Psychologists have uncovered and grouped intelligence into three main groups: abstract intelligence (the ability to understand and manipulate using verbal and mathematical symbols), concrete intelligence (the ability to understand and manipulate with objects), and social intelligence (the ability to understand and relate to people).¹

Emotional intelligence (EI) has its roots in the concept of “social intelligence,” first identified by E.L. Thorndike in 1920. The influence of this concept on popular culture and the academic community has been rapid and widespread.

As we all know, emotions are a fundamental part of who we are, and play an important part in our relationships with others. They cannot be removed from the picture. However, most of us have traditionally been conditioned “to leave our emotions at home,” believing that in order to be more effective we need to base all our strategies and decisions only upon cold, logical “intelligence.”²

In fact, to do so often guarantees that the suppressed emotions will flare, causing increased conflict and affecting the mood of the individual negatively. But what if we continue to expand our knowledge of emotions in a different way altogether, as another kind of “intelligence,” beyond reason and logic? An intelligence that – if we could learn to access it – could become nothing less than a touchstone to greater collaboration, giving us greater influence with others, motivating us to be more productive and effective.

It could be said that the greatest distance there is is the distance between the mind (IQ) and the heart (EQ). By learning about and utilizing EI, we will be able to shorten that distance, and we will be working with astonishing capacity and effectiveness. Let us address some important questions and issues about Emotional Intelligence.

What Is EI?

When Salovey and Mayer coined the term “emotional intelligence” (EI) in 1990,³ they were aware of the previous work on non-cognitive aspects of intelligence. They described emotional intelligence as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”⁴

Esther Orioli and Robert Cooper state the following in explaining EI: “EI is far more than being ‘nice’ to people. It is the ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions as a source of energy, information, creativity, trust, and connection.”⁵

Another way to describe EI is the ability to sense and use emotions to more effectively manage ourselves and influence positive outcomes in our relationships.

Why Do We Need EI?

Primitive emotional responses of our EI hold the keys to better health, experiencing greater joy and closer connections, achieving stronger leadership, a clearer vision, greater efficacy, higher goals, expanding our personal power, enhancing our self-awareness, augmenting learning, magnifying clarity, ensuring healthier relationships and finer perception, and finally, the provision of greater satisfaction. These emotional reflexes, rarely conscious but powerful, motivate our choices. In short, we need EI for utilizing the power of emotions.

What Are the Competencies of EI?

In Goleman’s model of EI there are five key steps:⁶ self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, empathy, and effective relationships; each includes a set of different competencies. All the competencies to be successful are not necessary, but the two core competencies (emotional self-awareness and accurate self-assessment) are essential. These are the two foundational abilities upon which all others rest (see Chart).

1. Self-Awareness

The cornerstone or foundation of EI is self-awareness. It supports all the other EI skills. Self-awareness must come first because if we do not know ourselves or what we are feeling, how can we possibly know the needs of others or understand someone else and how they feel?

The more we know about ourselves, the better we are able to control and choose what kind of behavior we will display in any given situation. Self-awareness is about knowing where we are now and where we want to go, so that we will be willing to change to get there. Without self-awareness, our emotions can blind us and guide us to do things or to become people we do not want to be.

To become more self-aware, one must follow these steps:

• Learn the difference between thoughts and feelings. It is extremely important to know the difference between “I think” and “I feel” if you are to know yourself better.

• Ask yourself how you are feeling throughout the day and be honest. If your heart races or you blush or if you are short of breath – this is usually a gut reaction. Ask yourself, “What is the feeling behind it?” Name that feeling – fear, anxiety, love, eagerness.

• Be open to input from others. Friends and associates can often enlighten us about our behavior.

2. Self-Regulation

While we are listening and learning from our gut feelings as a step toward self-awareness, self-regulation is regulating those same feelings and managing them so that they do more good than harm. Self-regulation is giving the rational side time to temper our feelings when needed. It also helps us to act intentionally rather than reactively. When we act intentionally, we mean what we say rather. The other side of the coin is to just spout off without thinking and later regret an impulsive act.

Here are some tips to help you with self-regulation:

• Monitor your self-talk (what you say to yourself in your mind).

• Accept responsibility for your emotional responses in your life. When you are feeling that you are accountable, you are acknowledging your own power.

• Anticipate emotional “triggers” and prepare to manage them.

• Reframe an irritating situation into a problem-solving exercise. When you encounter a situation that provokes an undesirable emotional response, decrease your anger by focusing on the behavior. Reframe it to make the behavior the problem, and not the person.

• Use humor!

• Never underestimate the power of taking deep breaths. Increasing the flow of oxygen to the brain eases tension, clarifies thinking and has a relaxing effect on our psyche and body. It also gives you a moment to collect your thoughts and to think before speaking.

• Remove yourself from the situation and keep moving. There are major benefits in distancing yourself from a bad situation and re-directing your energy into a new activity. This will help you regain your perspective, increase your alertness and re-energize.

Unlike Intelligence Quotient, which is fixed for life, Emotional Quotient can be continually developed to enable people to increase their awareness of their selves and others, to develop.

3. Self-Motivation

Self-motivation is directing the power of our emotions toward a purpose that will motivate and inspire us. It is also visualizing the achievement of a goal and taking whatever the necessary steps are to get there. Various ways to bolster your self-motivation are: — Be aware of how you explain setbacks to yourself… stay realistic. Realize that you can control and choose what you are thinking and feeling. Increase your persistence by keeping things in perspective. — Connect your goals with your values to get energized. Keep your eyes on the goal and follow through so you can enjoy the satisfaction of completing whatever projects you’ve begun. — Strive for reaching a —flow— state while working on projects. — Visualize! — Keep learning! The pursuit of knowledge will build on your areas of strength. You will be more valuable and versatile.

4. Empathy

Once we have become more honest and intentional with our emotions, it is time to look outward. EI is both tuning into our feelings and tuning into the feelings of those around us. It means responding to others appropriately, with sensitivity and compassion. Empathy is being able to see a problem from another person’s perspective. It is good to acknowledge other people’s emotions while still remembering that those are their emotions, not ours. Empathy begins with listening. This means making a connection with people. Individuals who lack empathy are more focused on their needs and pay little or no attention to anyone else’s. Empathy is the glue that will bind a group together to work successfully. Some of the techniques for enhancing your empathy are: — Look for nonverbal cues as well as listening for verbal ones. Studies show that words account for only 7% of communication. Tone and the speed of speech accounts for 38% of the message, while 55% is unspoken and revealed through body language, such as posture, eye contact, facial expressions, and so on. — Share and be honest about your feelings. Good communication leads to trust. — Your spoken and unspoken messages should be consistent. You want what you are saying to uphold what you are doing. This proves that you are being honest, or authentic, which builds trust. — Take the kinder road whenever possible. There are many ways to deliver opinions and criticism. You can be honest and still give positive feedback, which increases confidence. Construc-tive feedback increases competence. — Try to see a situation from the other person’s perspective. Empathy is about imagining what it would be like to walk in someone else’s shoes. We ought to assume that everyone is doing the best they can with the resources that they have at the moment.

5. Effective Relationships

Mastering the abilities of self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, and empathy paves the way to attaining greater skill in effective relationships. This competency is about interacting with people successfully and being adept at managing emotions in others. With heightened social skills, leaders are better communicators and better collaborators. Some EI techniques for having more effective relationships at work: — Share your passion and enthusiasm for your job and the organization’s vision — it’s contagious! Keep the vision in view by relating your own excitement for a project or goal. — Create an inspiring work environment. If you show honesty, trust, and appreciation toward your team, you create the perfect environment for them to do their best work. — Engage in creative brainstorming. Not only is brainstorming good for generating fresh ideas, but the process builds rapport and trust among team members. This could smooth the way to future collaborations because of the creative bond that has been formed. — Be willing to coach or mentor others and be open to being coached yourself. This is the most important relationship skill in the workplace. By sharing your knowledge and expertise with other team members, you are nurturing the next generation. And by allowing someone to coach you, you are showing that you are receptive to others’ ideas and that you do not —know it all.— In conclusion, quite simply the EI competencies of intra-personal and inter-personal skills are central to our life and are a different way of being intelligent. They are the tools that our brains use to define ourselves, to shape the meaning of major concepts like love, success, and happiness. EI has been found to be more important than IQ, technical ability, or experience in determining life success. Unlike IQ, which is fixed for life, EQ can be continually developed to enable people to increase their awareness of their selves and others, to develop self-management strategies, and to connect with others to create collaboration and harmony. In practice, EI also enables people to tap into their true power and creativity and to consciously choose the most effective response to any situation rather than merely reacting impulsively.

Footnotes

1. Ruisel, I., Social Intelligence: Conception and Methodological Problems, 34(4-5), 281-296.
2. Emotional Intelligence Workbook, CRM Learning, Carlsbad, 2001.
3. Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. Emotional Intelligence, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 1990.
4. Salovey, P., & Mayer, J., The Intelligence of Emotional Intelligence, 1993, 17, 433-442. 5 See http://www.qmetricseq.com/
5. Goleman, D., Emotional Intelligence, Bantam Books, New York, 1995.

Perhaps the discovery of consciousness will begin with a simple assumption like: Humans are self-aware; animals are not. Although at first this seems to be valid, it will be very hard to support it with examples. Nobody ever saw a monkey crying and looking at mirror while thinking about its self-origin; or a fish committing suicide because of something it did; a snake becoming depressed, or a bird fearing God. However, just because we cannot see such things does not mean that they do not exist. Moreover, we hardly see such behavior among people. Perhaps they will say that self-awareness is a condition of the human brain and soul that lasts for a few seconds, during which people experience their own consciousness and thus realize their place in the universe, that death is inevitable, that they are responsible for their actions, or, in principle, that their existence has no meaning if they do not invent one.

Such statements, which seem dull to today’s freshman philosophy students, will be welcomed with great enthusiasm in the scientific community. Although nobody can argue for the above human-animal assumption, empiricism, which always has been biology’s main path, will cause researchers to compare the differences between animal and human brains, cell molecules, neural connections, and all other aspects.

It seems almost certain that the faculties of consciousness controlled by our souls will remain completely unknown to us until the end of time. However, the materialistic part of self-consciousness probably will turn out to be a group of cells connected to each other in a very special way, hopefully in a localized area of the brain. When this discovery is made with certain electrodes or other receptors, maybe we will be able to observe our free will’s decision-making process. In fact, although our free will and self-awareness are somewhat related, it is easier to trace the free will. It will really be something when an article relates that a scientist will ask a human subject to put a knife in his hand without reason. He might do it, but a monkey would never deliberately hurt himself. It is quite possible that some form of communication between the neurons making up the consciousness will occur when the free will is deciding what to do.

Transplanting the consciousness

Once the group of neurons that make up self-awareness are determined, work will start on clinical trials to learn how to transplant consciousness (c). Since c and memory are two different things, it will be argued that, in principle, it is possible to transplant c from a dead person to another and thereby increase the recipient’s quantity of self-awareness. It is almost trivial that one’s memory is also one’s self. A person begins with no memories, acquires them while alive, begins losing them as death approaches, and then loses all of them through death.Only a deep perception of these memories by c can give a person a view and idea of the world. Given this, it follows that a person with more c will understand life and the world better, and will find more accurate solutions to problems regarding existence. Obviously, this person would need a certain memory that the c can work on”in other words, education. In summary, with c-transplantation studies, humanity will be able to produce individuals that can perceive the world from a higher perspective.

When c-transplantation surgeries are considered safe and that patients start seeing the world from a very different angle, most likely the organization that holds the rights to and carries out c-transplantation operations will become the richest medical company on Earth. Who would not want to be more intelligent, to lie down a normal person and stand up an ubermensch? There might even be government-funded research projects designed to see if more c will allow people to answer such questions as the meaning of life or the simultaneous existence of fate and free-will. This c-trade will make its founders rich, but only for a very short time.

Sadly, one of the fastest financial growth curves in history will end unexpectedly and very rapidly. The idea that a person with more self-awareness can understand life and the world better will still be valid, but after a couple of years people will not want it. This might be hard to 

believe, for we have never been given such a choice. Consider this: Do we really want to live our own self-awareness now? Or is it that whenever our c finds us alone thinking about life, the universe, God, death, and so on, we run away from it like we saw a beast? Even though this makes us a lesser human being, do we really care about all that or do we just want to forget?

Remember the adventure of European philosophy, in which the Middle Age’s ignorance was disrupted by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment’s philosophical proceedings. Moreover, advances in science and positivism have augmented the self-awareness of intellectuals and of society in general. However, at the height of this awareness, we see the emergence of a pessimistic worldview, modern philosophy, and even ignorance”an intentional escape from thinking in the shape of postmodernism. The story of c-trade will closely resemble that of philosophy: Stocks will lose their value in a single day, and nobody will want any more self-awareness than they already have.

However, one day, when everybody has forgotten about c-trade, a person will emerge and lead humanity to everlasting happiness. This person will first perform a c-transplantation surgery on a living person to remove the c as if it were a tumor that does not kill but sometimes gives unbearable pain. And he will not transplant that c to someone else, but just throw it away.