Emotional Intelligence | Stevehein.com

Yesterday I took another look at the 1990 paper written by Salovey and Mayer. I saw something I never noticed before.

In the abstract of the paper they wrote this:

a set of abilities…


Earlier in the day I was writing about the difference between potential and skills. I wrote this in what I will call my EI journal



A few days ago I re-read something else which caught my attention for the first time. It was about what Salovey and Mayer thought could be the result of “deficits” in emotional intelligence.


At this point I am feeling more and more uncomfortable with the concept of emotional intelligence which Salovey and Mayer



Another note, I looked around Jack’s website a bit more yesterday, too. I noticed two things of particular interest. One is that it is getting more personal. He talks about his mother, for example, and how she is an artist and how she influenced him. This is a little funny to me since he used to tell me that my site was too personal! So maybe I can take some credit for helping Jack loosen up a little and even maybe for helping him create his site. For years he had no site and I was the only one on the Internet who was telling people much about his work. Then David Caruso created one. But it was still a couple years later before Jack created his own site.

I felt encouraged when I saw that he was putting copies of his articles on the site. This was something I felt frustrated by before. I felt frustrated because I wanted more people to read his articles and I also wanted to be able to put copies of them or at least significant quotes from them on my site. I still feel frustrated though that he only puts pdf format copies on the site. This makes it impossible to a) search for terms within the article and b) copy text from it without re-typing it. I don’t know if Jack just created pdf files because it was easier or if he specifically didn’t want people to copy anything from the articles. If it is the latter I don’t understand why. I would like to see him make it as easy as possible for people to share his ideas as I do and as Alice Miller does, for example.

I don’t think Jack feels in need of much money so I don’t think he created pdf files to stop people from stealing his ideas and making money from them. I have thought about this with my feeling words list. Right now it is easy for people to copy the part of it I have on my site. And it is easy for them to copy the complete file if I send it to them, since I send it as a text file. If I sent it as a pdf it would be harder to copy and re-sell. I am sure that some people do re-sell it without giving me either credit as the author or without giving me any money. This bothers me a little, but obviously not enough for me to go to the trouble of figuring out how to create pdf files. I tried to do it actually and had the software for a while, but accidentally deleted it.

Now why do we spell accidentally that way when we spell publicly this way?

No one that I know says “ac ci dent al y” They say accidently. But when I spelled it that way the spell checker told me it was wrong! And the other day when I spelled publicly like this “publically” it told me that was wrong! lol

How am I supposed to explain these things to English students here?!

I usually just tell them English is makes no sense because the man who invented it was smoking marijuana.

Anyhow, back to EI, since this is supposed to be my EI journal.

Ok here is an EI type story. True, like most every story I tell about myself or what I see…

The other day Carla, who has been doing some work for me, showed up dressed much more elegantly than usual. I asked her why and she said no reason, she just felt like it.

Now I will admit something else here since only my closest friends read this site and no one like Rob Emmerling reads it to try to find information to use to hurt me.. ha ha.

Anyhow, the honest truth is that the thought went through my mind that she was dressed up because she had a job interview with someone else.

It turned out she was with me all day so my fear was evidently once again based on my insecurities rather than reality.

So the point is that this is another example of the difference between emotional intelligence and emotional insecurity. Would a more emotionally secure person, with the exact same level of innate emotional intelligence, have had this same fear and corresponding thought?

Now let’s say I was even more insecure. Let’s say I didn’t believe her when she said there was no special reason. Let’s say I said something like “That’s rubbish. You don’t just wear blue jeans one day and then a nice matching outfit like that the next day for no reason.” What might have happened next? What would this kind of distrust to do our working relationship? Fortunately we only have a working relationship because I am so insecure that I would almost surely destroy the relationship if there was anything more to it. History has proven this to me time and time again. So do I destroy my relationships out of a deficit in EI or out of deeply seeded insecurity and a lack of healthy emotional management skills?

Thus we get back to the question of whether EI is a set of skills or whether it is innate potential.

Another question for Jack to think about….

Since Laura left me I think about suicide almost every day. Does this mean my emotional intelligence went down when she left?

And when I was in my twenties most people would say I was “successful” or even highly successful. I had graduated from one of the top business schools, according to Business Week, (The University of Texas at Austin), and I graduated as a “Sord Scholar” which means the top 2 percent. I got a high paying job in a Fortune 50 company, Atlantic Richfield (Arco) Then I started my own business and within three years was making more money than I had made at Arco. I can’t remember even one time thinking of suicide when I was in my twenties. So does that mean I was more emotionally intelligent then?

Or does it mean I hadn’t really thought about things; I hadn’t traveled; I hadn’t questioned the values I had been raised with; I hadn’t thought about my feelings or felt my own pain; didn’t realize I felt judged and unaccepted by my own family; hadn’t felt robbed of love and friendship multiple times or seen people I care about treated as prisoners even though they had committed no crime; hadn’t seen children being brainwashed to turn into little Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Peruvians, Indonsians; hadn’t seen them being forced to wear little bows in their hair and socks with the name of their school on them, or ties, even for the girls, and jackets with the school pin or logo; hadn’t watched them suffer through painfully boring classes taught by people who had the power to hit and punish them almost at will; hadn’t felt alone for nights on end longing for someone to sleep next to, to listen to me, to hug me, hold me, accept me, admire me and love me; and hadn’t seen or thought about the poverty and pain as I have by this point in my life?