The traditional view of intelligence is as a set of verbal, numerical and logical skills that are measurable by means such as school exams and IQ tests. A high IQ may enable you to flourish academically, but by itself it will not help you to form productive relationships with your partner, family, friends, colleagues and yourself – all of which provide a platform for an optimistic, fulfilled life. In the 1990s, psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer and, a few years later, Daniel Goleman recognized that our ability to manage our emotions strongly affected our level of achievement in all walks of life. They used the term “emotional intelligence” to encompass a set of social and emotional skills, such as self-awareness, self-motivation, selfregulation and empathy. Not only is there far more scope to develop the abilities that make up emotional intelligence than those that form IQ, but the benefits of doing so are far greater.
Emotional intelligence is the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and others.
Daniel Goleman (1946–)
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize your feelings and to understand how they guide you. By being aware of your emotions, you minimize the risk of conflict with others and maximize the chances of resolving it if it does occur. To increase self-awareness get into the habit of stepping back to ask yourself what you are feeling and why you might be feeling that way.
Self-motivation involves being able to take action to reach a goal. Optimism plays a crucial role in self-motivation: if you expect to succeed in reaching your goal you are more likely to be motivated to set off in pursuit of it. Improve your motivation through visualization (see p.69) – picture yourself achieving your target and imagine how it will feel when you do.
Self-regulation is the ability to manage disruptive emotions such as anger, fear and despair. For example, if you are able to rein in your distress at seeing a co-worker land the assignment you wanted, you will avoid damaging your relationship with that person. The key to self-regulation is to take time to examine your thinking so that you are able to identify and reframe negative feelings through cool-headed analysis.
Empathy, the ability to understand what another person is feeling in an unfamiliar given situation, is the fundamental social skill. Empathy develops out of self-awareness: as we learn to recognize our own emotions we are better able to recognize emotions in others. Improve your empathy by observing both people you know and figures in the news, asking yourself “What must it be like to live through that experience?”