When I was at University the whole class took a test to evaluate our IQ as part of a study to assess if there was a relationship between our IQs and our grades.
In my case (you will soon see why this is not bragging) I had the highest IQ in the class and I graduated with the second highest scoring in the year.
However for a lot of the other students the correlation was not so direct.
I remember thinking it was because some did not bother studying much and others spent their lives with their nose in the books but as years went by I realized that IQ was not at all an indicator of people’s success!
Later I realized that emotional intelligence was as important to the person’s success, if not more!
If you can identify, assess and use in your favor your emotions and the emotions of those around you, you stand a better chance of being an effective leader and of achieving the goals you set out to achieve in your life.
When dealing with everyday situations in our jobs we have to understand that our IQs can be severely undermined by our inability to manage our emotions properly. And since our emotions are subject to fluctuations, we need to develop strategies that allow us to stay in charge of them as best we can.
Emotional awareness, or our ability to recognize emotions like anger, sadness, fear or joy when they appear, will help us understand our reactions and why sometimes other people seem to rub us the wrong way.
Emotional self-management will then allow us to control our emotions or express them in a more appropriate manner.
As we begin to master emotional awareness and emotional self-management – and yes, these are learnable skills – it will become easier to recognize them in other people and create empathy.
It is important to be aware of what other people think and feel if we want to keep them engaged and our social skills are invaluable in managing relationships and moving other people in the desired direction.
By developing our emotional intelligence we will be better at real-world problem-solving because emotions will not cloud the issues. It is not about increasing IQ, but rather about allowing your existing IQ to shine through under more and more testing circumstances.
Not controlling the initial emotional response to a given stimulus may render the highest IQ effectively worthless.
The secret is to create a better relationship between the emotional brain and the thinking brain.
Learning not to react aggressively towards other people will benefit all and eventually they will learn by default that emotions can be controlled, and may be inspired to improve their own emotional responses as a result.
So would you rather be someone who is supremely intelligent, but who leads a chaotic and unfulfilled live because you are unable to set aside your emotional reactions or be “streetwise” and have the social skills to cooperate and work in a team with minimal amount of stress?
