Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition
When I first wrote this book in 1994, the very idea of being intelligent about emotions—that is, “emotional intelligence”— was held by only a small handful of people. It had been proposed by Peter Salovey, then a junior professor at Yale, and one of his then-graduate students, John Mayer, in an obscure (and by now extinct) psychology journal.
As a science reporter at The New York Times, I came upon that 1990 article and was electrified by the concept, which offered a new way of thinking about our emotions. Emotional intelligence reconciled what had been seen as two opposites: our feelings and our reasoning.
So I used the phrase as the title of this book, a handy framework for tying together a broad range of scientific findings not just on emotions but also on child development, a new vision for education, and excellence at work, to name a few strands that went far beyond the focus of that original article. I also was able to draw on initial findings from what was then a new field, affective neuroscience, the study of emotions and the brain.
My eponymous book made the concept famous, as Peter Salovey—now the president of Yale University—has acknowledged. My initial goals were modest: I had the thought before this book was published that if I one day overheard two strangers use the term “emotional intelligence” and both knew what it meant, I would have succeeded in spreading the concept. Little did I know. The awareness is global; this book has been translated into more than forty languages and been a bestseller in many of them.
The shorthand phrase “EQ” has become a word in several languages around the world (though I prefer the abbreviation “EI”). Emotional intelligence has been a punchline in the cartoon strip Dilbert among others, and the phrase has become a casual descriptor of whether or not someone has interpersonal skills. In the search for a romantic partner some people have claimed to possess a goodly portion of EI in their ads.
The EI concept has been ricocheting around the Web for years now, and with that notoriety have come several misinterpretations that I’d like to clear up. For one, emotional intelligence does NOT account in individuals for 80 percent of success. This misconception comes from a misreading of data suggesting that IQ may account for up to 20 percent of career success (and likely a smaller amount); there are plenty of other factors that add to success apart from EI.
Then, there’s the mistaken notion that EI always matters more than IQ. EI can be more important than IQ when it comes to health and relationships (though I’ve never seen data showing this)—but certainly not when it comes to, say, academic achievement. Another wrongheaded view: that having emotional intelligence just means that a person is nice—when in fact EI could mean a person is blunt or assertive when it comes to expressing unpleasant truths in certain contexts. Finally,for the record I am not the “inventor” or “father” of the idea of emotional intelligence. I first saw the term proposed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in a 1990 article, and some have suggested it was in use even before that date.
I came to the EI concept after having spent two years in South Asia studying contemplative traditions, and another decade or more leading workshops with my wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman, that applied the tools of meditation to problems typically dealt with in psychotherapy. Tara’s work flowered into her books Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart and, later, Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-defeating Habits. We continue to give workshops together and think through applications of contemplative methods like mindfulness. As my work began to focus on EI, my ongoing work with Tara informed my thinking, particularly on the essential role of self-awareness.