Extreme Emotional Quotient Questions

Do you enjoy thought provoking questions like:

• Is the glass half empty or half full?
• What came first? The chicken or the egg?
• Are you comfortable in crowds or do you prefer solitude?
• Do you like to read or would you rather have someone read to you?
• Do you live one day at a time or live contemplating the future?
• After a long day at work upon returning home do you take off your shoes and throw them haphazardly or do you place them neatly in their appropriate place?
• Do you have pity on the homeless or do they frustrate you when you are approached for help?
• Do you feel more at ease when someone looks into your eyes when they are talking to you or does peace come when they look away?
• Do little children make you smile or do they usually annoy you?
• When you see a stranger in tears do you inquire or do you walk past them believing their tears are a sign of weakness?
• Do you feel faith in God is critically important or merely a crutch?
• Do you feel uneasy when an author starts an article by asking you so many personal questions?

Welcome to this month’s Home Cures That Work topic: Emotional Quotient or EQ!

Before we dive into the pool of self-discovery, I think it would be helpful to define the words, emotion and quotient. 

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines,

• emotion as: a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood or relationships
• quotient as: a degree or amount of a specified quality

IQ 101 and EQ 101

In the late fifties, the term IQ became extremely popular in the American culture even though a French psychologist, Alfred Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon developed the first IQ test in the early 1900s. Binet and Simon created a number of questions that focused on things that had not been taught in school such as attention, memory and problem solving skills.

By using their test, Binet and Simon quickly discovered that some of the younger children scored higher than some of the older children proving to them that the concept of a “mental” age or a measure of intelligence based on the average abilities of children of a certain age group were valid. The first IQ test, referred to today as the Binet-Simon scale, has been used in the military since WWI and though many other psychologists have claimed they have improved the test it is still considered the standard today. Enter EQ!

Maybe your thinking, IQ or EQ, what’s the difference?

• Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a measurement of a person’s organic intelligence relating to logical reasoning, memory, word comprehension and problem solving.
• Emotional quotient (EQ) is a modality for measuring a persons ability to recognize emotions in themselves and in others and can determine how they will perform under stress at work and as a team player.

Many people with a high IQ may possess a low EQ, which in layman’s terms means, very intelligent but does not function well with others. Unlike IQ, EQ is a relatively new discovery coined by two psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer in 1990.

Sometime in the 1990s, Daniel Goleman became aware of Salovey and Mayer’s work, which led to his book, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman’s bestseller really helped bring attention to EQ as a new benchmark for human evaluation.

Divine Diagnostic Test

Now with this brief history behind us we can talk on a more educated level. As useful as these tests are, they are still created by humans for humans. I would like to direct your attention to a far more accurate divine diagnostic test that is assessed by our creator!

In Genesis 2:7 we read,

“The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.”

At the advent of man, God breathes (n’shamah) into an inanimate pile of dirt and creates (bara) an animate soul (nephesh).

Now remember, just prior to the advent of man was the concept of man,

“Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, in Our likeness.”’ Genesis 1:26,

Lets stop there…did you see it? God just breathed into a dirt mound and a soul came to life that was in the image of God? Think about it! A soul – the epicenter of mans thought, will and emotions – brought to life with God’s breath!

Ok, here we go…

“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and Godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness.

Through these He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption of the world caused by evil desires.

For this reason make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self control; and to self control, perseverance; and to perseverance, Godliness; and to Godliness, brotherly kindness and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 2 Peter 1:3-4

Now most would agree that the above mentioned scripture boasts some amazing attributes that man is already capable of performing as a believer, right?

• Pinterest

Here is the Extreme Question

Why do men still look to creation for answers instead of their Creator? 

Lets say you purchase a new computer and you don’t fully understand its potential. Would you rather ask another consumer who owns the same model what it is capable of or ask its designer?

In the movie, The Matrix, Neo is taken to visit the oracle to find out if he is the “one” who will save mankind. When Neo is confronted by the oracle, there is a great lesson for all of us… Behind his back is a plaque that reads,“Know Thyself” but Neo can’t see it because he is too focused on the oracle standing before him! The oracles job was to get Neo to know himself, think for himself and do what he was already empowered to do.

Today in America, people are sadly empowering others to tell them who they are, think for them and do for them what they should do for themselves!

An ideology that believes that a bigger government is what people need is empowering the government and limiting the peoples freedom to think and choose what is best for them, it is easy to let someone choose for you but it will cost you…a lot!

Here’s another example of emplowering someone else to think for yourself…The life coach. Ok, somehow in the last 20 years we have suddenly become incapable of managing our own lives. Therefore, we hire another human to do it for us…it’s easy and will also cost us…a lot!

Now here’s another good example of emplowering someone to do what we should do for ourselves: personal shopper. Yep, that’s right folks. In the last 20 years, we’ve become too busy and important to shop for ourselves so we make another human busy buying our food, clothes and our families Christmas and birthday presents and because now they are too busy buying our stuff they have to hire someone with the money they made from us to buy their stuff… Oh yeah, it’s so easy but it too will cost you…a lot!

When I mentioned the inherent power of life and Godliness spoken of in 2 Peter 1:3-4 it hinged upon “the knowledge of Him” – not them!

• When I say them I am talking about the human consortium seen and unseen, known and unknown.
• When I mention Him, I am speaking of the Author of Life itself, the Alpha and Omega, the Aleph and the Tov, the opening statement and the last word. I am, of course, speaking of Jesus Christ!

You see, if you let man run you life, then the best you can hope for is soulish information based on the experiences of other people… you may also be MANipulated in the process.

I am amazed how easily people are controlled by others; we become what we believe.

Have you ever read a magazine article that starts with, “By age forty you should have deep crows feet in the corner of your eyes.” What was your response? Most people run immediately to the mirror and say, “OMG! They were right!”

My immediate response was, “Who is they?” If you believe “they” are right, then your wrinkles will show up for you! If you understand that “they” represent human talking heads, that make up statistics by looking at a test group of people, and that “they” sell magazines and cosmetics for the companies that buy advertisement in their magazine, then you will no longer put faith in “they.” Then you will enjoy the knowledge of Him and all things pertaining to life and Godliness in Him…not them!

In an among themselves, there is nothing evil about, EQ tests, life coaches, personal shoppers or human government. Even though these help systems can be beneficial, you just don’t want to depend on someone else living your life for you! They are innately human systems, at best.

The Ultimate Intelligence

As humans we are constantly reinventing the wheel and unless we discover the wheel outside the wheel, the world outside our world, and the government outside of man’s government, we will only see what “they” want us to see, think what “they” want us to think and believe what “they” want us to believe…

Read these words penned by King Solomon,

“All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new?’ It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. Ecclesiastes 1:8-10

The only thing older than a human soul is its creator.  So, we can depend on an EQ test to know ourselves or we can ask the extreme question,

“Should I depend on man or man’s creator?” 

Your answer will change your life… one way or the other.

“Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.” 3 John 1:2

Till next month,

Michael

1. As a musician, EQ means tone equalization, ie, Bass, Midrange, Treble. If your controls were Body, Soul, Spirit on a scale of 1-10, how would you be tuned today?

2. Who coined the phrase, “Know Thyself?”

3. What is more accurate: perspective or proximity?