CHAPTER 4

Success Throughout Your Life

“Caring is a powerful business advantage.”

—SCOTT JOHNSON, CARTOONIST, ILLUSTRATOR, AND DESIGNER

Stewart D. Friedman, a Practice Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in Philadelphia, directs Wharton's Leadership Program and Work/Life Integration Project. The aim of the program is to help people improve their performance in all domains of their lives including work, home, community, and self. This holistic approach recognizes the fact that we cannot separate one area of our lives from the other. If we excel at work at the expense of our home environment, eventually our home life will suffer and impact our work.

Traditional thinking has separated work and the other areas of our lives and often pitted one against the other. For better or worse, all areas of our lives are intertwined. The good news is that regardless of where we put our energies and efforts into increasing our EI functioning, whether at work, at home, or in the community, all areas of our life will improve. Throughout the book, you will find stories and examples of EI at the workplace, at home, and in the community. Sometimes the stories will connect all three areas to demonstrate how EI affects all areas of our lives. There is no such thing as trading off in one area, or giving it short shrift to benefit another area. By building better relationships in one area of our lives, it increases our capacity and ability to build in other areas, thereby leading to a more fulfilling life.

There is evidence that the more arenas of our lives in which we practice new behaviors, the more effective we will become in all areas of our lives. And the more areas of our lives that we can relate to leadership, the more quickly we will improve. According to Professor Jane Wheeler of the Weatherhead School of Management of Case Western Reserve University, the more venues in which people practiced new skills such as their families, community, and church, the greater was their improvement rate. Not only that, but these improvements seemed to stick around for a longer time, some still very much in evidence after a period of two years or more.

EI for the Twenty-First Century

Although the study of EI is still in its infancy, there is growing evidence that the study of emotions and how they affect our world will expand to many areas in the next few years.

Recently, the department for children, schools, and families in the United Kingdom implemented a SEAL program in their public school system. SEAL stands for Social, Emotional Aspects of Learning. Bullying has been a problem in the British school system as it has been in North America. It became apparent that the school system was not teaching one of the crucial skills that children need to learn to become well-adjusted adults, which is how to get along with others. The British school system set up a Social, Emotional, and Behavior Skills team to come up with programs that would effectively teach school-age children the social and emotional skills necessary to get along with their classmates and teachers. The hope was that once these skills were learned, the children would grow up to become well-adjusted functioning adults. School systems in other countries will be watching, and if the results are positive, will look at implementing similar type programs.

Interest in the value of EI has not been confined to the public school system. Institutions of higher education have been looking into ways that EI can be incorporated into the halls of advanced education. In 2008, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., hosted a symposium with the objective of exploring the role of emotional intelligence in higher education. In this event the faculty, administrators, and students shared best practices, success stories, and ways that EI could be used to have a substantial impact on the success and development of students. Across the border in Canada, Wilfred Laurier University recently hosted a daylong event to discuss how EI impacted teaching and learning.

Ongoing research and study regarding EI is not confined to North America but is going on around the world. Recently, a study was conducted in a large urban hospital in Bologna, Italy, within the obstetrics department. The study showed a significant increase in performance and life success among professionals with high EI scores over those with lower scores. EI has also been finding its way into the highly competitive professional sports world. The Southampton Football Club in the English premier league has been using EI to develop their young talent. A study carried out at the National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan found a relationship among EI, physical activity, and health-related physical fitness. They found that students who had higher levels of EI were also more fit.

In short, emotional intelligence has become a highly valued commodity throughout the world in business, life, and leisure. The skills presented in this book can be applied throughout your life, whatever your profession, family situation, geography, or personality.