A children’s rope-skipping rhyme, “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief”

came to mind as I reflected on four recent HCI webcasts and interviews on how EI competencies benefit multiple occupations:

Law enforcement      Retail      Sales    Leadership

Given that EI “enables a person to demonstrate intelligent use of their emotions in managing themselves and working with others to be effective at work” it stands to reason that all of these professions would draw on EI competencies.

What critical competencies did people in these professions learn to be successful? 

If you’re a movie buff or fan of fictional stories based on fact, you may recall the story of “The Great Imposter”   where Ferdinand Waldo Demara  taught himself a number of professions and performed quite well in all of them.  Demara obviously figured out how to continuously learn new competencies.  In today’s knowledge economy, people have more career shifts and changes within their working lifetime than was the case 2-3 decades ago, and tend to change jobs every two years. This statistic referenced in the Boston Globe suggests that “change is good for stoking your passion”.
People who are passionate about self-development and self-directed learning are pre-disposed to make the best use of coaching and company investments in their competency development.   Richard Boyatzis  authored an enlightening article on the EI consortium about “Unleashing the Power of Self-Directed Learning”   He says that most behavioral change is intentional, and that the starting point is the discovery of who you want to be.  

Boyatzis suggests three steps that are critical to a self-directed learning process: 
(1) Experiment and practice to learn more from your experiences
(2) Find settings that feel safe within which to experiment and practice
(3) Develop and use your relationships as part of your change and learning process
Boyatzis reminds us that most of what we become is within our power to create, and offers a thought from the 1835 John Anster translation of Goethe’s Faustus: A Dramatic Mystery. In the Prologue to the Theater :

“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it, Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
Here are four related questions for your thoughts and comment that I invite you to explore:
1. Where does the passion needed to successfully change jobs come from?
2. How does one learn critical competencies to move into a new job?
3. What does EI have to do with success in any number of occupations?
4. How does EI faciliatate self-directed and other learning?