Sure, You're Smart—But What Kind of Smart?

Why emotional intelligence—not IQ—might be the key to your success, according to bestselling author Travis Bradberry.

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As a reader of this newsletter, I’m guessing you’re pretty smart. And if I wanted to, I suppose I could quantify how smart you are by testing for your intelligence quotient, or IQ. But what about your EQ? That’s a measure of your emotional intelligence, and according to bestselling author Travis Bradberry, it’s even more important than IQ when it comes to success at work and in life. In his new book, The New Emotional Intelligence, Travis argues that understanding and managing your emotions—and the emotions of others—is a superpower in today’s fast-paced world. No less an authority than the Dalai Lama says Travis “succinctly explains how to deal with emotions creatively and employ our intelligence in a beneficial way.” Scroll down to read his key insights, or get yourself a copy of the book on Amazon.

1. Emotional intelligence is huge when it comes to success and performance.

We find that 92 percent of top performers score high in emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a foundational skill because emotions are the primary driver of behavior. We have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day, and your ability to understand your emotions and do something productive with them is a huge driver of how you perform, act, and respond to the world around you.

There is a barrier to entry in most professions, and it’s hard to set yourself apart with intellect alone. For specific roles, most of your competition will likely have a similar IQ and experience, but emotional intelligence sets you apart from the crowd. Not a lot of people have it and even fewer have a ton of it. Those who do tend to perform better in the world, and so emotional intelligence is a huge driver of success at work.

2. Emotional intelligence can be improved.

The brain region responsible for emotional intelligence is receptive to behavioral changes. This isn’t necessarily true of other brain regions. IQ—meaning the pace at which you assimilate new information—is relatively fixed at an early age. Longitudinal studies in which researchers followed people from age five to age 50 found that IQ, relative to your peers, doesn’t change throughout the lifespan. IQ doesn’t tend to change in response to alterations in your behavior.

“The brain region responsible for emotional intelligence is receptive to behavioral changes.”

That’s not the case for emotional intelligence. The brain’s limbic system is where emotions are generated. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for rational thoughts and responding to those emotions, but there is a long pathway between these two regions. When you work on your emotional intelligence and try to understand your emotions better, you can increase the flow of information between these two brain regions. As a result, your neurons grow and branch out to each other, creating more pathways of connection. Your brain physically changes.

3. You need to test yourself.

To strengthen your emotional intelligence (EQ), it is necessary to develop the ability to take an objective perspective on your own behavior. You need to know what your strengths are that you should lean into. You also need to know what you should focus on improving about yourself. It’s challenging to achieve greater self-awareness on your own.

Getting assessed opens up big doors because it provides an objective understanding of your behavior. It paints a picture, and in the case of the test I designed that comes with The New Emotional Intelligence, it pinpoints which of the 60 strategies from the book will increase your EQ the most. It says, “Look, based on your unique score profile, you should start here.” Simply put, self-testing supercharges your effort to increase your EQ.

4. Higher EQ can increase your income.

People with high EQs earn an average of $37,000 more annually than those who don’t possess a high degree of emotional intelligence. We also find that when people work on their emotional intelligence, for every point they increase their EQ, we see a $1,700 increase in annual income. This happens because emotions are the primary driver of behavior.

“EQ training influences not only how you read and respond to your own emotions, but also to those of other people as well.”

When you focus on the four emotional intelligence skills—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management—you are becoming a master of your emotions. This trickles into everything you do. You may not realize that your EQ training is also addressing, for example, your fear of public speaking, your ability to engage in constructive arguments with your spouse, or your capacity to be a highly motivating leader. EQ training influences not only how you read and respond to your own emotions, but also to those of other people as well. You think you’re just working on your EQ, but it changes your behavior in a way that has a ripple effect on all aspects of your life.

Higher EQ tends to lead to improved overall performance. If you focus solely on your EQ and improve those four skills, the rest will take care of itself.

5. Your brain loves efficiency.

When you repeat a behavior, your brain builds pathways to reinforce the use of that behavior so that, over time, it is easier to do it without actively thinking about it. Why would you build a temporary bridge to cross a river that you plan to cross over and over again? You build a permanent bridge instead. The same thing is true in your brain.

When you work on your EQ, you build pathways to make new behavior happen. The process you follow in the book is designed so that when you choose to work on one of the 60 strategies for EQ improvement, you repeat the training until you catch yourself doing it without thinking about it. That moment means your brain has formed a pathway to facilitate that behavior, and you can move on to one of the other strategies.

“Why would you build a temporary bridge to cross a river that you plan to cross over and over again?”

Let’s say you’re a yeller. When you get really frustrated with people, you tend to yell or raise your voice. You don’t love that you do it, but it keeps happening. Your brain does that because there is a pathway reinforcing the yelling behavior. Very likely, your score profile would tell you to read the section of the book focused on the anger funnel. Many people who raise their voice and respond with anger do so because they tend to channel less palatable emotions into anger.

When people understand the anger funnel, they tend to choose a more constructive approach that addresses the underlying emotion directly. When doing that, the urge to yell goes away. The first few, several, or maybe many times, it will be difficult to pause and bite your tongue, so to seak, but over time, you learn to catch yourself. Eventually, situations that normally would’ve made you yell won’t provoke that behavior.

Your brain prioritizes efficiency. If it forms a new habit, then you’ve mastered that skill because your brain will want to keep taking that pathway. When you work on your EQ, you can create physical changes in your brain that will change you. Your efforts will bear fruit. You will see results.