Book Reviews: Emotional Intelligence by Michael Garron

Happy Sunday, everyone! Ready for another Manic Monday tomorrow? Me neither. Who really wants to deal with the start of a new week? The stress, the anxiety, the insanity, it’s all but impossible to handle our own emotions, let alone deal with anyone else’s. And yet that’s exactly what we must do, day in and day out, if we want to be successful in our work lives, social lives, and personal lives. It’s this sort of mania which has led me to bring you a book especially on dealing with emotions today: Emotional Intelligence: The Complete Guide to Improving Thoughts, Behavior, Relationships and Social Skills (The EQ Book) by Michael Garron.

Emotional Intelligence discusses just about everything one can think of in regards to emotional intelligence: the advantages and abilities a high EQ (Emotional Quotient) can give you; how you can develop your EQ; managing self-awareness and relationships; reading body language; collaboration and conflict management; building trust and accountability; the pitfalls of low EQ; and so on. This book provides you with all the information necessary for understanding what EQ is and what it can do for you as well as tips for improving your EQ and what you should avoid in order to keep your EQ sharp. At 318 pages, it’s a thorough and complete guide to the issue of interacting with your emotions and the emotions of others.

This book covers a wide variety of topics. In addition to the information mentioned above, it also discusses meditation, mindfulness, journaling, the issues of multitasking and how to avoid them, and examples to go along with each concept. In fact, I think that Garron could have easily grouped some of the chapters together and expanded upon them to make multiple books rather than one long guide. That may have made for an easier read, too, and people wouldn’t be so intimidated by a nonfiction guide over 300 pages long.

Still, the thoroughness of Garron’s writing and research is one of the biggest strengths of this book. Unfortunately, it’s also one of its biggest downfalls. Garron often uses a lot of words to describe very simple concepts. Garron also becomes repetitive at points, and this combined with the verbose writing style lost me many times. However, the information is useful enough that I pushed through any confusion or boredom to get it all, even re-reading multiple sentences to ensure that I understood it all.

The examples Garron provides really helped me understand most of the concepts better. I particularly latched onto the example given for the “attachment” concept, most likely because I saw myself in it. (I have a bit of a hoarding issue…she says as though it’s only a small problem.) Everyone will find at least one example they can relate to in this book, and so I’m sure that everyone can mine some nuggets of wisdom from Garron’s advice.

Writers will find Emotional Intelligence to be a surprisingly useful guide, at least the part on non-verbal cues and reading body language. That section discusses such things as physical signs that people are experiencing a particular emotion, i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, anxiety, etc. These lists of signs, I think, are handy guides for writers who have a hard time being able to show a character’s emotions rather than telling them. Some of them are obvious—I found the happiness signs to be rather self-explanatory—but they are still good to refer to when you find yourself using the same sorts of gestures and body language for an emotion time after time.

Overall, Emotional Intelligence by Michael Garron is a helpful read for those looking to become more empathetic and gain better control of their emotions. For those of us with more extreme emotional issues—for instance, I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder—it might be more difficult to apply the book’s advice in real time, but practicing the techniques outside of real-life situations might make these situations easier to handle when they do occur. Keep in mind that this guide is not a light read and it necessitates more than one reading, both to ensure you understand it fully and to continue to grow your EQ as you get older. However, it will be worth the extra time in the end once you see all your relationships—work, social, and with yourself—and your life in general improve.

You can buy Emotional Intelligence by Michael Garron as an e-book or in print on Amazon.

Do you know of any books I should read? E-mail me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com and let me know!