Okay - Emotional Intelligence, your emotional quotient (EQ) - I’ll go with EQ from here on in.

Interesting topic.

Not gonna lie, I have a compulsive habit of taking concepts I usually see in the context of Harvard Business Review and Googling: “Criticisms of [insert concept here].”

(Here's a good one, and another interesting one)

My passing acquaintance with scary looking French philosophers like Michel Foucault, awareness that we live in a reality now pretty much completely mediated through neoliberalism’s vernacular of measurement, standardisation, rationalisation and optimisation, leads me to immediately think - uh oh, EQ, here are some probably decent, but actually common sense, sets of practises that have been packaged up into PowerPoints and “Key Takeaways” and sold to corporate boardrooms for hefty $.

Turns out - yeah, that’s pretty much what has happened with Emotional Intelligence.

EQ, sadly, I think at a broad level, has taken habits and practices (mindfulness, listening well, reflection and interrogation of the things we feel) which are practises that serve to make us human and, hopefully, serve to make ourselves and those around us feel more good/less bad, and turned it into a way to “optimise” (I don’t like this term when applied to humans) and sort of made all managerial and weird.

But! But but but. I don’t wanna be the turtleneck wearing, Foucault wannabe, pouring postmodern cynicism and Chardonnay all over everyone’s parade.

I do think the actual habits/practices above and the things outlined in the EDA blog are good things, they aren’t new things, in fact, they are actually probably ancient things and present all over the world before some guy from Yale called it Emotional Intelligence and sold it as a boxed set. But whatever you want to call them: being mindful, reflecting, sitting with the sensations - physically and emotionally - that we experience, listening well without needing to respond, turning over memories, thoughts and really following the meanderings of our mind - is a bloody lovely thing to do as a human experiencing, as fully as we can, our humanness - not just trying to nail a job interview.

I think it’s good to remind ourselves that, hey, don’t worry about optimisation, you’re not a robot or a piece of software or, I don't know, a Toyota.

Don’t optimise.

Stay messy and real and then just try and do the things like those in the EDA handbook or those above or other things you do that can’t be labelled easily but feel like they are helping you cope, connect, feel good, feel closer to being wholly human - you know those generally good things.

So yeah, here’s to not optimising ourselves!