Monday, December 17, 2007

Do You Have Emotional Intelligence?

I agree with Geoffery James that success in life is related to the ability to "sell" - and "selling" is related to cognitive and emotional intelligence. The challenge is this: do intelligence tests actually measure "contemporary" intelligence?

We can all learn to do better at test taking - but that does not mean we are "more" intelligent. The problem, it seems to me, relates to test design. Emotional Intelligence is an aspect that was not measured by standard intelligence tests - does that make it a "new" intelligence or simply one that we did not know how to measure? There is a strong school of thought that suggests we cannot "improve" our EQ (Mayers, Salovey). But that doesn't mean that we cannot improve our emotional abilities and function "better". I may have no sense of direction, but I can learn to use a GPS system and find my way around.. Geoffey quotes an excellent article from the New Yorker which makes the point that current thinking among IQ experts is that even IQ can change, often substantially, over time, The New Yorker magazine.

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