Emotional Intelligence Is Too Small A Term

Emotional Intelligence Is Too Small A Term

Emotional Intelligence, in spite of its title, is much broader than emotions.  It is even broader than a set of well-developed social skills.    Emotional Intelligence encompasses a fuller constitution of personage.  It includes the soul, mind, body, and heart.  I purport that Jesus presents this fuller constitution of a person in the Bible in the book of Mark when he was asked which was the greatest commandment of the law:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with your entire mind and with all your strength.'  The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.   (Mark 12:30-31 [ESV])  (cf: Luke 10:27)

            Contained within these two verses is how we relate to ourselves personally, to our world socially, and to God spiritually.  These three components of the person overlap and are united together in a core that I think is the heart of a person.  I would like to represent this pictorially with a Venn diagram.  Each of the first three components (soul, mind, and strength) is independent.

Because all three of these are contained in the being of a human, they are not independent, but overlapping in interdependent intersections with the union of all three being the core of a person – the heart.

Upon extensive research, I am convinced that Emotional Intelligence reaches beyond psychology and sociology, and into the heart of a person.  Emotional Intelligence is encompassed within the fuller constitution of a person.  This fuller constitution of a person includes the body, soul, the mind, and the essence and center of the person – the heart.

Emotional Intelligence is only partly influenced by emotions.  Considering the fuller composition of what is now being described and included as the components of Emotional Intelligence (included in this paper), the term is a misnomer.  It is influenced by realms of the physical, rational and spiritual with the nexus of all three coming together in the fullest part of the human – the heart.  This is, perhaps, the most difficult part of the human to manage.  In the Bible the prophet Jeremiah writes “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”  (Jerimiah. 7:9 [ESV]).  

A more complete term and concept that better captures what is meant by Emotional Intelligence is what I am calling Spiritual Intelligence.  If a person’s standard intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage data, and a person’s Emotional Intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage the emotions, then Spiritual Intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage the heart.  
To find out more about Spiritual Intelligence, read more.