January 6th, 2025
If you’ve been around me in the past week and a half, there’s little doubt you had to hear me ramble on and on about emotional intelligence; I just can’t stop thinking about it.
That’s because I watched a Big Think video with Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author of five books on the subject. (If you reach out, I’ll share the 11 minute YouTube video with you; links on posts tend to bury them and people, weirdly enough, usually come to my corner of the internet because they’d rather read, anyway.)
People are always abuzz about who they perceive to be geniuses (and are often comically wrong about who they assess as such); IQ itself is unfairly valued in a society mostly made up of emotional, irrational animals (that’s us!).
That’s where emotional intelligence (EQ) comes into play: it’s how we deal with feelings, the colorful mosiac of other’s, and our fragile (and volatile) own.
EQ as an essential tool has been tragically overlooked, especially in the people we look to as leaders.
Think about every boss you’ve ever had. If they were kind or empathetic or patient or helpful or funny, what kind of workplace did you consistently have? Conversely, if you had a leader who was constantly angry or mean or dismissive or chaotic or focused solely on profits and never on people, how did your co-workers respond then?
It seems so obvious when you spell things out like this, but… is it? Because really think about all of the people you encounter in your life and rate their average EQ, especially those in leadership roles. I think you’ll start to realize how much a single human’s lack (or abundance) of emotional intelligence can infect a room, an entire building, every single person within that individual’s reach.
It can sink or sail a ship.
Goleman ends the video with a story about a bus driver (which I’ll paraphrase): it’s a hot summer day. Everybody in the city has their personal shields up, irritable and not looking to chat. Goleman’s bus arrives, and the driver opens the door, smiling. “Good afternoon! Welcome to the bus!” he says. Goleman thinks this is a little odd.
He sits down and notices that the driver is having conversations with all the different passengers. He’s pointing out landmarks and art galleries and just making genuine connections with everyone riding. As each passenger gets off the bus, they’re changed, as if by magic. They’re happy. They’re healed.
Years later, the driver retired after 20 years of service and the newspaper wrote an article about him. Turns out, he was a pastor, and he considered every person on his bus a member of his congregation. He transformed a job from something that could have been nothing more than meaningless transportation into countless moments of meaning. He had remarkable emotional intelligence.
Anyway, that’s what I’m into this week. Feel free to roast me in the comments or whatever. Or share stories of emotional intelligence in your life! I’d love to hear them.
The Den 