A close friend and I were having a heart-to-heart on Halloween, and she asked me to tell her something that I like about her. In piecing together a stream of consciousness about her resonance with others’ emotions and utilization of that empathy, I realized that I had stumbled across a way to differentiate people who thrive and lead and people who simply survive and follow.
Like IQ, “EQ” is a term that is arbitrarily yet authoritatively thrown around by people, in an attempt to evaluate each other’s relative ability to understand psychology (static) and social interaction (dynamic) between individuals and groups. As part of a social species, every human being is born with a capacity to recognize and express the same emotions of others around her—ecology will explain that is how we can mutually protect, survive, and grow. Someone characterized as autism-spectrum (e.g. Asperger syndrome) likely has a lesser ability to recognize and mimic emotions while interacting with other people, an anti-social quality, which is how that and associated behaviors have been grouped and pathologized.
You may have heard that some 70-90% of people, when surveyed, describe themselves as possessing above-average intelligence. EQ has been similarly inflated—people with the ability to perceive and mimic emotion necessary to survive, ubiquitous whether you’re in a nomadic population crossing the Bering Sea, or in the bustling metropolis of present-day Shanghai, are described as being “very empathic.” Now that empathy is praised as a differentiating asset in the world of business, I think it’s important to understand why my friend is outstanding compared to those around her, via the utilization of empathy.
Imagine two general levels of emotional intelligence—average and high. A person with average EQ can gather emotion from verbal and non-verbal cues, and “relate” to someone she is interacting with by showing comprehension that they feel a certain way about something, and emoting in return. A person with high EQ, on the other hand, is able to evaluate an emotional profile—“these types of situations make this person feel elated/indignant/empowered/helpless”—and utilize that knowledge to articulate the ways in which the person can change their situational emotions and behavior to be happier and more successful.
As you may have guessed, this friend of mine gives fantastic advice. She is meant to thrive and lead, not simply to survive and follow. We were discussing the importance of personal development and branding to entrepreneurs both for communicating vision to stakeholders (customers, business partners, investors alike), and for maintaining alignment between one’s growing strengths and eventual objectives. After answering a couple of her questions about my primary worries and goals after quitting my job to start my company, I suddenly formed several action items for shaping and scaling my personal brand! This earnest blog was the first step in that roadmap.
Food: What are the hardest questions you can ask yourself today? Who in your life is asking you those questions, and how can you maximize your time with them?
方令中 Christopher 
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