Emotional Intelligence 2.0
I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway. When I read the synopsis I thought it might be an interesting read so I entered the draw. Much to my surprise, a few days later an e-mail was waiting for me in my inbox telling me I was one of the winner. I had absolutely no expectations with this book.The fact that it was a non-fiction, self-help type of book was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves is more of a step-by-step program to follow than something you sit down and read for an afternoon. The book comes with a code needed to complete the online test that will help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to EQ.
This test takes about 10 minutes to complete and has very straight forward questions.
Once the test completed, a score is given based on four different categories:Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management.
It was no surprise to see that my lowest score was Social Awareness. Seriously, being social is not my forte.
After having received my score, the guide asked to chose a category to work on. Mine was, obviously, Social Awareness.
In the book, I found different sections that matched the categories enumerating different tricks to improve the skill I had chosen previously. Though some techniques were things that I thought were obvious, once I reflected on it, I realized that they weren’t things I practice very often.
All in all I thought this was a great guide to find the skills I excelled in and those I needed to work on when talking about EQ. The only thing I wasn’t to keen about were the questions in the test itself. Though I thought it was very precise in my situation, I thought they might have been more effective if they were scenario based instead of straight questions. In my opinion it’s easy to have a flawed perception of yourself . When asked a question like “Do you react well to stress?” one could easily over or under evaluate themselves whereas given a scenario, they might have a truer answer.
That said, I believe most people already know approximately where they need to improve. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is just a added tool to help us achieve our potential.
-Athena
Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.
