Aristotle said, “Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy.” Twenty-three hundred years ago the Greek philosopher already had a pretty good handle on emotional intelligence, and the field hadn't even been invented yet.

Simply put, emotional intelligence (EI, but sometimes referred to as EQ) refers to your ability to correctly identify, understand, manage, and learn from your own emotions and those of others and then act in ways that best serve your interests. In short, it means acting like an adult. Obviously, understanding and managing emotions is an important skill in your personal life.

It's something that helps keep families happy. But here you are focusing on your career. Psychologist Daniel Goleman wrote in Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam) that “the rules for work are changing.” These rules have nothing to do with your intellectual ability or technical skills — at many levels of achievement, those are a given. The new rules focus on “personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.”

Those are all qualities that are intimately intertwined with emotional intelligence. It's hard to imagine the moguls of the past — the Leland Stanfords, Andrew Carnegies, or John D. Rockefellers — worrying about empathizing with their underlings, but today's workplace is a whole different animal.

The idea of emotional intelligence has captured corporate America's attention. The Harvard Business Review called EI nothing less than a “paradigm-shattering idea” for the business world. The research from the past decade is impressive: Emotional intelligence can help make the difference between a leader and a loser.

In the late 1990s, an analysis of over 300 top-level executives from more than one dozen global companies identified the emotional competencies that set the stars apart, and they included influence, self-confidence, achievement drive, and leadership. One study estimated the annual cost to U.S. business of ignoring EI to be between $5.6 and $16.8 billion dollars www.eiconsortium.org).

The power of EI comes from being the foundation upon which a person can build such emotional competencies. Those are the personal and social skills that keep you motivated and help you achieve goals. EI, not GPA, seems to fuel the success of the peak performer.

That's a pretty surprising statement, especially if you've never heard of emotional intelligence before. You undoubtedly know some emotionally intelligent people — you may be one yourself. They are the ones who are described as being great with people, particularly intuitive, or sure of exactly what they want and actively pursue it. Don't despair if you aspire to these qualities but don't feel you measure up; your EI score can be improved.

Different people have defined EI and its components in different ways, but for the purposes of the test in this chapter, you'll focus on five main areas: self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, empathy, and social understanding.

Self-Awareness

This means that you know what emotions you're feeling and why, and you know how your feelings affect what you do, say, and think. Psychologist Erich Fromm said it was the quality that distinguished man from animal. Emotionally self-aware people don't ignore or obsess about their emotions.

If someone seems to slight you at work or fails to return your calls, do you explode, try to ignore how you feel, or worry that you may have done something to antagonize him? If you're not careful, you can spend all your time fretting over nothing. Try to remember: It's not always about you. Repressing how you really feel doesn't make the whole issue go away, and blowing up only makes matters worse.

If you possess healthy self-awareness, you know your strengths and weaknesses, can learn from experience, have a sense of perspective about yourself, and are self-confident and decisive.

Self-Regulation

This means you can manage your emotions in a positive way. A manager who explodes over every little problem or yells at a customer isn't going to reach his goals or win the respect and cooperation of his employees. In his book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam), psychologist Daniel Goleman noted the shift in our culture from “Have a nice day!” to “Make my day!” These days, anything, no matter how trivial, seems to set people off. People feel disrespected, insulted, and maligned at the slightest provocation.

A few years ago, a San Jose, California, man grabbed a woman's dog out of her car and threw it into oncoming traffic, where it died, all because she had bumped his fender in rush-hour traffic. This show of emotional incompetence landed the man in jail, where he presumably had plenty of time to contemplate his lack of EI and use the experience to foster his mental and emotional growth. Such out-of-proportion reactions are not only inappropriate, they're also scary and can be dangerous.

Self-regulation is another word for self-control. The playwright Oscar Wilde summed up a person lacking in self-regulation when he wrote, “I can resist everything, except temptation.” People with good emotional self-control can delay gratification in favor of future goals or rewards.

In the famous “marshmallow studies” by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University, four-year-olds were asked to stay alone in a room with a marshmallow until the researcher came back. If the child resisted temptation, he or she could have two marshmallows when the researcher returned. Two-thirds of the children waited.

Studies have shown that people who can delay gratification tend to be more successful than people who have no emotional self-regulation. They are the ones who can say “no” to a friend's all-night Alfred Hitchcock movie marathon in favor of working late to finish a big report. They're the ones who don't throw up their hands in defeat at the first sign of difficulty or opposition on a project, but instead buckle down and work out the problems. Top-level athletes exhibit a good sense of self-regulation. Challenges or stressful situations don't send these people off the deep end, which is an extremely useful skill to have in a high-pressure work environment.

Another aspect of self-regulation involves monitoring negative thoughts. Do you keep up a running interior (or spoken) monologue about how miserable your job is, how much you hate your coworkers, or how you wish your boss would just go away? Not only does it not help you, it can also poison your attitude, your motivation, and your relationships.

Just as you budget your money, you might also think of yourself as having an “emotional budget.” If every trivial incident sends you into a rage, plunges you into despair, or fills you with euphoria, what will you have left in your emotional store for the events that really call for such feelings? Self-management means being able to gauge situations and respond with the appropriate emotions. If you can self-regulate your emotions, you can be more adaptable, conscientious, and open to new ideas.

Self-Motivation

This is one of the key elements of EI. It means that you are results-oriented, you can set goals and work toward them, even in the face of obstacles or setbacks, and you are always striving to improve. EI puts the “motion” in “emotion” through motivation. All three words come from the Latin movere, meaning “to move.”

Let's say you have to complete a long and difficult project. By imagining how good the project will be once you've worked hard on it, how proud you'll feel, and how happy your boss will be with you, you can garner the motivation to plunge into the work and stay focused. Self-motivation means taking responsibility for your emotions, decisions, and actions, as well as your mistakes and successes. Self-motivated people have a sense of purpose, initiative, and optimism.

Empathy

Empathy means that you are able to put yourself in the place of others and really understand what they are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Scout Finch learned this lesson in To Kill a Mockingbird when Atticus told her, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Showing empathy is not the same as showing sympathy. Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book distinguish the two in The EQ Edge (Wiley) as: “Empathetic statements begin with the word ‘you’” and put the listener first. “Sympathetic statements begin with ‘I’ or ‘my’ and reflect the speaker's perspective.”

Bullies lack empathy. Psychopaths lack empathy, being concerned only with their own self-interest. One criminal psychologist has come up with a Psychopathy Checklist. He maintains that some of the executives of the companies that failed so spectacularly in recent years would score as psychopathic, in other words, selfish and remorseless in their dealings with others, yet remarkably adept at reading and manipulating the feelings of others (www.fastcompany.com).

Empathy can help you understand the behavior of others, even if that behavior seems to contradict what they say. Empathy is invaluable in the workplace because it makes you a good listener, and it makes you better able to get along with and respect people whose opinions, experience, and background may differ from yours. Any job that requires customer contact will benefit from empathy. Empathetic people anticipate others' needs, offer assistance, and look for ways to increase customer satisfaction.

Social Understanding

This means that you can recognize emotions in others and use that understanding to effectively handle, build, and maintain relationships. In the workplace, you can accurately read social situations in order to persuade, lead, negotiate, avoid conflict, or settle disputes. This sort of awareness helps you recognize what other people are feeling based on clues, such as their facial expressions and body language, so that you can then put your understanding of the situation to use by steering it in a positive direction.

Do you remember from what skills employers most wanted in employees (and often found lacking)? One of them was the ability to work in teams.

An experiment at Yale University showed that an actor planted in a group assigned the task of determining bonuses for subordinates could infect the group with his emotion, whether cheerful, depressed, or hostile. A 2005 study by the Institute for Organizational Performance shows that “building strong relationships is a core leadership competency,” according to Director Joshua Freedman (www.eqperformance.com).

Research by the Center for Creative Leadership has shown that emotional incompetence derails workers more than any other factor. Poor interpersonal relations and the inability to work well in a team are two of the primary factors (www.eiconsortium.org). People with good social understanding can lead by example, handle difficult people tactfully, collaborate, and foster open communication.