A little self-awareness can carry you a long way

Lately, I have been hearing and learning quite a bit about something known as EQ or emotional intelligence.

Your IQ is your capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, the ability to do abstract reasoning. After 18 or 19 years of age, it doesn’t increase any more. However, EQ is behavioral and therefore increases with life experiences, peaking in our late 40s. IQ gets you through school, but EQ gets you through life, although it was not written about until as recently as the 1980s when studies testing the resiliency of people were undertaken. The key components of EQ are:

- Self-awareness

- Self-management

- Social awareness

- Relationship management

When it comes to shaping our decisions and actions, feelings count every bit as much and often more, than thought. We feel before we think. The skill of perceiving, understanding and effectively managing emotions such as anger, happiness, anxiety, optimism, humor, sadness, fear, shame and love contribute to success in business and also in a major way to your health and quality of life.

The definitive book on the subject, “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” was written by Daniel Goleman, a Harvard Psychology Ph.D. and science writer for The New York Times. Goleman feels there are many important practical applications to EQ, from how companies should hire and how couples can increase chances their marriages will last, to how parents should raise children.

Two interesting experiments certainly bear him out. One experiment was conducted with 7-year-olds to see how they reacted with marshmallows. They were told they could each eat their marshmallow right away, but the tester was leaving to run an errand and if they could wait till he returned, they could have two marshmallows.

When the tester left, some of the children grabbed the treat immediately, some waited for a minute but others closed their eyes, sang or played a game to distract themselves. The children who had the fortitude to hold out, grew up to be better adjusted, more popular and confident as teenagers.

The other children were more likely to be easily frustrated and buckled under stress.

The other experiment was the Seligman Test designed for Metropolitan Life, a firm that was hiring 5,000 salesman a year at a cost of $30,000 each to train, with half of the recruits leaving in less than a year.

The Seligman Test measured optimism and pessimism, along with other key attributes of a successful salesperson. Hiring results improved dramatically. When optimists fail, they attribute the failure to something they can change, not something they are helpless to overcome.

Previously, Met Life, like many other companies, had put too much emphasis on logical reasoning, math and spatial skills. Some applicants with high IQ scores did poorly in life because they thought and behaved in a way that blocked their success.

It was found that success is 80-90 percent EQ and only 10-20 percent related to IQ. Our primitive responses were our key to survival and our emotions still help to limit the field in any choices we have to make. A sense of self-awareness is also key ... you need to be smart about how you are feeling and recognize why you are feeling angry or depressed. Anger can be one of the most difficult emotions to control.

Relaxation like meditation or soothing music helps calm high-energy moods like anger or anxiety while energetic activity is a recipe for low-arousal states like sadness and discouragement. Worry can be a rehearsal for danger so that you can search for solutions, but danger comes when worry is so extreme, it blocks thinking.

Of course, worry about failing increases the likelihood of failure. Some experts feel that we have defined success too narrowly if we are only concerned about IQ and that schools need emotional literacy programs to help children learn to manage anger, frustration and loneliness. With so many marriages ending in divorce, with road rage, homicides and school bullying major problems, anything that would help us develop people with more self-awareness and compassion is worth investigating.

I'm reading: A little self-awareness can carry you a long way