“Who to Listen to When You Need to Know,”
by Susan Dunn, MA, The EQ Coach
“He’s lost,” I mused to myself, starting to feel uncomfortable as I listened to the prominent minister giving a sermon to his flock one Sunday morning.
I knew the man’s personality and work habits, because I’d served on Boards with him, and worked on projects with him. I don’t mean to be saying here what makes a good minister – for one thing, it’s a mammoth job. The uninformed layperson might think in terms of “ministering to people,” while the insider would know how often it means administrating staff, and deciding whether to fix the boiler system or install new signage, then going out and raising the money, while balancing a budget larger than some CEO’s work with, but relying largely on goodwill and volunteers.
That having been said, this man was a good guy, cared about people, understood the religion he was representing, and handled the politics well. However, even with the highest degree attainable in his field from a revered institution, he didn’t have more than average intelligence, and he was lazy when it came to writing sermons.
I listened to him jumping aimlessly from topic-to-topic, then ending up somewhere and trying to find a point to make. Failing, he grabbed another topic and took off. It was disorganized and there was nothing solid going on.
He didn’t do his homework, I thought to myself. He was speaking extemporaneously, but didn’t have the charisma for it. What he was doing was making noises and filling airtime.
As the congregation filed past me at the end of the service, one of the men stopped to greet me. He shook his head sadly, and said, “He’s just too brilliant for me. Whatever he says always just goes right over my head.”
It would be a case of “baffle them with [baloney]” if it had been intentional, but it wasn’t.
It reminded me of one fine day in graduate school, in a class where we were learning to interpret what’s called projective tests. An example would be the Rorschach. It was completely beyond us at that time. As we took turns taking a stab at it, we strung together obscure phrases lifted from the textbook. Finally, like the fable of the emperor with no clothes, one student begged the professor, “Would you please just tell us what it MEANS?”
The professor replied, “It means his long suit is that he doesn’t have to understand life in order to enjoy it.”
Looks of either disappointment or disbelief shot around the room.
The professor then quoted Einstein, “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, then you don’t understand it.” (I apologize for Einstein’s use of “grandmother” in an obviously perjorative manner. That was a long time ago when, any grandmother you might know would not have been permitted to have gone to college.) He added that as we made our way into the higher levels of employment and talked with professionals in the field, we should keep in mind that things could be explained in plain English, and should be, and that we should endeavor to do that ourselves.
Some people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or don’t have, or won’t expend, the mental energy to explain something, or don’t have the emotional intelligence to speak a common language (avoiding professional jargon), will rely on what happened in that church that day: someone assumed that because the person speaking had a D. Min degree that he was brilliant, and assumed that he himself (the listener) was not, and therefore misattributed poor communication to some deficit within himself.
As an anonymous writer on a mental health website said, “Having a Ph.D. doesn’t always mean you’re intelligent, especially these days. In part it means you were persistent, knew when to keep your mouth shut, played university politics and could afford the credits. Intelligent people are clear when they speak, because they know what they are talking about and are not afraid of saying it with authority.”
Mumbling, skirting an issue, failing to be clear, quoting excessively from secondary sources, and rambling are all signs that the person you’re talking to either doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or can’t communicate, or both.
A common misconception I find when coaching people in emotional intelligence and training EQ coaches, is that if we get our own EQ high enough, relationships will be easy. It’s true that if you have developed your own EQ, you’ll have a better chance with someone whose skills are poor, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.
Our society has a long history of revering IQ (cognitive intelligence, including, for instance, “book learning), and advanced academic degrees. Unfortunately high IQ doesn’t necessarily include high EQ, and communication has more to do with EQ than IQ. A fair percentage of our “authority” figures, and the people we need to understand clearly, will fit in this category – our bosses, managers, CEOs, physicians, psychologists, consulting engineers, attorneys, expert witnesses, and judges, for instance. They may know their subject matter or they may not. They may know how to communicate or they may not. You can’t assume either.
More than once I’ve talked with a client who works for a “difficult” boss (by any definition), and is convinced if they were smarter, mentally or emotionally, they could figure out how to fix this situation, and they want me to tell them how, while often, after I’ve listened to them describe what’s going on, my answer is a question: “And why are you working there?’
Nowadays, advanced degrees can be bought online, exponentially more people have academic degrees than have in past decades, and we live in an “information” society. It isn’t clear, however, that we’re collectively “smarter,” and we can’t assume the value of any particular degree, so we have to rely on our basic instincts. It’s been said that we instinctively know when someone is speaking from real-life experience rather than memorized book-learning, but that’s only true if you’ve gotten in touch with your instincts, which is part of emotional intelligence.
As you work with others, take instructions from your workplace superiors, and seek advice from the experts in your life, keep in mind that intelligent people are clear when they speak, and people who speak clearly are intelligent - mentally and/or emotionally. Work to develop this within yourself, and assess it realistically in others. It’s such a delight to communicate with someone who knows what, but also knows how, don’t you think?
©Susan Dunn, MA,
The EQ Coach. Coaching, Internet courses and ebooks around emotional intelligence for your personal and professional development. I train and certify EQ coaches.
Email me for information on this fast, affordable, comprehensive, no-residency program.
"Most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself." 
