IQ vs. EQ: Is Emotional Intelligence Just as Important?

Dr. McDonough: 
Hello, I’m Dr. Brian McDonough, and welcome to Primary Care Today on ReachMD.  Many of us had IQ tests when we were young.  Many of us might have been told whether we were going to a certain school or we were going to get a certain opportunity based on our IQ.  But, is IQ that important?  Or perhaps I should say it better.  Is it as important as emotional IQ?  Emotional intelligence is certainly something that has been discussed for several decades.  Many of us don’t realize the importance of it, but it is apparent in our everyday lives. 

Joining me today on Primary Care Today on ReachMD is David Neagle.  He is the author of The Millions Within:  Tips to Improve Emotional Intelligence.  First of all, thank you so much for joining us.

Mr. Neagle:
Oh, my pleasure, Dr. McDonough.  It’s a great pleasure to be here. 

Dr. McDonough:
David, let me ask you, just in general, explain your understanding of emotional intelligence or emotional IQ, as it’s known.

Mr. Neagle:
Well, the interesting thing about it is, I think that it is a person’s ability to emotionally process the world around them to a point of accuracy or inaccuracy that is going to allow them to either make good decisions or poor decisions for themselves.  And in my opinion, my experience with the thousands of people that I’ve worked with in the last 20 years, I think it has a tremendous amount to do with how we’re raised and how we’re literally subconsciously programmed to emotionally respond to the world around us.

Dr. McDonough:
So, you really believe there isn’t just something that’s innate that is genetic.  There’s actually a lot of environment involved? 

Mr. Neagle:
I think there is a ton of environment involved.  Yeah, I do think that there is some genetic, and I think that we have some scientific proof that there’s some genetic, but I also think that that is highly reinforced by environmental conditioning.  As kids, we watch how our parents and authority figures respond to different things in our life.  For instance, one of the psychological and… I’m sorry, lack of a better term here.  If a person has a traumatic experience, say at the age of 14, or they become an alcoholic or a drug abuser, we know that their emotional intelligence gets stunted at that age, and until they get clean and sober and have an ability to start to process the world around them with the assistance of somebody that has a healthy emotional intelligence, they don’t grow, they stay at that place; so you could end up with a 50-year-old that processes the world emotionally like a 14-year-old.  If you don’t, if that child is raised in a healthy environment and they have healthy correction and direction as to how they’re responding to their world, you can have a person with the same IQ and have a completely different result when they are at 30, 40 or 50.

Dr. McDonough:
You know, when you read about your book and the work you have, it’s really interesting.  It talks about how you dropped out of high school and then you worked—I think you worked as a dock worker.  You move it along, you became an entrepreneur, made millions of dollars doing it.  Was that all because of early interaction by your parents?  Was it your own experiences?  I mean, what do you attribute it to?

Mr. Neagle:
I attribute it… So, here’s one thing I’ll say about when I was a kid.  I was raised in a dysfunctional family.  I wouldn’t say it was abusive, but it was dysfunctional.  There was a tragedy that happened in 1970 in my family that really caused everybody to bring up all their dysfunction, and nobody got any help for it, so it slowly progressed and really broke the family down.  My parents got divorced, and my mother was—you know, basically disappeared for 3 years, and I was on my own trying to help my 9-year-old brother, and I was kind of left on the streets of Chicago to kind of raise myself.  So, what ended up happening was I had this question running around in my mind:  Is life supposed to be this hard?  And I think that question came from the fact that I also had a religious background, like many people do.  I was raised Catholic, and we were taught that we come from a loving God, so here I’m getting 1 message and here I’m have another experience in life.  Plus, I was raised in the ‘70s where we’re watching everything that is happening on television from—like in my memory, the late ‘60s, losing Dr. Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War and watching the fallout of that as it comes into our living room every night when we only had a couple of channels to actually choose from.  So, like I said, it made me very inquisitive. 

And as I began to become an adult and I was making decisions that were very poor and I was taking on a tremendous amount of responsibility—I started a family very young, got married, had a couple of children and had no way to support them—and that’s when that question started coming more to the surface for me as a reality, like, “Why am I now in this position, and how do I get out of it?” 

So, I began to… I started with my own emotional intelligence.  The first thing that I changed was I changed my attitude, and that came just from an inner voice within one day that… I mean, I was literally on a dock.  I worked for a company called P.E. Foods in Lisle, Illinois.  I was driving a forklift.  I was absolutely exhausted because I working 6 ½ days a week.  I basically had an emotional breakdown in the back of a trailer.  I was crying.  I was frustrated.  I was tired.  I was about 24 at the time, and a voice in my head said, “David, change your attitude.”  And I had been hearing that since I was a kid, but I didn’t know what it meant, so I began to research what that meant, and I changed it, and everything in my life began to change like night and day.  And I was so shocked that I could have that profound of an experience in my reality change—because one thing that changed was my income tripled in 30 days, which was just amazing to me—and I’m trying to figure out how does all of this tie together.  So I spent 7 years really, really studying and trying to find out how to put it together, and then once I did, I started helping other people do the same thing, and then I started working with entrepreneurs and I became an entrepreneur, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. 

Dr. McDonough:
When you try to reach out to other people—because obviously you are; you’re trying to teach other people these sorts of things—do you get frustrated?  Do people pick up on the message?  And what determines who, maybe in the right environment, starts to think a certain way and others don’t?

Mr. Neagle:
Well, first of all, I don’t get frustrated with other people’s growth or where they are.  I think that everybody is exactly where they need to be to hear whatever message they need to hear, and I’m not stuck on the fact that they need to—like my message is the only message or the only way.  I think that the old adage that “when the student’s ready, the teacher will appear,” is very true, but a person has to want some kind of a change, and I think that we have… You have people that go into denial in their life that there’s nothing wrong, and some people go to their graves in denial.  Other people are searching.  They’re searching for an answer.  They know something’s not right.  They can’t put their finger on it.  They have not really understood the core philosophy of personal responsibility, so they’re part of believing a lot of what society believes, that we’re highly victimized, and they don’t know how to accept responsibility for themselves which allows them to take their power back and really begin to make changes. 

When I discovered that, it was a revelation to me.  I lived in a world where my parents and everybody around me blamed everybody else for everything, so I did the same thing because I didn’t know any different, so emotionally I was angry and I was frustrated.  And I see people—like they are a mirror image of what I was when I was 24.  When I’m working with them, I work with them from the same place as if I was that young man again or that young woman and speak to them to where they are in their life and about how to make that change and what it is that they really want, because I believe everybody has a purpose.  If you could tap into what that is, the power to make the change is there for every person.  I’ve just seen it too many times.

Dr. McDonough:
You’re listening to Primary Care Today on ReachMD.  I’m your host, Dr. Brian McDonough.  With me today is a very special guest.  My guest is David Neagle.  He is the author of The Millions Within:  Tips to Improve Emotional Intelligence.  So, let’s talk about it.  What ways can you improve your emotional intelligence?  What are some things the average person can do?

Mr. Neagle:
I think the first thing is to really understand the difference between victimization and personal responsibility.  When I teach people to accept responsibility for everything that they think, that they feel, that they do and experience in their life, I never mean to take away from the fact that they may have been victimized at some place in their life.  That does not remove that.  What it does do is it allows them to accept responsibility for whatever interaction they were in.  And then I believe everybody—whatever it is that you’ve experienced, you’ve experienced for a reason.  If you go back to Viktor Frankl in a Man’s Search For Meaning, he points out very clearly in that book that he believes that the way that he was trained to use his mind allowed him to survive a Nazi concentration camp, and he had a higher emotional intelligence than a lot of people around him.  So, he could have stood there and blamed everybody else, but yet he didn’t.  He chose to keep his mind in a completely different place.  So, the first place that I have people start is:  What is their readiness?  And I think readiness is a big factor in it.  What is their readiness to accept responsibility for where they are in their life and what has happened to them and what they’ve done and where they want to go?

Dr. McDonough:
So, it’s readiness; it’s acceptance.  I like what you say though about not expecting people to be at a certain point.  In other words, you want people to be at the point they’re at. What about societies?  We hear a lot of people talk about things like the theories of dependency or theories of modernization in societies and small countries and large countries, and people kind of fall into, “Well, if I come from a small country that maybe was a victim of colonialization and then later”—I don’t know—“huge corporations coming in and taking advantage of the people,” they don’t reach out and do things themselves.  How do you help them out or at least guide them when they’re in a society where many of the people don’t strive to do more?

Mr. Neagle:
Well, I’ve worked with people all over the world, and what you’re saying is exactly correct.  That is a lot of their experience.  But because it’s been their experience their whole life, they don’t understand that they have another option, and part of the other option in many of those other countries is not to play the game to begin with.  In some countries where you can still be killed for breaking the rules, it’s a little bit more difficult, because the ramifications of doing that are so stringent, but I think all of our backgrounds have that in it somewhere.  If you go far enough back in all of our lineages, there were kings and queens and dictators and things that if you didn’t follow the rules, they would kill you, and we still have that in some countries today.  But in other countries where it’s just oppression or colonialization, like you were talking about…  

I was speaking to a group of women a number of years ago, and I was a speaker—I was a hired speaker to come and speak to these women, and the people that were having a debate prior to me taking the stage were talking about equal pay for women versus men.  And I was listening to this whole thing going back and forth, and you had people that were on both sides of the line on this.  And when I took the stage, I said, “You know, how many women in the room would really like to earn as much, if not more, than men?”  And basically everybody raised their hand.  And I said, “You know, the real key is to try and stop changing them and stop playing the game, because every one of you in here has the ability to do that, but you’re doing it in a rigged system.”  So, it’s no different than when a country breaks away from another country or a person that’s raised in the ghetto.  Nobody gets… Like I say, nobody gets rich in the ghetto except for the drug dealer, right?  So, you have to get out of that environment, either psychologically, emotionally or physically in order to start to get a different result, and stop playing the rigged system that is set up to keep you poor, broke and dependent upon other people.  If that message can get through to them and you can actually physically show them options and strategies to do that, then the people that really want change, they will actually follow through and they’ll do it.

Dr. McDonough:
David Neagle, I really want to thank you for joining us.  David Neagle is the author of The Millions Within, and he has provided on our program tips to improve emotional intelligence.  The book you can get online—I’m assuming Amazon and other places.  I know when I was reading about it I could see all sorts of resources related to it online.

Mr. Neagle:
Right, yeah, absolutely.  They could also go to davidneagle.com.  We have a free download there called, You Were Born to be a Success, and that starts people off on the right path also.

Dr. McDonough:
David, thanks for joining us on Primary Care Today on ReachMD.  I really appreciate your time.

Mr. Neagle:
My honor to be here, Dr. McDonough.  Thank you very much.

Dr. McDonough:
I’m Dr. Brian McDonough.  I’ll talk to you next time.