Skills to Develop Emotional Intelligence
Skills to Develop Emotional Intelligence
An astronaut is probably the most difficult job to land on the planet.
Of tens of thousands of applications, NASA selects roughly half a dozen each decade. The application process is rigorous and highly demanding.
You have to be a total badass to qualify. You have to have deep expertise in science and engineering.
You need at least 1,000 hours of piloting experience. You have to be physically fit and strong.
And, most of all, you have to be a smart motherfucker.
Lisa Nowak was all of these things. She had a masters degree in aeronautical engineering and had studied postgraduate astrophysics at the U.S. Naval Academy.
She flew air missions for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific for over five years. And in 1996, she was one of the fortunate few to be selected to become an astronaut.
Clearly, she was smart as hell. But in 2007, after discovering that her lover was seeing another woman.
Lisa drove 15 hours straight, in a diaper, from Houston to Orlando, in order to confront her boyfriend’s new squeeze in an airport parking lot.
Lisa packed zip ties, pepper spray, and large garbage bags and had some vague-but-not-really-thought-through plan to kidnap the woman. But before she could even get the woman out of her car, Lisa had an emotional breakdown, resulting in her quickly being arrested.
Emotional intelligence is a concept researchers came up with in the 1980s and 90s to explain why intelligent people like Lisa often do really, really stupid things.
The argument went that the same way your general intelligence (IQ) is a measurement of your ability to process information and come to sound decisions, your emotional intelligence (EQ) is your ability to process emotions—both others’ and your own—and come to sound decisions.
