Emotional Quotient

Yes, another course again. Only 3 this year but due to the vagaries of the course schedule they all fall within a span of 2 months.

We first heard about EQ in 1995. I was in JC at that time and I took it very seriously. I talked to a few of my friends who, like me attended top JCs. 1 or 2 were surprised that coming from those top JCs didn't give them the advantages in life they thought it was going to confer upon them. I had an inkling by then that things were not so straightforward, and by the time the EQ book came out, it dawned upon me: if your EQ's no good, the real world is going to chew you up and spit you out.

There are many people who will dismiss his notions as being soft or subjective or totally without basis. Anybody who works in social science related stuff will get his theories attacked left right and centre, so no big deal there. Not everything is physics or chemistry where you can run a few experiments and settle the issue for good.

Can't really remember much about the book since I read it 5 years ago, but a few things struck me that I didn't know about that I will share below. Reading the book was good for my EQ, I think it went up by 5 points after that. Like when I did Psychology 101 in college it gave me 10 points in EQ. Being aware of the general principles is not going to make you stop being an ogre overnight but it is helpful nonetheless.

1. High EQ people will strive to be happy

Now this is very important. Happiness is good EQ. You can choose to be happy. Now some of you guys out there are going to slap your foreheads because this is so bloody obvious to you all along, sorry, us low EQ guys are slow with these concepts. (So yes - I am saying the converse is true as well: low EQ people do not really understand how important it is to be happy, do not realy understand that it is something they have to strive for all the time, and even if they know this, do not make it a habit to strive for happiness)

Low EQ people allow things to get them down, and if you do that, they will piss people off, and people will piss them off back. Hence begins a destructive downward spiral that gets everyone down.

The other thing to elaborate about this is that the implication that happiness is a choice. Yes. But people often forget, people do not realise that they are upset about something until it overtakes them and they break down. They forget that they can choose to prevent this, although to be fair to a lot of people who get a lot of shit, it can take a great deal of effort to achieve happiness. So to say that happiness is a choice should not be interpreted as an insult to those people who are living shitty lives, I don't agree with the political right who says that because happiness is a choice, therefore the poor and needy are to be blamed for their plight.

And yes, I find myself sometimes getting a little too lazy to try to be happy. Or sometimes when I become happy, I denigrate it by saying "it's no big deal". Or I set the bar for happiness so high that I rarely, if ever, achieve it. In fact I would say that the perfect metaphor is the characters in Harry Potter casting patronuses to ward off dementors.

2. Relationships can be poisoned
Yes, when relationships become bad, the brain has acquired the habit of thinking the worst about that person and every slightest comment can provoke the reaction that he's insulting you. Could it be that enmity is something as mundane as lousy EQ? It could be possible. The trick of getting around your antipathy towards certain people would be to try to get out of these mental traps, but of course you only hold 1 side of the cards.

3. Good EQ means that you know how you are feeling at any one point in time.
Is it possible to be happy or sad without knowing it? It seems ridiculous but it happens all the time. Nothing wrong with being happy without knowing, but if you're sad and you don't acknowledge it, it can take you over. It can get bottled up and then explode without warning. You could snap under the strain and have a breakdown. You could be doing something you don't like but because you're trying your best to believe you like it, you don't notice you're unhappy. This could result in shit happening like marrying the wrong person.

Anyway these 3 points hardly do justice to this wonderful concept, which is reflecting a subtle but important change in direction in the intellectual climate. EQ came out in 1995, but I think during the cold war you'd be hard pressed to allow much discussion about emotional issues, and even if you were, you'd be hard pressed to treat it with any form of respect. It would be "New Agey", "soft". Intellect has to be martial, masculine, measurable. But I think the resistance is falling away. Like the instructor said, it used to be something that gives you an edge in life, now it's become a necessity that it's very hard to do without.