Emotional Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Assessing Your Emotional Intelligence

In This Chapter

• Evaluating your emotional intelligence

• Knowing what being emotionally intelligent feels like

• Understanding emotionally unintelligent people

For some people, the concept of emotional intelligence makes perfect sense. For others, it seems like an oxymoron — in the same vein as open secret, military intelligence, larger half, minor crisis, deafening silence — you get the idea. After all, how could someone be both emotional and intelligent? Aren't emotional people, well, too emotional? And intelligent people — aren't they logical and unemotional?

This chapter turns all those assumptions upside down. I show you how to measure emotional intelligence, what being emotionally intelligent feels like, and how to relate to an emotionally unintelligent person.

Measuring Emotional Intelligence

This basic question created the current field of emotional intelligence: "How can someone so smart do something so stupid?"

Consider Julius, who's smart as a whip. He always has the right answer in class, hands in the best papers, and stumps the teacher with his questions. No one's surprised that he's the school valedictorian. Everyone knows that he's the most likely to succeed.

Julius goes to Yale law school, graduates in the top third of his class, and is hired by a top-tiered law firm in New York. Julius is on a fast track.

But Julius doesn't have the perfect life. He winds up twice divorced and has two children who don't speak to him, and he very ...