Understanding feelings

Nick Keith discusses the key to understanding feelings, plus strategies for seeing them more clearly and dealing with them through emotional intelligence (EQ)

The good thing about emotional intelligence (EQ) is that we can acquire it with practice. Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and editor who was educated and taught at Harvard, declared that IQ (intelligence quotient) was not enough to achieve success, in his best-selling book Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ(Bloomsbury, 1996).

For Dr Goleman, 80 per cent of a person’s success is down to EQ and 20% per cent to IQ. While IQ elicits a score for your intellectual ability, EQ provides a masterplan for success in life by helping to recognise and channel those troublesome emotions, intelligently.

And what of IQ? That first surfaced just over 100 years ago when William Stern, a German psychologist, coined the term in a book. It has been used as a way to measure intelligence through specific tests, many of them ...