I bet you have heard this scenario before.
A child is very smart in the third grade. They make good grades and seem to understand concepts more quickly than their fellow students. Teachers say: “That little boy is going to be a successful businessman one day!”
Or a student scores high on their SAT or ACT test, and gets accepted into an Ivy League school. Everyone agress — that young lady is going to be a huge success.
Then — in so many cases, they never reach their potential. It surprises us and we wonder how such a smart person could stall or fail to climb the corporate ladder.
Let me ask you a question. Do you know what single ingredient can foreshadow a student’s success once they graduate more than any other? This may surprise you. It is the ability to manage emotions.
When emotional intelligence was first discovered, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding — people with the highest levels of intelligence (IQ) outperform those with average IQs just 20% of the time, while those with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70% of the time. This abnormality threw a monkey wrench into what many assumed was the source of success: IQ. Scientists began to pursue another ingredient to explain this — and years of research and countless studies pointed to the factor we now understand as: EQ or emotional intelligence.
Despite the growing focus on EQ, a global deficit remains in understanding and managing emotions. Only 36% of the people tested by TalentSmart® are able to identify their emotions as they happen. Even fewer are able to manage them. Emotional Intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, as well as your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships. Four categories are of emotional intellience are:
1. Self-awareness 2. Self-management 3. Social awareness 4. Relationship management
While we all experience so many emotions in our day-to-day lives, all of them can be categorized into five core feelings: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and shame.
So, the next time you wonder why you or that recent graduate just didn’t perform and succeed the way you expected, forget IQ for a moment. (We can’t do much about that anyway.) Examine the issue of emotional intelligence. It can be developed, and it predicts performance better than any other single factor.