Whenever I decide to review a book I always have a quick google to see what others are saying about it. I don’t mean reading the reviews on Amazon - people who review on Amazon either love a book or hate a book, I rarely see objective reviews on there. That isn’t to say that my reviews are objective, in fact they are highly subjective. After all we all read for a reason, and my reason is very specific when I tackle a tome such as this. “What does this book tell me about being a better xxxxxx (customise to suit)”. In the case of this book I was interested in empathy. I was hoping to understand what makes some people “people persons” and other people not that people-friendly. From that I wanted to know how I could improve my own people skills, and hence improve team performance, and make working with me in whatever role I adopt an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I digress. If you want to read an objective, in-depth review of this book, go here.
Back to my thoughts. Interestingly before I read the book, based on a primitive understanding and assumption of what emotional intelligence was, I believed myself to be fairly emotionally thick. Not a good characteristic for a coach.
Fortunately this book caused me to reassess my own view. The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of emotional intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ, which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring eseential behavioural and character elements. We’ve all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow. The essential premise of EQ is: to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one’s own emotions, and those of other people. EQ embraces two aspects of intelligence:
- Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses and behaviour
- Understanding others, and their feelings
The book gives lots of examples of what happens when people aren’t emotionally intelligent. To be honest I think it does this to excess, I got the point fairly quickly and didn’t need to know about so many depressing examples in children and adults alike. It turns out that I must be fairly skilled in this area to have survived in society this long and have a job. And as the book progresses it is clear that the basis for emotional intelligence is formed in the first four years of a child’s life, and therefore it is the parents who have the single greatest influence on a person’s ability to function and relate with other people. And that empathy is really the benefit of being highly emotionally intelligent. It goes on to discuss some of the programmes being used in schools to educate people on understanding and controlling their emotions, it seems amazing to me, yet through my coaching I have discovered that many people aren’t consciously aware that they are experiencing emotions, they don’t know which emotion they are experiencing and they certainly don’t know how to control them in themselves or others.
So in terms of my purpose for reading the book, the key points I got from it were:
- The higher you progress in an organisation, the more important emotional intelligence is over IQ
- “Letting anger out” is not a good thing, even in a controlled environment, it increases stress and encourages you to learn to lose control
- Making people aware of their emotional states is the first step to controlling them
- People give emotions names without necessarily calibrating themselves first
- A good indicator of emotional intelligence is delayed gratification… those that can put off gratification on the basis that in the long term they will get more, are more likely to succeed in this world. You can actually gauge this by the age of 4
So it’s an interesting book, with some useful information that most of us would benefit from having. However to absorb it you do have to trawl through some pretty depressing stuff… drug addiction, suicide, murder and depression are just some of the wonders waiting for you. This is definitely an “away from” book, which tells you all the problems with being emotionally thick, rather than the pink and fluffiness of what happens when you are emotionally intelligent. It’s not for everyone, so hopefully my little review gives you some of the key points so that you can go and read Harry Potter instead.
So the upside is that I’ve realised that I’m not emotionally thick. Not emotionally Einstein either. It didn’t give me the insights in to empathy that I had hoped for. Although perhaps my definition of empathy needs some thought, because in the book I certainly learnt the importance of recognising emotions in others, so I wonder is that really empathy? Was I looking for something otherworldly?
So my search continues. I think I’ll read something happy before I return to “Working with Emotional Intelligence”…
If you would like to find out more about Emotional Intelligence without this book, try the businessballs website, which has a plethora of free resources on the subject.
