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    Background to Emotional Intelligence

  Where It Comes From

Emotional intelligence as a discrete area of study came into prominence in the mid-1990s. Daniel Goleman’s seminal, painstakingly prepared book, Emotional Intelligence served to both crystallize and evangelize what, at the time, was an academic topic. This topic had, during the preceding decade, been the preserve mainly of psychologists and therapists. His work had been influenced by, notably among many others, Peter Salovey and John Mayer. They had in 1990 published a ground-breaking article and coined the expression ‘Emotional Intelligence’. The impact of this compelling article put the subject well and truly on the map.

High IQ Is No Guarantee of Success

Their premise for emotional intelligence was that intelligence alone is not a predetermined feature of success in life and work. Intelligence as represented by IQ ignores aspects of personality, emotion and behaviour that are equally, if not more likely, to show how someone will perform. Emotional intelligence is therefore an important factor in evaluating people for roles, in making personal and business decisions, reacting collectively to circumstances and also in leading others. Understanding emotional intelligence will help self-awareness, self-development, and a better understanding of humankind (despite their conscious or subconscious attempts to hide things).

Emotional Intelligence Matrix

In this model, emotional intelligence has four dimensions. Two dimensions have to do with our own emotions (self-awareness and self-management), while the other two relate to emotions in people around us (social awareness and relationship management). As this model is a matrix, these four dimensions can also be classified according to what we see (two dimensions: self-awareness and social awareness), as opposed to what we do (the two other dimensions: self-management and relationship management).

• The first dimension, called self-awareness, is about how aware we are of our own emotions. This is what we can see about ourselves (“What we can see” plus “Own emotions”).
• The second dimension, self-management, refers to how skilfully we can handle our own emotions (“What we do” plus “Own emotions”).
• The third dimension, social awareness, describes how good we are at identifying emotions in people around us.
• The fourth dimension, relationship management, is about using emotions to build trusting and healthy relationship with people around us. For a leader, this means mainly with peers and team members.

The challenge to our emotional intelligence is to steer a path through all the possible reactions to arrive at a position where the best outcome has been achieved. Inevitably, this will be harder than acting on face value but will be the basis for a better result. Although we depend on reason and judgement in making what we see as being an intelligent decision or taking an appropriate action, intelligence alone is not necessarily enough to create the right effect or to ensure a successful outcome. Intelligence, as measured by IQ has been the benchmark for predicting how someone, or a group of people, will perform in life and in their chosen role or occupation. However, it is now no longer on its own seen as a sufficiently predictive indicator of competency. Knowing when to follow our own and others’ feelings and emotions, and when to ignore them, is a valuable attribute. Unlike IQ, whose level remains more or less constant throughout life, EQ can be improved through observation, learning and experience. Behaviour is significantly more affected by emotions than just by intelligence.

Emotional Resilience KOAP Mobile Emotional Inteligence

Steve Gore James Graves Deena De Vries-Jones