Hoo S. Pai: EQ

Among the EQ skills, which ones do you find
contribute the most to success?

Hoo S. Pai

According to the theory of emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, understanding our emotions has a major impact on how successfully we live our lives. Psychologists agree that IQ contributes only about 20 percent to the factors that determine success, but a full 80 percent comes from other factor, as it is called emotional intelligence. The skills of this emotional intelligence include self-awareness, self-control, self-motivation, empathy and people skills. Self-awareness means the ability of understanding ourselves. Self-control relates to the skill of handling emotions. Self-motivation is how to use emotions productivity. Empathy is the understanding of other's emotions. People skills mean the approaches to relating well to people. Especially, self-motivation and people skills are the greatest contributors to success.

Self-motivation is one of the most important EQ skills. According to literal meaning, one's motivation for doing something is what causes one to want to do it. Self-motivation, therefore, means incentive, inspiration or stimulus by oneself. Daniel Goleman said that positive motivation is paramount for achievement, and that is why the ability to motivate ourselves is highly needed in our successful lives. He also pointed that self-motivation for success requires clear goals and a can-do attitude. Most behavioral scientists frequently assert that goals can do their function as inducements if only they are clear, and Martin Seligman declared that people who have optimistic attitude tend to obtain higher results even though they have no aptitude. It is beyond dispute that self-motivation through the establishment of concrete goals in life and the maintenance of optimism positively affects our prominent accomplishment.

People skills are other important set of EQ skills. Those skills are some kinds of approaches to build up good relationships among people. The capacity to know how another feels is important on the job and in other relations. Daniel Goleman emphasized that the more we have insight into the feelings behind other people's signals, the better we control the signals we send. Robert Kelly and Janet Caplan demonstrated the importance of these good interpersonal skills in their study, for good people skills result in networks. In addition, they observed that the standout performer had a network with a wide range of people. There is no doubt that people skills such as networking have a great deal of influence upon our successful lives obviously.

In short, no matter what our IQ, once again it was EQ that separates the excellent performer from the average performers. All components of EQ skills, of course, must be significant contributors to our high performance. Self-motivation and people skills, however, are more meaningful factors to success because those elements have a direct and prompt effect on our successful achievement in life.