Emotional Intelligence: Why Your Teen Needs EQ More Than IQ to Succeed

You want your children to leave the nest one day, confident and self-sufficient. You won't always be able to protect them and walk them through every difficulty, nor should you. You want them to be able to financially support themselves, have good friends and relationships, to be healthy, and to handle what comes in healthy ways. How do you help them to be ready for a successful and satisfying life?

It helps to know a little about EQ, Emotional Intelligence. It is defined as "a measure of a person's adequacy in such areas as self-awareness, empathy and dealing sensitively with other people."

With all the focus on grades and achievement, EQ gets lost in the IQ shuffle. Psychologists agree that when it comes to success ingredients in life and career, IQ counts for 10-25%, while EQ is responsible for the rest (up to 90%)!

First, a little more information on EQ, and then we'll focus on the pieces that you need, now. Here are the five categories of emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness - the ability to recognize emotions as you feel them is the number one element of EQ. When you tune in to your true feelings, you can learn to understand them and manage them.

2. Self-regulation - Emotions happen, but it's up to you for how long and how intensely they stick around.

3. Motivation - Accomplishing any goals requires a plan and a good attitude, all key to finding the motivation to complete the work. This includes reframing negativity into more positive terms.

4. Empathy - The ability to recognize how people feel, and acknowledge those feelings, is critical for healthy relationships, be they social, business or intimate.

5. Social Skills - We all have instant access to information and technology, so there's nothing unique there. It's the people with great interpersonal skills that will tip the scales to success.

Our focus must be on #1 and #2, self-awareness and self-regulation. (They are in the first two spots for a reason -- you can't have 3, 4 and 5 without them.) Unfortunately, these are not areas of strength for teens. They are busy figuring out how they fit into their new, expanding world. A teen's (normal) all-about-me perspective does not include introspection and self-examination (self-awareness) and they are mostly reactive (lack of self-regulation).

This doesn't come naturally. But just because it doesn't come naturally doesn't mean they can't learn it. It's up to you, us, parents, to teach them and walk them through it.