Moving On Up: An ABC Guide To Learning Emotional Intelligence
Irene Krechowiecka Saturday February 12, 2000 A. Natural selection You're intelligent - that's good. You're emotional - that's bad, or is it? Depends what you pair it with. Being tired and emotional is not going to enhance your career prospects, but being emotional and intelligent is. Even better, unlike most things that help make you a success, emotional intelligence can be learned and improved upon. So, if you're not tall, handsome, gifted or endowed with good hair, you can compensate by developing a high emotional IQ. It's recognised by many employers as the best predictor of success in managerial roles. B. Get better soon If you can pick up cues from others, deal tactfully with difficult people and situations, build rapport and engineer win-win solutions, you're emotionally intelligent. If not, there's still time to learn. It's all to do with how well you're able to understand and deal with others and how you understand and deal with yourself. Intelligence without an emotional angle to it explains the behaviour of many clever but inadequate people. C. The perfect mix The emotionally intelligent individual is a blend of common sense and considerate personality with a dash of self control and maturity thrown in. Try an online test at http://www.queendom.com/ to see where you are and what you could improve on. Get your boss to try it too. Individuals with even a small degree of emotional intelligence are a dream to work for. Perhaps you should select your next employer on the basis of their EIQ.
For decades, a lot of emphasis has been put on certain aspects of intelligence such as logical reasoning, math skills, spatial skills, understanding analogies, verbal skills etc. Researchers were puzzled by the fact that while IQ could predict to a significant degree the academic performance and, to some degree, professional and personal success, there was something missing in the equation. Some of those with fabulous IQ scores were doing poorly in life; one could say that they were wasting their potential by thinking, behaving and communicating in a way that hindered their chances to succeed. One of the major missing parts in the success equation is emotional intelligence, a concept made popular by the groundbreaking book by Daniel Goleman, which is based on years of research by numerous scientists such as Peter Salovey, John Meyer, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg and Jack Block, just to name a few. For various reasons and thanks to a wide range of abilities, people with high emotional intelligence tend to be more successful in life that those with lower EIQ even if their classical IQ is average. The test that you are about to take will evaluate several aspects of your emotional intelligence and will suggest ways to improve it. Please, be honest and answer according to what you really
do, feel or think, rather than what you think is considered right in this test. Nobody is there to judge you, just yourself, and besides, there are many trick questions :) Read every statement carefully and indicate which option applies best to you. There may be some questions describing situations that do not apply to you. In such cases, select an answer which would be most likely if you ever found yourself in such a situation. Please, verify whether the form is fully loaded before you proceed. In order to obtain valid results, you need to answer all the questions. If you skip one or more questions, you will receive an error message asking you to return to this form to complete the test. Please, note that if your browser is set up to refresh every page every time you load (see Preferences or Internet options in your browser), all your answers will be erased. We recommend that you either change the setting of your browser or that you check very carefully to see whether you skipped a question. Please, visit Cyberia's BookShelf to get references for books about building emotional intelligence.