If you are determined to raise your EQ, the book provides a panoply of techniques to improve your performance in each of four key areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. To increase your score in the self-awareness arena, for example, you should "watch yourself like a hawk." To the authors, this means to "slow yourself down and take in all that is in front of you, allowing your brain to process all available information before you act."
To accelerate the slowing process, may I suggest that instead of starting your day at Starbucks with a Frappuccino, you switch to the Kit Kat Klub where you throw back a dry martini with two olives, a twist, and an Ambien. When you get to work, lean back in your Aeron chair and rest your Ferragamos on your desk. Let the hectic workday world rush frantically around you, while you "slow yourself down." (In case you get too slow, make sure the office defibrillator is nearby.)
The authors also suggest a nifty strategy to improve your Social Awareness score: "Don't Take Notes at Meetings." As they so correctly point out, "by having your head focused on your tablet and your hand scribbling away, you miss the critical clues that shed some major light on how others are feeling and what they may be thinking."
So true! If you didn't have your nose buried in your notes, you would notice the subtle visual clues in the meeting, like pencils being snapped in half and chairs being thrown through the window, simply because you grabbed the first doughnut, and the last doughnut, and every doughnut in between.
Yes, improving your EQ will definitely boost your career, right up until the moment you meet an EQ idiot like your boss, who will crush you like a bug. But at least this time you'll be sufficiently self-aware to notice!
