Emotional Intelligence

"Emotional Intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them."--Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p. 80.

In today's world with so much emphasis being placed on the merit of IQ alone a person's intelligence and their ability to succeed is measured heavily by their IQ. Unfortunately this is the most well known predictor for intelligence. However, it is not the only one. It is just the most widely known. At least as important, perhaps even more importantly, is a persons emotional intelligence. A better predictor in assessing a person's ability to succeed in their life is their emotional intelligence.

David Goleman was one of the people who brought emotional intelligence to mainstream of public knowledge. David Goleman was working as a science journalist at the New York Times when he came across an article by psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey in a small academic journal that piqued his curiosity. The article introduced the concept of "emotional intelligence" and challenged the commonly held belief that the Intelligent Quotient (IQ) was the strongest predictor of the future success of an individual. Theories behind emotional intelligence added additional ingredients to the recipe psychologists (and laypeople) might consider when measuring the potential for success in a person's life. ). In writing his book, Goleman was motivated to spread the concept of emotional intelligence and revolutionize the way people were to think of it. Further, Goleman sought to give more weight to the importance that they would continue to attribute to it in comparison to standard IQ measures.

As found on the website Funderstanding.com, "a 1994 report on the current state of emotional literacy in the U.S., author Daniel Goleman stated: '...in navigating our lives, it is our fears and envies, our rages and depressions, our worries and anxieties that steer us day to day. Even the most academically brilliant among us are vulnerable to being undone by unruly emotions. The price we pay for emotional literacy is in failed marriages and troubled families, in stunted social and work lives, in deteriorating physical health and mental anguish and, as a society, in tragedies such as killings..." The website Funderstanding further states: "Goleman attests that the best remedy for battling our emotional shortcomings is preventive medicine. In other words, we need to place as much importance on teaching our children the essential skills of Emotional Intelligence as we do on more traditional measures like IQ and GPA."

Upon further reading you will find that according to Funderstanding.com that emotional intelligence encompasses the following areas of a persons personality and skills: " Self-awareness--knowing your emotions, recognizing feelings as they occur, and discriminating between them, mood management--handling feelings so they're relevant to the current situation and you react appropriately, Self-motivation--"gathering up" your feelings and directing yourself towards a goal, despite self-doubt, inertia, and impulsiveness, empathy--recognizing feelings in others and tuning into their verbal and nonverbal cues, managing relationships--handling interpersonal interaction, conflict resolution, and negotiations." (Emotional Intelligence, pg. 193.)

According to Goleman, the most important dynamic of a person's ability to learn and succeed is an understanding of how that person learns and the person's method of coping with setbacks and challenges in their life. The key ingredients for this are: confidence, curiosity, intentionality, self-control, relatedness, capacity to communicate, as well as their ability to cooperate. (Emotional Intelligence, pg. 193.) These traits are all aspects of Emotional Intelligence. A person who learns how to learn, and learns how to overcome setbacks, and can deal effectively with other people in their lives has a better chance at succeeding in the world around them, making emotional intelligence a better means of predicting future success than traditional methods like the GPA, IQ, and standardized test scores.

Your mind is made up of two parts. Your emotional brain, and your thinking brain. Both parts of your mind are necessary and important, Goleman argues. Usually they are harmoniously integrated and work together while walking a person through their lifetime. However, as Goleman explains, "ordinarily there is a balance between the emotional and rational minds, with emotion feeding into and informing the operations of the rational mind, and the rational mind refining and sometimes vetoing the inputs of the emotions" (9). Sometime as we will see if is not so simple with one or both sides warring against the other.

Most of the time people are creatures of habit and emotion. It is often found that people feel before they think, and it is often the case that we rationalize our situations and surroundings and make our conclusions and choices based upon how we feel about them and our ability to deal effectively with those feelings. So it can be seen that mostly we feel our way through the world and then later rationalize out our feelings. Feelings first, thinking second. After all the world is not a sterile, isolated classroom encased safely within a protective shell of critical thinking.

Our emotions make up a sort of blue print in so far as how we deal with the world around us. In part one of his book Goleman states, "in a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels." (8) According to Goleman, thinking and feeling are the main ways of knowing that make up our inner mental life. Our rational mind which is in comparison cautious, observant, and most importantly: rational. On the other hand, our emotional mind can sometimes be quick to action (at times without any rational thought behind them), powerfully compelling, unreasonable and irrational.

It is the unreasonable and irrational part of our emotional lives that can so negatively affect us. In our attempt to better understand how a lack of emotional intelligence can influence our lives it is important to understand that there are often moments where passion overwhelms reason - an emotional hijacking of sorts where our feeling brain over-powers our thinking brain. This often times results in one taking action that will later be regretted. In times like these, as Goleman clarifies for us, "incoming signals from the senses let the amygdala scan every experience for trouble. This puts the amygdala in a powerful post in mental life, something like a psychological sentinel, challenging every situation, every perception with