Why EQ?

Consider these points.

1. There's not much point to either wealth or relationships if you aren't happy.
2. It is hard to be happy with others if you aren't happy with yourself.
3. It is hard to be happy with yourself if you don't feel good about yourself, i.e. have high self-esteem.
4. It is hard to feel happy and satisfied if you don't have good emotional management skills.

Do you agree with them?

Bright people connect dots so much faster. They are good at forming conclusions from collecting, organizing, and interpreting data and in mere seconds, they can easily comprehend the connection between their slightest imperfection and how the world evolve. It doesn't even matter whether their conclusion is true or false, whatever they want to prove, they can.

If we're not busy beating ourselves up, we are trying hard to ignore our true feelings. Many of us become masters at detaching our physical selves from our feelings. We ride through our rough patches by "being strong," a.k.a denying or repressing. We intellectualize, rationalize, justify, deny, and defend. In other words, we use our upper, thinking brain to quell the feelings in our lower, feeling brain.

When we fight our feelings, we fight reality. Instead of finding out who we really are, we try to be who we are expected to be, who we are told we should be. We seek the approval of those important to us, such as our parents, our partners, our teachers and religious leaders. But to be happy, we can only be who we are.

We can grow and change, but when we try to grow in a direction which is against our individual genetic natures, we are fighting nature and millions of years of evolution.

A simple definition of emotional intelligence, then, is knowing what feels good, what feels bad, and how to get from bad to good.