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Reflections on Emotional Intelligence
Many of us were taught that IQ is a static and generic understanding of our intelligence. If we get good grades, it means we are intelligent. However, this general approach to intelligence often doesn’t factor in the anomalies that occur.
What do you call a student who excels at language studies but can’t solve a math equation to save their life? Is this student unintelligent? What about the student who flunks every gradable class, yet they can sing like an angel, dance like the wind, draw an artistic design, or play the piano off by heart after just one experience with the original material?
Reading further about intelligence, we learn that intelligence can not be general. We learn that instead of IQ as we were told, there’s a litany of types of IQ such as Linguistic intelligence, Logical-mathematical intelligence, Spatial intelligence, Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, Musical intelligence, Interpersonal intelligence, and Naturalist intelligence(1). In this article, we focus on one type of intelligence — “Emotional Intelligence”.
“Emotional Intelligence” is an intelligence that is crucial to human intelligence and encapsulates self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills(2). Consider these two examples of individuals with exceptional “general” IQ but perhaps below average emotional intelligence: a…