"The CEO knew emotion was smart. By trusting himself about whether things felt right or wrong, he'd risen from summer intern to global titan, becoming head of a corporation whose revenue touched half a trillion dollars. But now that he'd reached the top, he didn't know how to spread his emotional intelligence to his team. His managers, his employees, and his C-suite all preferred data and metrics.
Attempting to open their minds, the CEO had spent lavishly on a weeklong course designed to activate EQ. EQ does for emotion what IQ does for intelligence: distills it to logic. Logic runs on identities and equations, so EQ encourages us to identify our emotions in other people, allowing us to equate their feelings with ones we've experienced ourselves: That man is feeling scared. I can identify, because I've felt scared before. Let me guide him through his fear by pinpointing and dispelling the source of his anxiety, like I would do for myself.
The EQ course had been marketed as a surefire way to make execs better communicators, managers, and decision-makers. But it had disappointed the CEO. It had empathized the benefits of empathy and the dangers of anger yet had produced no real changes in his team's behavior. That's why the CEO was calling me, hopeful but wary. He'd heard I had a different approach to emotional intelligence, field-tested in elite military units.
This was true. At the request of US Army Special Operations, I'd developed an EQ alternative. Instead of being logical, it was biological, based on the brain connection between emotion and story. That connection is why the narratives of films and novels touch our feelings, prompting joy, sorrow, and other sentiments that we don't get from a spreadsheet."
