People who develop their EQ tend to be successful on the job because the two go hand in hand. Naturally, people with high EQs make more money--an average of $29,000 more per year than people with low EQs. The link between EQ and earnings is so direct that every increase in EQ adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven't yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren't tied closely to EQ. In order to be successful and fulfilled nowadays, you must learn to maximize your EQ skills, for those who employ a unique blend of reason and feeling achieve the greatest results. The remainder of this book will show you how to make this happen.
The preceding description leaves me feeling, hopeful- that my high EQ score will translate into 10s of thousands of dollars of extra pay per year. It also leaves me feeling a little suspicious because this pitch really sounds like a make-money-fast advertisement. This book is primarily addressed to managers who want to improve their own performance and that of their work groups. I spent a number of years working for a junior corporate manager who talked about "passion" for software development, the importance of developing my own "personal-brand" and of being ready for "change". This kind of talk often comes across as being not entirely sincere whenever I encounter it these days.
Many of the ideas in this book are fine and worth thinking about. In the third chapter titled "What Emotional Intelligence Looks Like" the authors write:
The only way to genuinely understand your emotions is to spend enough time thinking through them to figure out where they come from and why they are there. Emotions always serve a purpose. Because they are your reactions to the world around you, emotions always come from somewhere. Many times emotions seem to arise out of thin air, and it's important to understand why something gets a reaction out of you. People who do this can cut to the core of a feeling quickly. Situations that create strong emotions will always require more thought, and these prolonged periods of self-reflections often keep you from doing something that you'll regret.
Self-awareness is not about discovering deep, dark secrets or unconscious motivations, but, rather, it comes from developing a straightforward and honest understanding of what makes you tick. People high in self-awareness are remarkably clear in their understanding of what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them, and which people and situations push their buttons.
...
The need for self-awareness has never been greater. Guided by the mistaken notion that psychology deals exclusively with pathology, we assume that the only time to learn about ourselves is in the face of crisis. We tend to embrace those things with which we're comfortable, and put the blinders on the moment something makes us uncomfortable. But it's really the whole picture that serves us. The more we understand the beauty and the blemishes, the better we are able to achieve our full potential.
Emotional Intelligence is broken down by the authors into four basic categories: 1) self-awareness, 2) self-management, 3) social-awareness and 4) relationship-management. I found the first section of this book which discusses self-awareness to be the most insightful, although the other sections are also interesting. In particular for each category the book provides a list of practical strategies to work on. The self-awareness strategies discussed in this book are as follows:
1. Quit treating your feelings as Good or Bad
2. Observe the ripple effect from your emotions
3. Lean into your discomfort
4. Feel your emotions physically
5. Know who and what pushes your buttons
6. Watch yourself like a hawk
7. Keep a journal about your emotions
8. Don't be fooled by a bad mood
9. Don't be fooled by a good mood
10. Stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do
11. Visit your values
12. Check yourself
13. Spot your emotions in books, movies, and music
14. Seek Feedback
15. Get to know yourself under stress
Each strategy is presented in a 2-4 page writeup and in my opinion these are all fairly reasonable strategies for improvement. In Recovery meetings we talk very explicitly about several of these principles. We focus on dealing with discomfort, not necessarily assuming that feelings are equivalent to facts, the physicality of emotions, observing our own responses to stressful situations, and learning from these encounters. I also like the notion that EQ isn't necessarily a cure for the mentally ill, but rather something that anyone can learn and practice to improve their lives.
Sales resistance is a natural response that we all have to someone trying to get our attention, especially if their goal is to engage us in some sort of cash deal. It's the bane of the cold call salesman. If you've ever had a job where you went door to door either canvasing for a charity or trying to actually sell a product you will be familiar with the phenomena. People are suspicious of strangers, and rightly so. There are lots of individuals who unscrupulously want to take our money or time in exchange for whatever, not necessarily anything we might want or need. Automatically rejecting a sales call is an average intuitive response and often a very reasonable one. While I appreciated a lot of the ideas in Emotional Intelligence 2.0 it continued to trigger my sales resistance. When taking the EQ test online the experience strongly reminded me of the talks from my past corporate manager and how she use to brag about reading far more than anyone else in the office, and claimed that her broad base of knowledge was part of the reason why she was hired and would be very successful. The books that she read were books just like Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Several of her favorites are listed as recommended reading by Bradberry and Greaves. I also appreciate that many people feel this way when they first hear about Recovery meetings. Indeed, I was quite unsure of what I would encounter at meetings before I attended. I read a lot of the primary Recovery text to try to get a sense of what Recovery meetings would be about before I went. In the preface to MHTWT Abraham Low writes:
Since Recovery places the emphasis on the self-help action of the patients, it must ignore investigations and explorations which are not within the province of inexperienced lay persons. Complexes, childhood memories, dream experiences and subconscious thought play little part in the class interviews conducted by the physician and are entirely eliminated from the self-help effort carried on by the patients. The psychoneurotic individual is considered a person who "for some reason" developed disturbing symptoms leading to ill-controlled behavior. The symptoms are in the nature of threatening sensations, "intolerable" feelings, "uncontrollable" impulses and obsessive "unbearable" thoughts. The very vocabulary with its frenzied emphasis on the "killing" headache, the dizziness that "drives me frantic," the fatigue that "is beyond human endurance" is ominously expressive of defeatism. The first step in the psychotherapeutic management of these "chronic" patients must be to convince them that the sensation can be endured, the impulse controlled, the obsession checked. Unfortunately, the physician is far from convincing. His attempt to "sell" the idea of mental health arouses the "sales resistance" of the patient. "The physician doesn't dare tell me the truth," muses the patient. "It would be against his ethics to declare me incurable." The resistance is easily overcome in the group interview. The fellow sufferer who explains how he "licked" his frightful palpitations after years of invalidism cannot possibly be suspected of trying to sell something. That "colleague" is convincing. He convinces the novice that "chronic" conditions are not hopeless.
For most of the doctors and counselors I've spoken to, and probably every self-help book I've read my sales-resistance has always been strong. Perhaps my initial reaction isn't always entirely rational, but my response to professional advice is that there must be some ulterior motive. I still maintain this perspective to some degree, in my opinion a little suspicion is healthy. I always laugh a little when I read Dr. Low's acknowledgement of this as an average disposition, and I have found that meeting individuals in a peer support setting who describe the benefits that they have attained can be quite convincing. While I think that Emotional Intelligence 2.0 says some interesting things, I'm not entirely convinced by the self-appraisal test that this book is based on.
The EQ 2.0 test is composed of a list of about 30 multiple choice questions that are blunt and completely subjective and answered with a range of "never", "sometimes" and "always". Self-reported measurements, like the EQ test, are susceptible to manipulation. I observed this first hand when taking the EQ test where if I answered "always" and "never" to appropriate questions I was easily able to generate an EQ score of 96/100 which put me in the highest category. To me this test didn't seem very objective or able to filter out my biases about my own ability. This is an issue because of the Dunning Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. If I have a low EQ, when asked a question like "Do I understand what others are really thinking?" I might honestly answer always! regardless of whether or not that is actually the case. If you think you have a high EQ you will do well on this test. If you think you have a low EQ you will do poorly. In my opinion you might as well just answer the question- rate yourself between 40 and 100 on your EQ. I took the test twice- first with the idea that I was an average person, but for my second trail I assumed that I was an expert. Some of my scores are reported below:
Wikipedia summarizes a collection of criticisms of Emotional Intelligence. From the Wikipedia page:
Landy distinguishes between the "commercial wing" and "the academic wing" of the EI movement, basing this distinction on the alleged predictive power of EI as seen by the two currents. According to Landy, the former makes expansive claims on the applied value of EI, while the latter is trying to warn users against these claims. As an example, Goleman (1998) asserts that "the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. ...emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership". In contrast, Mayer (1999) cautions "the popular literature's implication—that highly emotionally intelligent people possess an unqualified advantage in life—appears overly enthusiastic at present and unsubstantiated by reasonable scientific standards." Landy further reinforces this argument by noting that the data upon which these claims are based are held in "proprietary databases", which means they are unavailable to independent researchers for reanalysis, replication, or verification. Thus, the credibility of the findings cannot be substantiated in a scientific way, unless those datasets are made public and available for independent analysis.
Having pointed out these concerns with Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I'm not saying that this book isn't worth reading or that we can't learn better self and social management from the authors. I think we can learn these skills and I think the ideas in the book are good, although not necessarily for the reasons that the authors say that they are good. The "research" described by the authors seems questionable to me at best but that doesn't necessarily mean that all their ideas are wrong. Their motives seem to be fairly plain, they want to sell their Emotional Intelligence training programs to businesses, and present it in the most positive light possible to maximize interest in their product. I don't regret buying their book, they have some good ideas, I'm just pointing out that their approach may not be as shiny as they claim.
If you ever wonder about my motives for writing these blog pages they are also fairly simple: after years of attending Recovery meetings and watching my improvement and the improvement of the other attendees, I really want our group to thrive, and I want other people to have some ideas about what we are doing. I'm not an expert, I don't put my name on this blog, or collect any income from the group. I'm just a regular guy who has attended these meetings for years and found them helpful. In these blog pages I try to connect what we do in meetings with other self-help ideas that you may have heard of so you can make your own decision about whether or not what helped me might help you. I want to see the groups in Hamilton and the surrounding area grow and be well known. We have several good dedicated leaders in the area who provide their time voluntarily, and if you ask them why they continue to run meetings they all say the same thing; they have benefited from the program, they believe in the program, and by hosting meetings they receive support and help from the other members. We recognize that new attendees feel sales resistance, and that is average and okay. We hope that you will give our meetings a chance and find the same benefit from them that we have found.
More Information
The Imposter Syndrome, Competency, Self-Esteem and Rejection
Narcissism Self Esteem and Humility
Games People Play
