QUIZ ANSWERS
As promised, here are the quiz answers:
- Build their self-esteem – d: Self-Regard
- Speak up for what they want, or establish appropriate boundaries – a: Assertiveness
- Increase their resilience when things go wrong – b: Optimism
- Restrain impulses – f: Impulse Control
- Understand their own feelings – e: Emotional Self-Awareness
- Understand the feelings of others – c: Empathy
To further explore EQ’s potential usefulness in therapy, consider these four EQ facts.
Fact #1: EQ Is Science-based.
Since the early 1990s, three major lines of research on EQ have produced thousands of studies that demonstrate the positive impact of EQ skills. For example, Reuven Bar-On, Ph.D., when on faculty at the University of Texas Medical School (Galveston), had a Eureka moment. He noticed that everyone on the faculty was really smart, but that only some of them were successful. He asked himself: “What makes the difference?” That question led him on a 17-year research journey in which he identified 16 learnable skills that he labeled EQ. His work not only spurred many studies that have verified his work, it also led to a scientifically valid measure of EQ (The Emotional Quotient Inventory2.0) that is now used worldwide.
Fact #2: Access to learning EQ has been limited.
Our society does a good job of teaching intellectual skills, but not such a good job of teaching EQ skills. That’s one reason why so many people who consult you are having life difficulties. They have not had the chance to learn the emotional skills which they, and all of us, need.
Executive coaches recognized the value of EQ early on. They have had great success coaching their clients in EQ skills as a way of helping them become more influential, contribute more to their companies, and leapfrog over competitors for top jobs. But people who do not have access to top executive coaches have been left out.
Therapists could become a major access point for the general public, allowing far more people to learn about and benefit from EQ skill training. This could happen not just in the therapy room but also through presentations, workshops, and group training. Opening up the opportunity for regular people to have access to training that is currently available almost exclusively to top business leaders could have massive positive social impacts.
Fact #3: EQ can be an adjunct tool that fits with your favorite models.
Therapists use a wide range of theoretical models. Most of those models fit within the Problem Solving/Skill Building meta-model. In other words, your patient presents with a problem, such as depression, anxiety, relationship issues, recovery from trauma, etc. You help them build the skills they need to solve that problem. How you do so depends on the theoretical model you believe best fits their situation.
Adding a systematic element of EQ skill development to your current methodologies may enhance your outcomes.
Sometimes, EQ skills may be the only skills the patient needs to solve presenting and underlying problems. Suppose someone comes to you complaining that people constantly walk all over them, take advantage of them. Perhaps helping them build their assertiveness skills will solve that problem.
But sometimes patients need to improve an EQ skill before they can develop the skills your approach requires. Here are two examples:
- Let’s suppose you are using Cognitive Behavior Modification (CBM) to help a patient manage excessive emotional reactions to certain events. To do so, the patient needs to think differently about such events. You probably find that this process usually goes smoothly.
However, some patients struggle for reasons that may be initially unclear. One possibility is that there is a hidden EQ skill deficit, perhaps Flexibility, which is one of the 16 skills. To fully embrace CBM, people need to change some of their thought patterns. Rigid thinking, often associated with persistent high anxiety, might get in the way, leading them to resist your suggestions about how to reframe the events in question. By helping them build their Flexibility skill you can help them overcome this barrier so that they can more fully engage in CBM.
- Suppose that you are working with a patient using a psychodynamic, insight-oriented approach. Your goal is that this person will develop recognition about how their thoughts and feelings impact and perpetuate the dysfunctional behaviors that create the problems that brought them to your office.
Again, some patients may be able to develop insights relatively quickly, but others just don’t get it. It may be that they need to better understand their emotions before they can develop useful insights about how their emotions relate to their thinking and behavior. In EQ terms, that means helping them build the skill of Emotional Self-Awareness.
Fact #4: EQ skills can be learned and improved.
As our short quiz demonstrated, you probably already have some ways to help patients build EQ skills. But it might be helpful to have some field-tested, customizable exercises that would help your patients build each of the 16 EQ skills in systematic ways. For example, exercises to build Emotional Self-Awareness could include having your patients:
- Learn how their thoughts, impulses, and body sensations can help them recognize their emotions.
- Learn to label their emotions. Being able to name an emotion makes working with the emotion easier for your patients, because it helps organize their thinking about it.
Is adding EQ to your tool kit worth it?
You may be thinking, “I do a lot of this already. How can adding an EQ model contribute to my success rate?” Here are three possibilities.
First, by having EQ skills organized in your thinking, they become more accessible to you and your patients. The list of skills becomes a menu you can check to see if weakness in one or more of them might be blocking progress. You can see the full list here.
Second, unlike many psychological terms, most EQ terms will be familiar to your patients. The words are everyday words with no stigma attached. Your patients may not initially fully grasp the terms’ full meaning, but the fact that the language is familiar facilitates acceptance.
Third, there is a ready-made set of exercises for each EQ skill, (available at The EQ Press.) Let’s say you want a patient to improve their Emotional Self-Awareness to help build their capacity for insight. You and they can access that specific exercise guide and then select the specific exercises from that guide that will be most effective for your patient.
Note: An earlier version of the 200+ exercises has been field tested with thousands of executive coaching clients. The exercises were developed for my EQ Leader Program manual (MHS, 2006; EQ Leader, 2021) and have been used by executive coaches around the world. The exercises you’ll find on The EQ Press have been revised to suit pretty much everyone, not just people in leadership roles.
Finally, you may feel that some patients would benefit from reading a short new book that explains EQ and its value to the lay public. A Little Book to Save Humanity has two missions:
- To help people recognize how and why EQ skills can be useful for solving problems in living, such as building relationships, having successful careers, dealing with a terminal illness, weight loss, and many others.
- To help all of us learn how to rescue our society from the toxic impact of “conflict entrepreneurs” – politicians and media who profit from pitting groups of people against each other by manipulating their emotions. One of the advantages of having EQ skills is that we can spot these manipulative attempts and short circuit them.
You can read the book’s introduction for free on The EQ Press.