Emotional Intelligence 2.0

By Travis Bradberry & Jean Graves

The daily challenge of dealing effectively with emotions is critical to the human condition because our brains are hard-wired to give emotions the upper hand. Here’s how it works: everything you see, smell, hear, taste and touch travels through your body in the form of electric signals. These signals pass from cell to cell until they reach their ultimate destination, your brain. They enter your brain at the base near the spinal cord, but most travel to your frontal lobe (behind your forehead) before reaching the place where rational, logical thinking takes place. The trouble is, they pass through your limbic system along the way – the place where emotions are produced. This journey ensures you experience things emotionally before you reason can kick into gear.

(Bradberry and Greaves 2009, 6)

Cognitive intelligence, or IQ, is not flexible. Your IQ, short of a traumatic event such as a brain injury, is fixed from birth. You don’t get smarter by learning new facts or information. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it’s the same at age 15 as it is at age 50.

(Bradberry and Greaves 2009, 17-18)

Naturally, people with high EQs make more money – an average of $29,000 more per year than people with low EQs. The link between EQ and earnings is so direct that every point increase in EQ adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven’t yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren’t tied closely to EQ.

(Bradberry and Greaves 2009, 21)

Self-awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your own emotions in the moment and understand your tendencies across situations. Self-awareness includes staying on top of your typical reactions to specific events, challenges, and people. A keen understanding of your tendencies is important; it helps you quickly make sense of your emotions. A high degree of self-awareness requires a willingness to tolerate the discomfort of focusing on feelings that may be negative.

The only way to genuinely understand your emotions is to spend enough time thinking through them to figure out where they come from and why they are there. Emotions always serve a purpose.

(Bradberry and Greaves 2009, 24-25)

Listening and observing are the most important elements of social awareness. To listen well and observe what’s going on around us, we have to stop doing many things we like to do. We have to stop talking, stop the monologue that may be running through our minds, stop anticipating the point the other person is about to make, and stop thinking ahead to what we are going to say next. It takes practice to really watch people as you interact with them and get a good sense of what they are thinking and feeling. At times, you’ll feel like an anthropologist. Anthropologists make their living watching others in their natural state without letting their own thoughts and feelings disturb the observation. This is social awareness in its purest form.

(Bradberry and Greaves 2009, 38-39)

Everything you see – including yourself – must travel through your own lens. The problem is, your lens is tainted by your experiences, your beliefs, and, without question, your moods. Your lens prevents you from ever obtaining a truly objective look at yourself, on your own.

(Bradberry and Greaves 2009, 92)

We have measured EQ in a half a million senior executives (including 1,000 CEOs), managers, and line employees across industries on six continents. Scores climb with titles, from the bottom of the corporate ladder upward toward middle management. Middle managers stand out, with the highest EQ scores in the workforce. But up beyond middle management, there is a steep downward trend in EQ scores. For the titles of director and above, scores descend faster than a snowboarder on a black diamond. CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace. A leader’s primary function is to get work done through people. You might think, then, that the higher the position, the better the people skills. It appears the opposite is true. Too many leaders are promoted because of what they know or how long they have worked, rather than for their skill in managing others.