constitutes a smart, succesful human. For instance, the Harvard-educated Berkeley professor Theodore Kaczynski is known to have a very high IQ. But, he was the unabomber whose mail bombs killed people from 1978 to 1995. This illustrates a severe disfunction with, or lack of, emotional and social intelligence.
Social Intelligence relates to Gardner's Interpersonal Intelligence. The following chart features methods for strengthening this intelligence.
