Trevor Moawad is an author and mindset coach who works with some of the nation’s top college and professional athletes. His expertise and gift for storytelling have made him a  featured guest on numerous sports and personal development podcasts.

In one recent interview, he relayed a story his father told him about one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world and the serendipitous experience that transformed his life.

An under-achiever in high school, this young man was failing most of his classes, hanging out with the wrong crowd, and was about to get expelled. The only thing that kept him from dropping out was a promise he made to his single mom that he would take the SAT.

After taking the test in the spring of his junior year, to his dismay, he scored a  whopping 1480 out of 1600.

Shocked at his performance, his mom asked him, “Did you cheat? You must have cheated.”  He confessed that he actually tried to cheat, but the spacing of chairs was too far and made it impossible.

That’s how surprised he was.

Armed with this new self-realization, something changed in his approach to high school as he entered his senior year. He began to think: “If I’m smart, I might as well go to class.”

So he started applying himself and attending classes. He stopped hanging out with his old crowd. His teachers took notice and started to treat him differently.

After graduating high school, he attended community college, then transferred to an Ivy League University, and eventually went on to become a successful magazine entrepreneur.

Great story, right?  The life lesson: “He’s smart. He just needed the standardized test to unlock his hidden potential.”

But this isn’t the story. What comes next is the most important part.

Twelve years later the man received a letter in the mail from Princeton, New Jersey. The letter explained that the SAT board periodically reviews their test-taking policies and procedures.

He was 1 of 13 people sent the wrong SAT score.

His actual score was 740–half of the score he thought he received!

“People think that 1480 changed my life,” the man reflected, “but what really changed my life was acting like 1480.”

Amazing.

To most people, the message reveals the power of our beliefs in shaping our actions, which shape our lives.

And while this is true, to me, the real point of the story is how “smart” is overrated.

Ever since the study of human intelligence was formalized around 1900, IQ (cognitive capacity) was considered the biggest predictor of how we do in life.

We tend to equate “smart” people with high achievement, happiness, and overall well-being.

Yet research shows that IQ predicts a relatively small portion of personal and professional success.

If this is true, is there a better, more reliable internal indicator, or is success in life more a function of external factors like upbringing, education, and life experience?

Emotional Intelligence: Another Kind of Smart

We’ve been taught to view cognition (rational thinking) and emotion as completely separate human functions for the vast majority of human history.

Greek philosophers argued that emotions were erratic, idiosyncratic sources of information and should not be trusted. And up until the mid-20th century, emotions have been viewed as an internal interference that gets in the way of sound judgment.

Growing up, we were often admonished by parents and teachers to stifle or downplay our emotions.

“Get over it.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen.”
“Big boys don’t cry.”

Then as adults, we tend to view emotions with trepidation or even fear.

If you accepted a job with a new company, for example, and they described your new boss as “highly emotional,” would you be excited or concerned?

But then science began to be challenged beginning in the 1970s as psychologists started to realize the limitations of cognitive ability in explaining the differences in people and their life outcomes.

Decades later, researchers Peter Salovey and John Meyer introduced a new form of intelligence which they defined as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s own thinking and actions.”

They termed it “Emotional Intelligence,” the assumptions of which were increasingly backed by new research into neuroscience.

Consider these three observations on emotions from the research:
1. Every sensory experience we encounter must first travel through our brain’s limbic system (the emotional center) before entering the other neural pathways. That means we have an emotional reaction to every conscious experience before we can ever deal with it rationally.
2. The average person experiences up to 400 discernable emotions every day, each of which can produce a different reaction.
3. According to Travis Bradbury, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, emotional intelligence accounts for 58% of performance in all types of jobs. It is the single biggest predictor of performance at work, and it subsumes most all other important skills, such as time management, decision making, and communication.

Perhaps the best news: Unlike IQ, which is fixed from birth, EQ (the metric by which we assess emotional intelligence) is malleable–a skill that can be improved with deliberate practice.

Conclusion: Emotions drive performance.

Emotions play a more prominent role than cognitive intelligence in our decision-making, creativity, problem-solving, social relations, and physical health.

And our ability to understand, manage and optimize our emotions lies within our circle of control.

Yet, despite all the evidence, we still tend to think of intelligence and emotion as coming from two completely separate parts of our bodies–one from the head, and the other from the heart.

And which of the two have we been conditioned to trust more? (Spoiler alert: It’s the head.)

Your Mood Matters

In an experiment conducted at Yale University (Yale has its own Center for Emotional Intelligence!), teachers were divided into two groups.

One was told to remember and write about positive classroom experiences, and the other was assigned to recall a negative memory.

Then, all were asked to grade the same middle school essay.

The positive-mood group marked the essay a full grade higher than the negative-mood group.

But what’s most interesting is when researchers asked the teachers if they believed their moods affected how they evaluated the papers,  87% replied, “No way.”

The Big Idea: When it comes to presenting the best version of ourselves, emotions matter…a lot.

Your IQ has much less of an influence on your life than your EQ. Specifically, our emotional state at any given moment directs your mood which influences your behavior which, in turn, shapes the quality of your relationships, your performance at work, your health, and ultimately, the legacy you will leave.

How would you describe your understanding of your emotional make-up?

Growing up, were you taught to recognize and manage feelings?

Would others describe you as emotional, unemotional, or somewhere in between?

Have you ever considered the impact of your feelings and moods on your work performance, social life, and overall sense of well-being?

What would it mean to the quality of your life if you worked to improve your emotional intelligence?

I’d love to hear your feedback.

Next up: “What are the specific skills of emotional intelligence and how can I improve my EQ?” That’s what I will unpack in Part 2!