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Yes, Emotional Intelligence has been called “white hot” by the press, and you’ve probably been hearing about it lately. In fact when the Harvard Business Review published an article about Emotional Intelligence in 1998, more readers read the article than any other article published in the HBR in the past 40 years. According to Gary Cherniss, Ph.D., Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers University, in an article entitled, “Emotional Intelligence: What It Is and Why It Matters,” “when the CEO of Johnson & Johnson read that article, he was so impressed that he had copies sent out to the 400 top executives in the company worldwide.”
However, Emotional Intelligence is far from a fad or business buzz word. It’s a field of study that developed to fill the gaps in what lay people like you and me, and experts alike observed: that success and happiness in life (career and relationships) has more to do with emotions than thinking, and that IQ alone is not the most important factor.
Highly credentialed researchers have worked in the field to define what Emotional Intelligence is (and is not), and to come up with ways to describe it and break it down into qualities, competencies or skills that can be learned. The work may have begun in 1983, when Howard Gardner, who proposed that “interpersonal” and “intrapersonal” intelligences (part of his theory of multiple intelligences) were as important as the type of cognitive, intellectual intelligence measured by the IQ tests at the time. Other names in the field you will recognize are Mayer, Salovey, Goleman, Seligman, Caruso, Siebert, Cooper and Cherniss.
Whereas coaching credentials, or no credentials, may be adequate for some coaching specialties, because of the complexity of the field of Emotional Intelligence, and its interface with psychology, it’s important the coach be specially certified in that specialty.
An example? Emotional Intelligence coaching deals with emotions, and so does psychology, and the EQ coach must know where the line is drawn between coaching and therapy. Can you, for instance, teach someone learned optimism if they are clinically depressed, and how do you know the difference? How do you teach resilience, which has to do with past traumas, losses and setbacks, without going into the emotions of the past, which would be therapy?
A rigorous credentialing program for Emotional Intelligence will be directed by someone with an advanced degree in the human sciences, ideally Clinical Psychology, and taught by equally qualified individuals.
It must cover theory, affective neuroscience (where emotions come from – brain science), learning theories, a whole new terminology, assessments, ethics and best practices. It must also be academic and empirically based. In Emotional Intelligence, we don’t ‘guess’ at what makes someone resilient. We can go to the research in the field which is based on more than assumptions and guesses.
The coach must also learn how to make the concepts come alive; to be able to show the client what they look like in real life, and to be able to make use of the naturally occurring moments that take place in the coaching sessions. Perhaps nowhere is a field of coaching more a living lab than when one is teaching Emotional Intelligence. Nor can you fake your own ability at it. If you are rigid, how can you teach the competency of flexibility. How you are being will shout louder than anything you are trying to say.
Emotional Intelligence is a set of life skills meant to be applied to life. The client develops the competencies and then applies then in real life to their career, marriage, parenting, transitions, losses and setbacks, procrastination, integrity, life balance and so forth.
Few things can benefit you more than developing your Emotional Intelligence. Work with a certified EQ coach. You deserve the best.
