Emotional Intelligence is not silence and appeasement

As I’m starting to identify with emotional intelligence, and am clarifying what this does and doesn’t mean, I came across this article. It emphasises these 3 key questions to ask yourself, before speaking:

• Does this need to be said?
• Does this need to be said by me?
• Does this need to be said by me now?

I’m not sure if this is the right approach to working on having a higher EQ. It’s actually the opposite.

The intentions are good, and sometimes they might apply to EQ. But they’re more of a hard rule to being nice, not to high EQ.

Not that being nice is not compatible to high EQ — more to the point, I don’t think that biting your tongue, or being 100% nice, has anything to do with EQ. They can be attributes of a person with a high EQ, but they don’t define a high EQ.

When I think back to the most emotionally intelligent people I’ve worked with, they are the ones:

• who don’t engage in gossip,
• who find a way around politics,
• who don’t take genuine feedback personally,
• who don’t latch on to trivial details or comments,
• who don’t argue,
• who don’t go around in circles,
• who don’t hold grudges,
• who let off some steam,
• who move forward after letting off some steam,
• who are open minded,
• who concentrate on the thoughts behind the language rather than the particular language/grammar itself (empathy),
• who listen before having an opinion,
• who tackle confrontations early instead of often,
• who feel as if it’s an injustice not to have an opinion if things are moving in the wrong direction.

Phew, what a mouthful. I really need to learn how to condense these examples.

If you’ve ever watched Jeff Probst on Survivor, he’s an example of someone who loves getting asked hard questions just as much as he asks them of others. He has a high EQ.

In response to the 3 questions above used as an EQ guide, I’ll attempt to condense why I don’t agree with this:

Emotional Intelligence is not stopping yourself from asking the hard questions. It’s accepting that you’ll ask hard questions, and embracing them from others without taking it offensively.

So rather than asking yourself the 3 questions that most likely would do an injustice to having hard conversations and moving things forward, I’m going to reword it as one question, and ask myself this:

• Am I speaking before understanding this person, or understanding the problem?

This gives way to empathy, it makes it front and center — and empathy is the gateway to a high EQ.