The Common Definition of Emotional Intelligence

I am starting to see a pattern in the ways people like Goleman, BarOn, and Caruso use and define the concept of emotional intelligence. (links below)

It is something like this.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to feel good about doing whatever you are told, ordered, forced, convinced, or expected to do. It is the ability to keep doing it regardless of the level of stress or pressure you are put in. It is the ability to find ways to cope with your stress and thus keep doing it, regardless of your actual true desire to do it.

In other words, it is the ability to keep doing it despite all your negative feelings, even feelings which may be coming from your conscience. It is, therefore, the ability to go against your feelings and to not feel your emotional pain or discomfort. It is the ability to not listen to your conscience or your own inner voice, but to listen instead to external voices which tell you to study, achieve, perform, run, jump, buy, sell, shoot, kill.

An emotionally intelligent leader, then, is one who can persuade others to do the same thing and to make them feel good about it and want to wake up in the morning and keep doing it.

Do I sound cynical? Probably. That's because that is how I feel. And I believe my feelings have value. I want to listen to them and not listen to the external voices. So I guess I am not very emotionally intelligent according to the popular definitions. But I feel good about my own concept of emotional intelligence and I want to keep writing about it despite the pain I feel when I think about what others are doing with the term "emotional intelligence", so maybe I have some kind of distorted, or maladjusted type of EI. Yeah, that's probably it! Well, I guess I will have to settle for that then!

Till next time...

By the way, here is my own actual defintion of EI

Steve
March , 2006
Salta, Argentina

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My definition of EI and some of my beliefs about life and EI

Goleman
Reuven BarOn
David Caruso