Can your emotions hold you back from success or wealth, or performing at your best? The quick answer is yes. Your emotional quotient or EQ is often limiting your ability to move forward and be successful in what you want to achieve. There are people who have emotions that help them to succeed and there are people who have emotions that cause them to hurt others in order to succeed. I saw an interview with George Soros on TV and he mentioned that he was unemotional about making money that money was amoral. He didn’t believe that morals applied to making money. That is probably what allows him to create great wealth. There is a scene from Citizen Kane in which the journalist is interviewing his friend and asks him about making money. And he says that its no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money.
Money is often considered one of the measures of success in a person’s life. But it is not the only measure. There are other qualities that have merit when considering how successful a person is. I think that we value other characteristics of a person when we deem them to be successful. Some of these qualities are things like love, compassion, integrity, kindness, fairness, faithfulness, courage, generosity, perseverance, as well as wealth. But we often overlook some of these other characteristics and measure success by money only. Still, for many people, success equals wealth, for example if we know of someone who is poor yet has all the other characteristics in the world’s perspective they would not consider them high on the ladder of success. Thus, many people are conflicted about their values and how to measure success.
Why? I believe that it is because of one’s emotional quotient. If we let only our emotions guide our choices, then we often will be like the person above who has no moral values when it comes to money. It may be fear or shame that is driving him to make money over the cost of his other values. This is what drives most people to do things or not do things. Their emotions override their judgements and values that should be taken into consideration.
In my book From Good to Great, I talk about the need to deal with these emotions if we want to perform at our optimum level. We are held back by emotions and it is finding and clearing up the underlying issues that created these emotional reactions that will allow us to get from good to great in our lives.