IQ stands for intelligence quotient and EQ stands for emotional quotient. The word quotient means the degree or amount of a quality or characteristic.

In the real world, having a high IQ is great but it does not determine the trajectory of your life. Some people score low on testing such as SAT and ACT but have very high EQ scores.

How many really smart people have you known that struggle with jobs, relationships and life. There are many because while they have book intelligence, they don’t possess the personal skills / emotional intelligence needed to excel in the workplace. Thank goodness for me, I had a higher EQ than IQ which was the ability to relate to people. If we took a companywide IQ intelligence exam, I would be dead last.

The only way to develop a high EQ is to be around other people. Kids need to be around other kids and adults need to be around other adults. In the world of gaming, IPad’s, cell phones, screen time and TV, we seem to have skipped a step in the healthy growth of children that sometimes results in dysfunctional adults.

When we were growing up, we had neighborhood friends and played outside, built tree houses, played basketball, raced bikes and a thousand other outdoor things. Many of us probably had ADHD but didn’t know it. We probably had other disorders you hear about today, but we had incredible EQ’s because we related to other kids and developed into adults with a sound self-esteem.

My point is this. Grades are important but they are not the most important. Love, forgiveness, acceptance, and good life examples are many times the difference of us being introverted or extroverted. So, IQ is great, but we should also strive for a healthy EQ. KT