Emotional Intelligence

In the dictionary, intelligence is defined as "the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situation." Dr. Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence specialist, argues that this has nothing to do with your IQ, but rather your EQ, or emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the way a person handles their emotions and how well they can relate to others. He says that an emotionally intelligent person has six distinguishing characteristics which includes, their strong, internal drive to achieve, their impact or influence, pattern recognition, problem solving abilities, willingness to take on challenges, and self confidence. Goleman believes these "soft skills have hard consequences" and are the reason for peoples success in the work place.

An example that Dr. Goleman uses to explain how emotional intelligence affected a persons success was a story he told about his conversation with a member of the Board of Trustees at MIT. Goleman said that this man had done a study about the largest Alumni donors at MIT and compared them to what they were like while in school. Their study showed that all of the brilliant bookworms with 4.0 GPA's in college donated less than the people who did the work but were also involved in teams or clubs. These people became powerful business leaders, founders, or heads of companies and were able to donate more money to the school because they were more successful. This is because those people had a higher emotional intelligence because they were involved with more and interacted with more people in college than the bookworms. Therefore, these people could understand their feelings as well as others and could relate more to others.

Another study done on emotional intelligence involved preschoolers and marshmallows. 4 year old children from the Stanford preschool were given a marshmallow by an experimenter. The experimenter then told the children that they could eat the marshmallow now, however, if they waited until he got back from running an errand they could have two marshmallows. When the experimenter left the room approximately 2/3 of the kids waiting until he got back to eat the marshmallows. The experimenters then followed up with the kids 14 years later to see how they had developed. The children that had waited to eat their marshmallows surprisingly had more friends in school, and scored 210 points higher on the SATs than the kids that did not wait to eat the marshmallow. This shows that the kids that waited have higher EQ's than the kids who did not wait.

To watch a clip of the marshmallow test click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EjJsPylEOY

Overall, a higher EQ will get you farther in life than IQ will. IQ can help you land a job, but EQ will help you go above and beyond to reach that highest position at that job.