***Aging Can Help Your EQ

If you know more, have more savvy, and are more effective than you were years ago, give yourself credit for having a higher EQ.

Pat Nicolino, a corporate consultant friend, was catching me up on what had happened since I saw her in September. In short, she is having great success at turning around yet another company and has never felt better or enjoyed herself more.

“I’m 56 now and I have 20 more EQ points than when I was 36,” she said with exuberance. “At 36 I would have been clueless about how to accomplish things that I now do with ease.” Everyone knows what IQ is. EQ, she explained, is knowing how to get things done and doing them.

I love it. As you get older your experiences and new learning build on each other. Do you have more confidence than you did twenty years ago? Do you know more about how organizations work and how to work with people? Have you learned a lot of new skills in the last twenty years? If so, give yourself credit for a higher EQ (Experience Quotient).

I would suggest that at 18 the average IQ and EQ is 100. If you are continually learning and growing, give yourself credit for an additional EQ point each year since age 18. If you have gone back to school, learned a new career, or have had other intense learning experiences, give yourself extra credit.

After the insight, I realized there is a lot of overlap between experience quotient and Dr. Daniel Goleman's emotional intelligence and his eventual use of EQ for emotional intelligence. The broad skills he describes for emotional intelligence have a lot of overlap with experience quotient. The difference is an emphasis on having social intelligence vs. those skills getting better with experience.
Why is considering your EQ important? Psychology and medicine have painted a negative picture of declining skills as we age. Your EQ reminds you that you have grown, and are getting sharper with age. No disrespect to my teenage children, but would you really want to go back to the mind you had at 18? Neither would I. So what’s your EQ?