Emotional IQ is More Important than IQ

Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.

Have you hear about EQ?

How much do you think your emotions are important to helping you to succeed?

When emotional intelligence became known to everybody, it seemed to explain why high IQ people didn’t always have success. And why people with average IQs did better than those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly made confusion about what many people had always thought was the only way to be successful – that is IQ. Many years of research now suggest emotional intelligence as the important thing that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

Emotional Intelligence is the "something" in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we control our behavior and actions. How we are able to be in control of things in life such as how we behave with other people. And how we make personal decisions that achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence has four basic skills that pair up under two basic abilities: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence is made up of how you are aware of yourself and how you manage yourself. And how you concentrate more on your own behavior as a person than on your behavior with and to other people. Personal ability is to know about your emotions and manage your behavior and habits or actions.

                           Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately see and understand your emotions and be aware of them as they happen.

                           Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively control your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social ability or competence is your ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and reasons for doing things so that you can respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.

                           Social Awareness is your ability to accurately see and understand the emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.

                           Relationship Management is your ability to use personal knowledge of your emotions and the others' emotions to manage social interactions or relationships successfully.

Emotional Intelligence, IQ, and Personality Are Different

Emotional intelligence taps into a basic part of human behavior that is different from your intelligence. There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence. You can’t simply decide what someone’s emotional intelligence is from how smart they are. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it's the same at age 15 as it is at age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills that can be gotten and improved with practice. Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren't born with it.

Personality is the final part. It's the stable "style" that defines each of us. Personality is the result of our personal operating system, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can't be used to see emotional intelligence. Also like IQ, personality is stable over a lifetime and doesn't change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality each are different and help to explain how a person acts or is.

Emotional Intelligence Predicts Performance

How much of an effect does emotional intelligence have on your professional success? A lot! It's a powerful way to put your energy in one direction with a big result. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence along with 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest way to see future performance. It explained a full 58% of success in all types of jobs.

Your emotional intelligence is the basic part for a lot of critical skills--it has an effect on most everything you do and say each day.

Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. Some of the answers are very close and have similar meaning. The meaning of these words is how they are used in the reading. Some of these words have different meanings in the dictionary depending on how they are used.

 The answers are below the table.