Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

by Daniel Goleman

Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way —this is not easy. ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics

emotional intelligence, which include self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.

The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another's need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, was the first to discover the key role of the amygdala in the emotional brain.2

Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.

Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.

At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.

Inter personal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. Successful salespeople, politicians, teachers, clinicians, and religious leaders are all likely to be individuals with high degrees of interpersonal intelligence, Intrapersonal intelligence . . . is a correlative ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form an accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life.

Jack Block, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, has made a comparison of two theoretical pure types: people high in IQ versus people high in emotional aptitudes.

Self-awareness, in short, means being "aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood,"

Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings.