Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence:
Why It Can Matter
More than IQ
1995
"Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading, can be
handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of competencies.
And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding
why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, deadends:
emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can
use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect."
"I have had to wait till now before the scientific harvest was full
enough to write this book. Now science is finally able to speak with
authority to these urgent and perplexing questions of the psyche at its
most irrational, to map with some precision the human heart."

The book is almost 300 closely set pages long, with endless case
studies and footnoting, but the thrust of Emotional Intelligence
can be summed up in three points:
? Through the application of intelligence to emotion, we can improve
our lives immeasurably.
? Emotions are habits, and like any habit can undermine our best
intentions.
? By unlearning some emotions and developing others, we gain control
of our lives.
If this were all there was it would not be a very interesting book, but
Emotional Intelligence is one of most successful self-help tomes of the last
decade and has reached well beyond what would normally be considered
a traditional self-help audience. Researchers had been expanding our idea
of what intelligence is for some time, but it took Goleman's book to catapult
the idea of emotional intelligence (EQ) into the mainstream.
How much the average person hates the IQ test must have something
to do with the success of the work. Whether or not that test is a
good measure of anything, its effect has been to restrict choices and
damage self-esteem for millions. Saying that IQ is not a particularly
good predictor of achievement, that it is only one of many "intelligences,"
and that emotional skills are statistically more important in
life success, Emotional Intelligence was bound to be well received.
Following is a breakdown of the book and some of its key points.
Civilizing the brain
In looking at the way the brain is wired, the first part of the book
removes some of the mystery from our feelings, particularly the compulsive
ones. The physiology of our brains is a hangover from ancient times when physical survival was everything. This brain structure was
designed for "acting before thinking," useful when in the path of a flying
spear or in an encounter with an angry mammoth. We are still
walking around in the twenty-first century with the brains of cave
dwellers, and Goleman tells us about "emotional hijackings" (floodings
of the brain with intense, seemingly uncontrollable emotion) that can
trigger spur-of-the-moment murder, even of a longstanding spouse.
Using emotional intelligence
Parts Two and Three go into the elements of emotional intelligence and
its application in real life. Goleman notes that the problem is not the
emotions per se, but their appropriate use in given situations. He
quotes Aristotle:
"Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right
person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and
in the right way—this is not easy."
Aristotle's challenge becomes all the more important in a technologically
advanced world, because the meaning of "civilization" ceases to
be technological, defaulting to the nature of man and the quest for selfcontrol.
Part Three applies the lessons of emotional intelligence to intimate
relationships, work, and health. The relationships chapter alone is
worth more than many entire books on the subject, intricately describing
the neuroscience behind the Martian and Venusian worlds of the
sexes.
Emotion and morality
In making the link between emotional life and ethics, Goleman notes
that if a person cannot control their impulsiveness, damage will be
done to their deepest sense of self. Control of impulse "is the base of
will and character," he says. Compassion, that other benchmark of
character, is enabled by the ability to appreciate what others are feeling
and thinking. These two elements are fundamental to emotional intelligence,
and therefore are basic attributes of the moral person.
Emotional intelligence makes a winner
Other major qualities of emotional intelligence are persistence and the
ability to motivate oneself. These are not emotions per se but require
self-control and the ability to put negative emotions and experiences
into context.
Goleman validates the "power of positive thinking" as a scientifically
proven approach to achieving success, and says that an optimistic
outlook is a key clinical predictor of actual performance, borrowing
from research done by Martin Seligman (see Learned Optimism).
The obsession with IQ was a product of the twentieth century's
model of mechanistic achievement. EQ, with its focus on empathic people
skills and relationships, is a basic success element in a more fluid
and creative twenty-first-century economy.
The world of work
Goleman's book has had a significant impact on the workplace and
business world. Though he only devotes one chapter to management, it
is clear that the concept of emotional intelligence has struck a nerve
with workers angry or hurt by the low emotional capacities of their
bosses. Similarly, it has shone a light for many bosses and team leaders
who wonder what they can do to improve maddeningly poor performance.
As you suddenly see that half your organization is emotionally
stupid, your standards will inevitably rise.
One fascinating chapter, "When smart is dumb," puts IQ in its place
among several other types of intelligence. As anyone who has worked
in an office environment will know, you may be producing the most
exciting product around but it will still be a miserable place to work if
it is also an arena for clashing egos. Business success is the result of
passion for a vision or a product. Though big egos are often associated
with such success, better companies are notable for their ability to
create harmony and excitement by focusing on the product or the
vision, not the organization. These ideas are further spelled out in the
spin-off Working with Emotional Intelligence.
Teaching EQ
Emotional Intelligence has its roots in the concept of "emotional literacy"
and in the final part of the book Goleman expounds on the need for EQ skills to become part of the school curriculum. With facts and
figures he has no trouble convincing us of the high costs—monetary
and societal wellbeing—of not teaching children how to deal with their
emotions constructively and resolve conflict.
Final comments
Part of Goleman's motivation in writing Emotional Intelligence was the
thought of millions of readers relying on self-help books that "lacked
scientific basis," and indeed the book comes from an impeccable academic
and research milieu. Goleman appears to know all the key people
in the field, notably Harvard intelligence researcher Howard
Gardner, New York University's Joseph LeDoux, and Yale's Peter
Salovey, who first provided the concept of emotional intelligence.
Yet this is still a self-help book in the classic mold. Pointing to the
extraordinarily malleable circuitry of the brain and our ability to shape
the experience of our emotions, one of Goleman's great points is that
"temperament is not destiny." We are not beholden to our habits of
mind and emotion, even if they seem an unchangeable part of us.
The most alluring implication of Emotional Intelligence is that
greater awareness and control of our emotions on a large scale would
mean an evolution of the species. We believe that hate, rage, jealousy,
and so on are "only human," but when we look at the finest human
beings of the twentieth century—Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother
Teresa—we find that such negative emotions were remarkably absent.
These people were able to express anger according to Aristotle's dictum:
They could use their emotions instead of letting their emotions use
them. What could be a better definition of civility or humanity?