That was Tony Blair’s evaluation of his Chancellor Gordon Brown’s condition. Apparently Gordon was somewhat of a genius when it came to some of the details of the economy, but he was totally incompetent when it came to seeing and being sensitive to other people, particularly the electorate. The rest is history. Labour lost the election in the United Kingdom.
For too many years we’ve believed that high IQ. is the benchmark for life success. On that assessment alone, the likes of Dick Smith, Richard Branson, and even Winston Churchill who didn’t speak until he was six, would have been regarded as abject failures.
Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of your own emotions and to become attuned to the interior world of another human being. To the degree a mother can become attuned to her child, the child will feel safe and grow. We now know we come into this world with a capacity for social intelligence. It’s design is in the structure of the embryonic brain. To the degree we are seen and loved unconditionally, to that same degree we are enabled to become attuned to others and our human spirit is enabled. We are born with this capacity to empathise but as with all of God’s gifts, the more we exercise it the more it is integrated into an authentic expression of ourselves.
I seem to remember it says in the Old Book “Weep with those weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice, and make it your purpose to take an interest in ordinary people.” We now know the more we do that, the more the neurones will fire together in our brain, the more the synapses will make connections, and the more likely we are to become the loving and socially aware beings we were designed to be.