Some of the smartest, most successful people I know are C+ students. I say this with the utmost confidence. No caveat. No reservations. No second guessing. Elon Musk once said, “Don’t confuse schooling with education, I didn’t go to Harvard, but the people that work for me did.” Society often feels that Intellectual Quotient (IQ) supersedes Emotional Quotient (EQ) and I am here to tell you this is incorrect in more ways than one, especially in the workplace and more importantly in a leadership capacity. Therefore, in order for there to be an infrastructure of coaching or leadership, both must co-exist, with EQ taking precedence. 

Emotional intelligence requires a unique skill set. One that increases team performance, personal well being, leadership ability and improved decision making. Contrastingly, it is one that decreases occupational stress and staff turnover. It reads people well. It reads situations well. It learns from mistakes and capitalizes on these mistakes for the better. And, it is always seeking out the lesson. I am not, nor would I ever suggest, that IQ is irrelevant-it’s not. I am simply suggesting that it is not as relevant as we often make it out to be [myself included]. In my subtle, unbiased opinion, it’s important to trend hard skills, but more important to trend, traditional soft skills. Especially in the workplace. Very obvious, I know. Very unoriginal, I know. But very very true, nonetheless. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 3 kinds of smart, all important and all universal in nature. 

So here’s the recommended order of importance:

1. Street Smart

2. People Smart

3. Book Smart

Street Smart requires vision. It’s requires experience and knowledge of seeking out difficulties and potential dangers before they happen. Depending on your upbringing, you may be innate with this quality or precocious at an early age. This is simply having gut instincts or personal judgements that you trust. Street Smart is logical and pragmatic. Street Smart suggests that you have a fundamental advantage via experience and outlook. It’s inherited. It’s uprooted and genetic. I can promise you that some of the most affluent, prosperous people in the world are Street Smart because they see the angles in life that most don’t. These very same people are the "I told you so” folks that, well...”told you so.” In addition, they are skeptical, often. Street Smart folk take the tiniest, most minuscule bit of information and over analyze everything about it. And loyalty, well that is everything, all the time, without exception. It is simply understood.

People Smart. Pat O’Neill coined this term and it caught like wild fire. Know people. Know how to talk to people. Know how not to talk to people. Verbal communication and more importantly nonverbal communication. Seek to understand, then to be understood. The smarter you are with people, the {smarter} people will be with you (double entendre). But, this is more difficult than one thinks. It’s a learned craft that requires more. It requires emotional restraint, emotional channeling, or as my boss would put it, Emotional Management.  It’s not about being nice or cordial or articulate, it’s about seeing the result of decisions (right or wrong) and to what expense. If you want to see People Smart in action, track a reluctant student all day and watch how responsive he or she is to some teachers more than others. Or track a reluctant adult all day and see how they respond to some co-workers vs others. You can’t learn this stuff in a book. It requires onsite training. Trial and error. Experience. And most of all...patience. People Smart people see the result of decisions and they see the result of the result of decisions before they make them. People Smart is having empathy and sympathy, but not simultaneously. People Smart is sacrifice. People Smart is always wrong to some people; mostly to the people that are not People Smart.

Book Smart. You need to know what you’re talking about. You can’t go through life trying to convince people to buy into your brand if you’re superficial or unwilling to learn and grow, especially in education. So read. Believe me, I get it, reading is tough. But the more you read, the more you can express and articulate and present. The more you read, the more you can persuade and prompt and direct. In fact, the higher you go in your position, the more you need to know, if you want to stay in that position. Getting there is easy, staying there is a very different story. The Life Long Learner Theory holds true if you’re looking to advance. It holds true if your looking to grow. Diversification is important. Your audience should be everyone. You should want to grow for no one other than yourself. Book Smart means re-inventing yourself through knowledge, which as we know is wisdom and power.

That’s a lot. When you think about about it, people are really Smart. Many are fortunate to be multiple levels of Smart. Just because they don’t talk a particular way or write a particular way or have particular letters after their name doesn’t mean they don’t possess a quintessential skill set. They do, we’re just not appreciating it as much as we should. Which brings us to our students....

~Rob 🐺