Emotional Intellligence

Last night, I watched a programme, Battle of the Brains, that reaffirmed for me just how overrated vanilla IQ is. One of the experts on the programme defined EIGHT types of intelligence which are all measurable. However if one is to succeed in life, then one needs to work on their Interpersonnel and Intrapersonnel Intelligence, collectively known as Emotional Intelligence. The programme measured the eight categories of intelligence for the seven participants who were considered leaders in their fields; artist, chess grandmaster, dramatist, fighter pilot, IQ expert, musical prodigy and quantum physicist. While the fighter pilot performed consistently well and even scored highest in one of the intelligence test, the overall winners were the dramatist and the quantum physicist. The dramatist didn't start school until she was eight and she took seven years to finish her English degree at university. However her emotional intelligence is very much to the fore and that came across in the programme. The quantum physicist had a sense of humour that was evident and his emotional intelligence came across too.

Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ, illustrates how developing one's emotional intelligence as a child can serve one in good stead later on in life. In his book, he asks why it is that people who excelled academically at school and university weren't necessarily able to transfer that academic excellence into similar success in the real world? How is it that people who didn't excel academically or stopped their formal education at an early age, such as Richard Branson (he left school at 16), went onto achieve great success? It's down to their emotional intelligence. In E IQ terms, Richard Branson is a genius (E IQ > 180).

Ironically, the man we now all acknowledge to be a true genius, Albert Einstein, was labelled a dunce early on in his academic career - his grey matter was probably bored to tears.

So people, develop your emotional intelligence by engaging the left side of your brain, the creative side. Let your children develop social skills because how they interact with others will determine their degree of success or failure later on in life.