The concept of our multiple intelligences is being used quite widely now in education, promoting the attitude that what’s important is not how smart we are but how we are smart. It is still true that our education system very much focuses on the need to be able to read, write and add up, and the syllabus primarily teaches skills to develop our IQ. But Howard Gardner’s work is helping us see that our IQ is just the tip of the iceberg; research is now showing that we need more than just our IQ in life to be effective and successful.

The other shift in thinking which derived from this work is an encouraging one: that each of these intelligences is not fixed, at birth or before, but is capable of being developed during life.

Note that “Spiritual/Existential”, as well as being a later addition, unlike the others does not seem to be localised to a particular segment of the brain; it involves the whole brain and so is put in italics. We should make it clear that while the identification of the intelligences in the table is due to Gardner, the groupings they have been put into are our own.

Although Gardner himself did not equate the sum of his intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences with emotional intelligence, a concept which was popularised after the initial publication of his work, we see them as being equivalent, hence the division we have already made of emotional intelligence into its two components of intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence.

The far from exhaustive list of aspects of self management in the right-hand side of Table 2.2 may need some expansion and explanation.

And now for the other side of the coin, interpersonal intelligence.

The examples of effective relationship management in Table 2.3 are perhaps a bit more self explanatory, but it should be acknowledged that you can’t really motivate other people beyond the carrot and stick level. If you really want others to be truly motivated so as to contribute their energy and their creativity, then what you have to do is to help them motivate themselves and obviously you need to be interpersonally intelligent to do that, because you need to pick up what it is that turns them on or turns them off.

It should also be noted that being interpersonally intelligent does not mean being all lovey-dovey. You need interpersonal intelligence to collaborate effectively with others and get them to collaborate with you, certainly. But you also need to be interpersonally intelligent to have an effective confrontation with someone else.

Insofar as “facilitating relationships between others” is concerned, this applies not just to professionals, like mediators and couples counsellors, but more generally to all parents who have more than one child and to team leaders and all managers who have more than one subordinate.

Similarly, “developing others” involves not just management development specialists but all managers, all teachers, all parents, all sports coaches, and so on.

This rise in EI test scores with age chimes in with our belief that all the aspects of emotional intelligence are not fixed but are changeable and developable. It also helps us to answer a question put by some sceptics: “If EI is so important, how come nobody had noticed it or given it a name before the 1990s?” Of course, emotional intelligence is not a new thing: human nature is no different now from what it was before Daniel Goleman wrote his first book. “Emotional Intelligence” is just a new label for old-fashioned virtues previously ignored by psychologists, educationalists and HR professionals, although recognised by the man or woman in the street: wisdom and maturity.

Wisdom and maturity naturally grow as we get older, provided we learn the lessons that our life experience offers us. So, if to a degree this happens naturally for most of us, why bother pro-actively to develop our emotional intelligence? Quite simply, there is no need to wait for life to dish out its lessons when you can create your own learning opportunities and speed up the process, thereby experiencing more of your potential more of the time and getting more out of your life. The real challenge in our pursuit of growth as human beings is to create our own change, rather than waiting for circumstances or other people to force change upon us. Also, pro-actively developing our EI will lead to a greater increase in it than merely picking up the lessons that the University of Life offers us.

A large aspect of this life-learning experience is, in fact, unlearning. Most of us in our childhood come to some overgeneralised conclusions in response to the way the grown-ups treat us that we continue to live by in adulthood, even though they no longer apply - perhaps they never did, because a lot of what adults tell children is not true, and what we worked out for ourselves we did with our childish brains on the basis of very limited experience. So, if we are told “I want never gets”, or “Speak when you are spoken to”, or were treated cruelly by a man with red hair, we may go through life not asking for what we want, being passive and not initiating interactions and terrified of all redheads, however mild and benevolent. A lot of these patterns are unconscious but nonetheless powerful for that, probably more so because it means that they escape conscious examination and review. These false beliefs and unhelpful patterns we call, after Timothy Gallwey, interferences.

Timothy Gallwey started off as a tennis coach who achieved remarkable success in getting very unathletic, unsporty, unconfident people to play a reasonable game of tennis. He managed this because he tumbled to the fact that their main problem was not that their capacity, their potential, was limited, but that they prevented themselves from reaching their potential by espousing a lot of limiting beliefs. (“I’m no good at sports.” “I have hopeless eye-hand coordination.” “I’m the wrong shape.” “No-one in my family can play tennis properly.” And so on.) The route to success lay not so much in addressing their technical deficiencies, but in dismantling these internal “interferences” as he called them. He communicated his learning in the book The Inner Game of Tennis and followed that up with The Inner Game of Golf and a whole series of best-selling “Inner Game” books. The core of his approach is summed up in the equation:

We believe this applies to functioning with emotional intelligence just as much as it does to sports. In fact more so, since the physical and technical requirements for emotionally intelligent functioning are minimal. All of us have the potential. Unfortunately, most of us have, at least to start with, lots of powerful interferences too.

Be warned that this belief distinguishes our approach to EI, and our beliefs about it, from those of many others. You may come across a number of EI specialists who see emotional intelligence as being like any traditional aspect of intelligence - relatively fixed and perhaps inborn. As they see it, your only hope of being emotionally intelligent, just as it is of being clever, is to choose your parents well. And you will also come across EI specialists (this time coming from the gang of psychologists who call themselves personality theorists rather than intelligence theorists) who believe that EI is a trait, or at best a bundle of traits, that are relatively fixed, perhaps inborn, parts of someone’s personality.

The P = p - i equation has significant implications for those of us who seek to raise our own emotional intelligence and/or to facilitate others to raise theirs. First, and happily, it means that we are not embarking on a wild goose chase: we can increase our performance, our effectiveness, by diminishing our interferences. And similarly for other people. Indeed, it is our belief that although there are no doubt individual differences in potential for being emotionally intelligent - for example, introverts are likely to be more self-aware and extraverts likely to be more aware of others - such differences in individual potential are completely swamped by the differences in the nature and strength of people’s interferences. So, for practical purposes, in most cases we can take the potential for granted and concentrate solely on the interferences.

Second, it means that different people are likely to have different interferences. This is not entirely true, since cultural interferences will be fairly general: a couple of generations ago probably most parents, and most nannies, told the children in their charge “I want never gets.” But it is true enough to mean that the route to be followed by somebody to raise their emotional intelligence will be relatively unique. Blanket prescriptions of one sheep dip for all will not do the business. It will be important to make an individual diagnosis (effectively of the nature and the strength of the individual’s interferences) before the appropriate route to change can be identified. Hence the importance of measuring EI, that is to say the various components of EI, in each individual to provide a base line to start from and to identify the route to the goal.

Third, since, as we have seen, a lot of these interferences are unconscious, an early part of the process of dismantling interferences will be bringing them into conscious awareness. We are in the realm of the process illustrated in Figure 2.3. The problem with this is that the first step, moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, can be very discouraging and seem like a step backwards, when really it is the first step in the right direction. Then the second step, from conscious incompetence to conscious competence can seem - to begin with - very false and artificial and can require a considerable amount of attention and energy. Lastly, the third step from conscious to unconscious competence, since it involves changing an ingrained habit and, in IT terms, changing the default setting, will take some time and many repetitions, say three weeks or more. Still, with support, it can all be done!

So, if being clever is not the key factor, what is? You will not be surprised to learn that we believe that emotional intelligence is the key, and that health, happiness and success are generated by EI and two related factors: self esteem and self confidence (Figure 2.4).

To understand this model, you need to appreciate the distinction between self esteem and self confidence. Self esteem (the same concept we shall later refer to as “self regard”, or “I’m OKness”) we define as our attitude towards our being, whereas self confidence (highly correlated with, but not the same as, self esteem/self regard and also highly correlated with our sense of personal power - one of the aspects of EI we can measure) we conceive of as our attitude towards our doing. “Health” here refers not only to our emotional health but to our physical health too: high emotional intelligence, self esteem and self confidence will mean that we are less likely to get stressed, less likely to get depressed or commit suicide, less likely to have accidents owing to inattention or recklessness, less likely to abuse our bodies with drugs or alcohol or sugar or food in general, less likely to present as what doctors call a “Type A” personality and be liable to high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes, and our immune system is likely to be in much better nick, so that we suffer less from infections of various kinds.

The connection between good life outcomes and emotional intelligence is not surprising when you consider the following syllogism:

Obviously there are some jobs where the need for emotional intelligence is greater than others: all jobs involving a significant element of person management and/or leadership, all jobs involving direct contact with the public (therefore, other things being equal, service jobs rather than production jobs), all sales jobs, all jobs involving development of others (all management jobs again, all jobs in education, in HR and training, consultancy) and so on and so on. But in the end it is hard to think of a job where emotional intelligence is not one of the determinants of success: whatever our job we have to manage ourselves and in the vast majority of jobs we also have to manage relationships, with colleagues, with bosses, with subordinates, with customers, with the general public, with suppliers, and so on. Professional hermits (and they are not very common these days) may be immune from the need for relationship management but not really anybody else. So, in short, emotional intelligence is an important determinant of performance, to a greater or lesser degree, in all jobs. And also in no job at all: since we are talking about health and happiness as well as about success, we are inevitably talking about life outcomes as a whole as well as job performance.

It has been understood for twenty years or so that anatomically we have a triune brain: a reptilian brain stem, a mammalian midbrain or emotional brain, and a primate neocortex or thinking brain (Figure 2.5).

With the advent of techniques of brain imaging, we are beginning to understand the brain’s physiology as well as its anatomy; to understand it in process as well as in structure. Thus, our assertion that most human beings are capable of acting with emotional intelligence boils down to an assertion that in most human beings there is potentially good communication between the thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) and the feeling brain (the limbic system of the midbrain, including the amygdala). This is indeed the case, and, as so often, it is the exception that proves the rule. Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error tells a tragic story of a well-functioning and successful man who had to have surgery for a brain tumour, which turned out to lie just between the midbrain and the cortex. The good thing about this location was that Damasio was able successfully to excise the cancer without impairing either the patient’s thinking or his feeling. But in the process of the surgery the connections between cortex and midbrain were severed, with the result that the patient was (since emotional intelligence is about thinking about feeling and feeling about thinking) rendered surgically completely emotionally unintelligent. The first way this showed itself was in a complete inability to take decisions, which is an evaluative process involving feeling applied to the results of thinking. Overall, the results were disastrous: the patient’s life was saved but his effectiveness as a human being was destroyed. Within nine months he was divorced and had lost his job.