Video Review: “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Greaves, Bradberry

“My alma mater was books, a good library…I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” -Malcolm X

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

FOREWORD BY PATRICK LENCIONI, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is a book with a single purpose–increasing your EQ. In today’s fast-paced world of competitive workplaces and turbulent economic conditions, each of us is searching for effective tools that can help us to manage, adapt, and strike out ahead of the pack.

By now, emotional intelligence (EQ) needs little introduction–it’s no secret that EQ is critical to your success. But knowing what EQ is and knowing how to use it to improve your life are two very different things.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 delivers a step-by-step program for increasing your EQ via four, core EQ skills that enable you to achieve your fullest potential:

1) Self-Awareness
2) Self-Management
3) Social Awareness
4) Relationship Management

Transparency Policy – this post contains affiliate ads. Read our “Disclosures” page for more info. 

“Books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” -Emma Thompson

“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” -Jim Rohn

INTRO

Welcome to the Female Flex. I’m your host, Staci Nichols, owner of SpiritualVirago.com. Today we’re going to be talking about the book “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves…hope I’m saying the right. Quick story about how I came to this book. I am currently located in Cancun, Mexico, and I was at like a street fair with my daughter and we came upon a booth, which had all used books. And of course can’t pass that up and I’m just hoping I do speak Spanish CLO Espanol battle. Um, I just really prefer to read in English. Right. So I’m really hoping that I can find, uh, at least a book, one book in English, my daughter, and I looked through the entire collection that they have available. And there were two books in English. My daughter got one and I got the other, and I just thought, you know what, like a synchro destiny kind of experience, right.

She ended up getting a book about Wicca, which I thought was really cool. She’s very into crystals and stuff like that. And the book has like all the explanations of different crystals for different things. Anyway, so that left emotional intelligence for me. So, um, I saw that it was recommended by the Dalai Lama on the cover and I’m like, yeah, I can read this. So, um, one of the unique things about this book is it comes with a, like a free code for you to take an emotional intelligence, free assessment on their website and just scratch off the, uh, the number here and, and that gives you access to taking the assessment. So, um, I did that, which I thought was a pretty neat experience overall though, while there was a lot of valuable information in the book, as far as, I mean, I majored in sociology. I sort of think like a sociologist to me, the most interesting part of the book was in the intro and conclusion when they kind of give like statistics overall about emotional intelligence in society. That to me was the most interesting part. I felt like the meat of the book really over-simplify as a lot of issues. And we’ll, we’ll talk more about that, but the book is broken down into four different areas of emotional intelligence. So self-awareness, self-management social awareness and relationship management. So when you take the assessment on their website, it tells you where you rank on all four of those different

Areas. And for me, I felt like the assessment for something as deep as this, as broad as this as well, I expected this assessment to be a little bit more in depth. I mean, I think about like when I’ve taken, uh, any, a gram personality test online or whatever, there’s a lot more questions and the questions are more specific. These questions, the questions on their assessment to me seemed very ambiguous. And I really felt like, how has this accurately like really accurately measuring mine, um, emotional intelligence. I mean, you think what they go through to measure your intelligence intelligence, you know, the, these four hour sat tests and whatever, or the complexity of an IQ test, you know, I mean, this didn’t have that in any way, shape or form. It was like, are you nice to people? You know what I mean? So, yeah.

Um, let me jump into what I thought were the best parts of the book. My favorite parts of the book, um, which were some statistics that they featured in the introduction and the conclusion. So one thing they say in the introduction is people with the highest levels of intelligence IQ outperform those with average IQ is only 20% of the time while people with average IQ outperform those with high IQ, 70% of the time. Now this doesn’t have too much to do with the subject of the book, but it is an interesting comparison because what their point is is that the people that have high emotional intelligence consistently outperform people with low or medium emotional intelligence, I mean, this book is clearly written for a corporate work professional type of setting. It makes plenty of references to supervisors and, um, you know, work evaluations and stuff like that.

It’s clearly written. It’s not like a spirituality book or whatever. Okay. In chapter two, it says only 36% of the people we tested are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen. Wow. I mean, that to me was very shocking. I don’t know. I don’t know why that would be so hard, but on the other hand, it certainly explains when I’m talking to my therapist, the first thing she always says is, well, how did that make you feel? I’m like, well, shall we say that? And I’m like, made me feel mad, made me feel frustrated, made me feel joy. You know, apparently these are difficult questions for people. Okay. Um, page 20, your EEQ is the foundation for a host of critical skills. It impacts most everything you say and do every day ETQ is so critical to success. That accounts for 58% of performance in all types of jobs, it’s the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.

So what they’re saying is being smart, doesn’t really equate to being successful. Being able to deal with people is what will make you succeed in a professional atmosphere? I think, I mean, if this stuff is so important, like why, why is school the way it is? Why isn’t school, about how to share and care? You know, I mean, thank goodness. They’ve all taken on like an anti-bullying, I mean, really like a campaign, but we’re lacking school system. Okay. Page 21 90% of high performers are also high in emotional intelligence. Just 20% of low performers are high in ETQ. People who develop their EEQ emotional intelligence tend to be successful in a job because they, the two go hand in hand, people with high IQ is make more money on average 29,000 per year, more than people with low EQs, the link between ETQ and earnings is so direct that every point increase in ETQ adds $1,300 to an annual salary.

Yeah. Um, if that doesn’t tell you how important people’s skills are. Okay. Now I’m going to jump to the back and the conclusion. Okay. So this to me, I thought was, was fascinating. They talked about, um, what they’ve done is they surveyed people’s levels of emotional intelligence year after year and the year of the mortgage crisis. So around 2007, 2008, they noticed a big dip overall in the us of people’s emotional intelligence, clearly nothing has changed except the economy, right? So they say on page 230, the relapse in emotional intelligence skills between 2007 and 2008 is a product of economic woes. So I think this is interesting because I feel like if people are in these high stress situations, like losing their houses, clearly it’s natural and reasonable that their emotional intelligence drops, which is again, why I feel like this book really oversimplifies a lot of these real issues.

If it was just as simple as I read this book, which tells me that I need to remember to say somebody’s name every time I talk to them, people would be doing that. What would it, I mean, what it really fails to understand is that the reason people are low on emotional intelligence is because deeply inside they’re scarred and burned by having been hurt by people. They think all people are dangerous. They think that the world is unsafe. You know, these are the cellular level programming that people are carrying around. And to just say, you know, Hey, you need to, uh, make a list of your emotional qualities and then check them off. And, you know, I mean, it just, if it worked that way, if it was that easy, this wouldn’t even be a thing. The book wouldn’t even exist, their company wouldn’t need to even be around.

Okay. So I feel like, I mean, I appreciate a lot of the tactics that they provide, but at the same token, you know, they talk about at one point in the book, like about emotional hijackings, I mean, jeez, these, the same thing by another perspective is called an emotional flashback and is a product connected with post-traumatic stress disorder. You’re not tackling post-traumatic stress disorder in this book of like handy-dandy workplace tips. You know, people are mean to other people because they feel scared because they feel unsafe because they’ve been, you know, abused. I, it just goes much deeper. This is really like the top of the iceberg here, the rest of the iceberg, you’re going to have to go read psychology books. Okay. So page men, 31, the stress from the mortgage crisis, um, seems to be having a significant impact on collective emotional intelligence.

This was also really fascinating as a feminist, okay. Women outperformed men in self-management social awareness and relationship management. In fact, self-awareness was the only EEQ skill in which men were able to keep pace with women. They’re still lower than women, but at least it’s not a ridiculous gap. Like these other ones, the evolution of cultural Moore’s benefits, men, men are now encouraged to pay their emotions. Some extra thought, not one single male leader with low E Q was among the most skilled decision makers. All right, now this, this is a prime example of how this book oversimplifies this really complex topic. Okay. Love this. Okay. Page 2 34. Men are now free to get a stronger, stronger handle on their emotions. In the name of sound judgment. I feel like right now, I should, I should have like the rainbow going across the screen, like, and how, you know, really are men free now to not be like change to toxic masculinity? Well, I’m glad we solved that up in one paragraph. That’s great. I mean, their reasoning here is that over, you know, a few years they saw men making improvements in three of the four emotional intelligence categories. That’s the reason why they’re saying, well, uh, toxic masculinity is over now. We’re free from that. It’s okay to feel guys.

That’d be really nice. I really wish that was the case. Okay. So the last thing that, that they talk about, um, kind of statistically speaking, which I found to be really interesting is, um, what they call heartless bosses. And so apparently the company that wrote this book put out this article called a heartless bosses in the Harvard business review. And it said middle managers stand out with the highest emotional intelligence scores in the workplace. But, uh, up beyond middle management, there is a steep downward trend in E Q scores for the titles of director and above scores descend faster than a snowboarder on a black diamond. So if you want to reach the top of the company, apparently you have to be a complete psychopath.

I mean, this to me is like another problem with why Steve jobs is so celebrated. I mean, I literally, I just watched that Netflix documentary about him two, three weeks ago. And I’m thinking, how is this guy a hero? You know, I mean, clearly our society has decided that it’s okay if you’re rude to people and you’re a sociopath, if you make nifty gadgets and if you run a big company and if you get super rich, then, then that justifies being a complete jerk. Like, I dunno if you guys are aware of this, if you haven’t seen the Steve jobs movie, I don’t want to Netflix. I think it’s just called jobs. Um, he got fired from apple for a long time. He didn’t work there at all because he’s a jerk, you know? Um, to me, I just feel like he doesn’t really deserve to be seen as the hero that he’s really made out to be. Um, you know, it’s just something that really needs to be reframed. Okay. So, um, then it continues page 2 35 CEOs on average have the lowest EEQ scores in the workplace.

It’s, that’s just disgusting. And then these guys are being paid. I mean, they’re ruining the economy with they’re paying these CEOs. So overall I felt like this book is definitely worth a read, but I would consider it more like almost a social experiment than a book of helpful tips that you’re going to walk away and think like, oh, this is gonna change my life. I can’t say that this book changed my life. It was worth reading, but it was, it’s more from a social study point of view from, from my perspective, if you want to read books about emotional intelligence, I feel like are going to have much deeper impact. I recommend these two books, particularly this one, this book, seven habits of highly effective people been around forever. It’s a classic. If you haven’t read it, you have to pick this up. But this book talks about how to actually make deeper level changes.

It’s not Oprah oversimplified here in this book, we have whatever, 300, 400 pages that talk about only seven tips here in this tiny little manual they’ve squeezed in, you know, each section has 20 or 30 tips in each chapter, like just one page tips. So I feel like this does a much better job of actually helping people improve emotional intelligence. This book is kind of like a chicken soup for the soul. If you haven’t read it, how to win friends and influence people, this is kind of the inspiring side of emotional intelligence. This is kind of your data and your hardcore tips, but this is your, your chicken soup for your emotional intelligence. Quite frankly, I recommend, um, all three of these books, but if I was only going to pick one, I would probably do seven habits. Um, I’m going to post some of my favorite excerpts from emotional intelligence, 2.0 in, um, on the website and there’s a link to it down below, and you can click on it. And there are as always, I always do like shareable quote squares or whatever. Um, and then also the quotes will be typed out if you want to copy and paste, um, to share, to share the quotes or just to read them to know if you want to buy this book at all, that’s going to be available. So this has been the female flex. I’m your host, Stacy Nichols, owner of spiritual virago.com. Thank you so much for tuning in, have a great day.