Jim Rees, The Emotional Intelligence Guru, explains

For a long time, emotional intelligence has been considered as a soft skill and there wasn’t enough data to prove to leaders of the benefits in developing the EI of the people in their organisations.

Well, times have changed! We now know that intelligence and what your CV looks like may well get you the next job but it’s your EI or mindset that will be the difference that makes the difference when looking to influence and inspire others to go the extra mile.

Someone who has a high intelligence score coupled with a high emotional intelligence will always outperform someone who has the intelligence but hasn’t got the emotional intelligence to use their intelligence and be able to interact with others.

Maybe the best way to think about it is that our Self Regard which we measure in the EI questionnaire along with 15 other scales, is shaped from 9 months onwards! As babies the only way we interact with the world is by our senses. So, if as a baby you’re hungry or are too hot or cold, you’ll cry out, if you are picked up by a parent or sibling, that is considered to be a positive stroke, if you’re left to cry, that is considered to be a negative stroke. This then shapes how you develop very early on, in other words your environment is conditioning you and if you have lots of positive strokes, it will grow your Self Regard, if you have few of those, you’ll end up being conditioned in a negative way and thus causing you to have a low Self Regard.

Before you run to the phone to blame your parents for your upbringing, it’s only part of the story.

As we grow as toddlers and then onto school we are bombarded with comments from our peers and teachers with positive and negative strokes (affirmations) which further conditions us and our Self Regard / self-esteem.

So, depending on how we’re raised as kids, our parent’s values and beliefs will be imprinted on us, for some of us, we will buckle against taking on some of our parents’ values and beliefs and bring our own children up very differently to our own childhood.

The great news is that you can transform some of these deeply engrained patterns of thinking and start challenging your beliefs.

I know that I was so conditioned around what was expected of me from society as a young boy growing up into a young man, I literally slept walked into getting married and having kids because it was socially expected of me!

So many patterns that we run in our lives are linked to our early conditioning and that then becomes wired in, and we don’t really take time to think about whether our beliefs about ourselves and life in general are still true today and whether our beliefs are helping us or hindering us in all the things we are pursuing in our lives.

Neuroscience has now caught up with lots of exciting discoveries about the brain and how we can rewire our brains (Neuroplasticity). So, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

So, to answer the question, is EI nature or nurture? For me, I truly believe it is a blend of both and it is never too late to reshape your mindset and reach your full potential.

Jim Rees is The Emotional Intelligence Guru and author of Vicious Cycle* also available from Amazon

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