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Emotional
Intelligence of the Gifted
by Joanna Fletcher I’ve
been thinking about EQ, or emotional intelligence, as people have
been recommending that I do so. In Chapter 3 of Daniel Goleman’s
popular book on the subject, Emotional Intelligence [1], he gives some
examples of high IQ people who are not achieving the heights they were
destined for. He
says that “Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life”
and goes on to say “...people with with high IQs can be stunningly poor
pilots of their private lives.” He believes that emotional intelligence
and IQ are independent of each other. Goleman
does a good job of showing that success comes to those who have an
awareness of social rules and apply them in the dominant mode of their
society. I
think his observation that people with high IQ may have low emotional
intelligence and therefore lower success is flawed. For starters, he
defines success largely in social terms, a narrow band of achievement
that gifted people may or may not choose to pursue. Because
of this, they will react differently. They are able to discern more
complexity in any situation, and social situations are the most complex
systems humans encounter. Imagine
being asked to play 50 games of chess at the same time – but some of
them are re-enactments of past games, and some are premonitions about
possible future games. A
gifted person can be consciously “playing chess” of this type during
group interactions, and not surprisingly can become easily overwhelmed
or start to avoid social settings to minimize the stress. Additionally,
their mental processing skills sometimes extend to emotional
processing. I recall being called “ice princess” after viewing a movie
about the last days of a man with cancer, including his death. Others
were crying, but I felt no emotional turmoil because the movie clearly
showed that he was at peace with himself at the end. I was already past
grief, but I started to cry with the frustration of being so
misunderstood. In
this way you will fit in and be a success in the eyes of the world. Not
only the gifted, but also people with varying cultural backgrounds are
victims of this prejudice towards the norm. In the
same way Goleman is saying that people from neglectful or abusive
families never learn this social vocabulary, neither do some gifted
kids. For
someone used to a big emotional range and the power to instantly adapt
to new information, the fact that other people can’t do the same needs
to be accepted in the same way as their intellectual difference. In
reality, that’s only one of the many possible causes, or sets of
causes, for stubbornness, indecisiveness, or delinquency in a gifted
person. But it
is essential that gifted people know about EQ and how it fits into
their lives, so that they do not become alienated and distrustful of
people and organizations, and vice versa. This, rather than the high IQ
itself, is what can reduce a gifted child’s potential to find success
by the standards of modern society. If the
gifted are the ones with greater knowledge of the problem, it is
incumbent upon them to make the required accommodation. However, it is
important to provide for yourself or your gifted child a community in
which natural emotional ranges are accepted, enjoyed, and reciprocated.
Otherwise a great loneliness may set in that is very hard to break. 2
See http://www.stephanietolan.com/dabrowskis.htm for a general
explanation of this term. ~ ~ ~ related pages: emotional IQ resources : books sites/programs intensity
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sensitivity GT
Adults giftedness ~ ~ ~ |
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