There’s been a long running debate in the world of behavioral and organizational psychologists regarding emotional intelligence. The issue? Whether emotional intelligence exists or not.
A consensus of experts think that EI is a real thing. The big argument centers on what it is and where it comes from. Some people are convinced that emotional intelligence is simply just an extension of your personality. That’s the problem if you’re trying to improve emotional intelligence.
If it’s just part of your personality, then it’s not much different from saying that you are just born with that emotional intelligence or you’re not. This is very depressing. Study after study has shown that emotional intelligence plays a big role in overall personal success. It works hand and hand with IQ.
It doesn’t hurt to be born with high IQ. Don’t get me wrong, this will definitely open a lot of doors for you, but you cannot rely on it alone. IQ can only go so far. You may be a high IQ individual but if you’re lazy, there would be less opportunities for you. You may be able to grasp otherwise complicated concepts very quickly but if you’re unable to communicate with your emotions effectively, this inability is going to stymie your success.
IQ does not exist in a vacuum. It really doesn’t. It has to coordinate with other very important human skill set. Emotional intelligence is one of them. The problem with positioning emotional intelligence as essentially arising out of personality is that it becomes random. You’re left with the conclusion that either you’re born with emotional intelligence or you’re not.
This flies in the face of evidence. Why? A lot of people who start out emotionally awkward or even socially incompetent become very smooth polished and effective when they find themselves in social settings. In other words, they chose to increase their emotional intelligence they chose to hone their skills. They did not wait for their built own personality-based emotional intelligence to kick in. They don’t wait around and took matters into their own hands.
They know that they have issues dealing with other people so they got the right information and they worked on this trait over and over again over an extended period of time until they got it right. In other words, building up emotional intelligence, if you look at it as an ability instead of some sort of built in, in born extension of your personality, is very much like working out in the gym. Do you remember the first time you hit the gym? It was probably hard on your body because you haven’t worked out before. When you hit the bench-press and you put 50, 60, 100 pounds on your system, it felt like murder. But after two weeks of continuously hitting the weights, it got easier and easier and eventually you reach the point where you can scale up the weights. Now you’re probably lifting a lot more pounds than when you started. The same applies to emotional intelligence.
At first, it’s going to be downright scary. In fact, in certain cases it may seem downright pointless. But the more you keep at it and the better results that you get, the more you stick to it and the better you get at it. You create an upward spiral.
To do yourself a big favor, understand that emotional intelligence is something that you can improve. It’s not something that is set in stone, it is not something that some people are born with and most are not. Get those ideas out of your head.
It is something that you can improve as long as you choose to. Make emotional intelligence maximize your chances of success in all areas of life.
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