How To Strengthen Your EI & Increase Your IQ
When dealing with this issue, we have to understand that a person’s IQ can be severely undermined by an inability to manage their emotions properly. In other words, those lacking in emotional intelligence may also find that their overall intelligence suffers.
In traditional terms, this is the balancing of the head and the heart. More accurately, since we know that our emotional intelligence also resides in the head, this is about creating a better relationship between the emotional brain and the thinking brain.
As the emotional brain can hijack our thinking processes, it does not take a great leap to realize that our intelligence can be adversely affected by our emotions.
How effective can you be if you are unable to think clearly because you are gripped by a certain emotion and cannot apply rationale to a subject? This is the bottom line.
In reality, there will be individuals who are supremely intelligent, with the highest of IQs, but who lead chaotic and unfulfilled lives purely because they are unable to set aside their emotional reactions. In some cases, of course, we will be talking about emotional hijacking that has led to mental problems.
These are the archetypal “mad professor” types whose IQs are off the chart but are wound so tight, and so driven by their emotions, that they cannot free their true potential.
We may also be able to interchange “emotional intelligence” with “common sense”. IQ and common sense are not the same thing.
An intelligent person without common sense can quickly reduce their ability to problem-solve because they do not have the wherewithal to see situations for what they really are.
In this respect, you could also list “streetwise” as synonymous with emotional intelligence, as this can provide the ability to react more rationally to more extreme situations that might provoke an emotional hijacking in someone less “street”.
IQ may not even be the correct term to use when speaking about the possibility of enhancing thinking intelligence by improving emotional intelligence.
A person’s IQ is a measurement at one point in time that is established by means of testing. It does not take into account the vagaries that exist in the real world that may cause that same high IQ individual to fail when circumstances prove too fractious.
The real improvement that can result from improved emotional intelligence is better real-world problem-solving skills, because emotions will not cloud the issue.
Strengthening your emotional intelligence is not, therefore, about increasing IQ, but rather about allowing your existing IQ to shine through under more and more testing circumstances.
It is all about controlling the initial emotional response to a given stimulus that might render the highest IQ effectively worthless. It is about applying intellectual rationale to the risk factors for emotional overreactions before they occur.
Emotional intelligence – such as self-managing intense feelings, developing empathy, listening to others without fear, judgment or contempt can often determine our destiny far more so than our IQ.
We should also be cognizant of the profound effects our emotional stability can have on the emotional health of other people. Learning not to react aggressively towards another person benefits both you and the other person.
They learn by default that emotions can be controlled, and may be inspired to improve their own emotional responses as a result.
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