EQ
EQ People are not supposed to know their IQs. Schools, for example, go to great lengths to hide IQ scores from students and their parents, locking the records in remote file cabinets where only the guidance counselor and the janitor can access them when necessary. I can tell you from personal experience that this policy of secrecy should never be lifted. I know my IQ and this knowledge has caused me nothing but grief. My husband, unfortunately for him, is to blame. Stephen is a clinical psychologist and when we got married he was still in graduate school. Part of his training meant learning how to give IQ tests, so one day I agreed he could practice on me. Big mistake. In retrospect, it’s obvious that no couple should engage in this kind of behavior because there is some information— how you eat when no one is looking, the number of your former sex partners , and exactly how smart you really are (versus how smart you think you are)—that should remain outside the bounds of marital knowledge. Still, I was a starry-eyed newlywed at the time and wanted to help out my beloved. I also was sure I could nail that IQ test to the wall. As part of the test, my husband read off a long span of digits and made me recite them backwards from memory. He showed me pictures that I had to arrange in a logical sequence. He asked me if I knew the name of the president during the Civil War. Up to this point in the testing I was doing great, imagining my IQ right up there alongside Einstein’s and Dr. Seuss’s and whoever the genius was that invented control-top pantyhose. Then came object assembly, a test of spatial reasoning. My hubby handed me some puzzle pieces, told me to fit them together into a recognizable object, and started his stopwatch. I turned the pieces this way and that, assembling them in all sorts of permutations. Were they supposed to form an elephant? A tree? An elephant stuck in a tree? As the minutes ticked away, so did the points of my IQ. My husband finally had to pry the stilldisjointed pieces out of my hands. From there, things went downhill fast. After the testing, Steve combined all the subtest scores, scaled everything in accordance with my age, and calculated my full-scale IQ. He was reluctant to tell me the number until I threatened to adopt one of those Vietnamese pigs for a pet, which happened to be all the rage at the time. I wish he had opted for the pig. For years, I suffered within the confines of my limited IQ. Like most people, I was conditioned to believe that intellectual intelligence is the best measure of human potential. As a result, I went through my young adulthood convinced I was doomed to only a slightly-above-average future.Then, in the early s, came a burst of good news. Two psychologists named John Mayer and Peter Salovey introduced the concept of EQ in the Journal of Personality Assessment. In case you missed that issue, EQ stands for Emotional Intelligence Quotient, and it is an alternative way to assess intelligence . Like your IQ, your EQ is also a predictor of future success, only instead of assessing your intellectual abilities, your EQ measures your emotional intelligence—how good you are at acting appropriately, based on your understanding of your own emotions and the emotions of others. A high EQ indicates you are likely to perform well at work, at school, and at home. A low EQ means you should go into computer programming. Well, as soon as I heard the news about EQ, I knew I had to know mine. For this testing, though, I was determined to get a more professional assessment , so I filled out an EQ questionnaire in a woman’s magazine. That is how I discovered that my EQ ran circles around my IQ. Suddenly, I realized that I had just as much potential as all those brainiacs with higher IQs. In fact, I actually had more potential because, when it comes to success, EQ matters even more than IQ, at least according to some experts. Armed with this new insight, my approach to life changed forever and my future has never looked brighter. There is nothing like a fresh perspective. The time has come for a fresh perspective on...
OR
Buy This Book in Print