Emotional Intelligence Quick Guide

Not education. Not experience. Not knowledge or intellectual horsepower. None of these serve as an adequate predictor of why one person succeeds and another doesn’t. There is something else going on that society doesn’t seem to account for.

We see examples of this every day in our workplaces, homes, churches, schools, and neighborhoods. We observe supposedly brilliant and well-educated people struggle while others with fewer obvious skills or attributes flourish. And we ask ourselves why?

The answer almost always has to do with this concept called emotional intelligence. And while it is harder to identify and measure than IQ or experience, and certainly more difficult to capture on a resume, its power cannot be denied.

And by now, it’s not exactly a secret. People have been talking about emotional intelligence for a while, but somehow they haven’t been able to harness its power. After all, as a society we continue to focus most of our self-improvement energy in the pursuit of knowledge, experience, intelligence, and education—which would be fine if we could honestly say we had a full understanding of our emotions, not to mention the emotions of others, and how they influence our lives so fundamentally every day.

I think the reason for this gap between the popularity of emotional intelligence as a concept and its application in society is twofold. First, people just don’t understand it. They often mistake emotional intelligence for a form of charisma or gregariousness. Second, they don’t see it as something that can be improved. Either you have it or you don’t.

And that’s why this is such a helpful book. By understanding what emotional intelligence really is and how we can manage it in our lives we can begin to leverage all of that intelligence, education, and experience we’ve been storing up all these years.

So, whether you’ve been wondering about emotional intelligence for years or know nothing about it, this book can drastically change the way you think about success. You might want to read it twice.