As a therapist one of the most interesting books that I have personally read in the last ten years has to be 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Golman, himself a psychologist. This was a book that was long overdue in coming in my humble opinion. It gets right down to the real reasons why people succeed (or fail) which has nothing to do with their education or social background by the way. The main crux of the book is that people who succeed, not necessarily financially either, use their emotional intelligence rather than just pure logic.

This basically means that people who reach their goals do so by being able to change personally held beliefs and changing their approach to a goal until it is met. Being able to recognize ones own emotions, feelings and reactions to life's hurdles is what is meant by having emotional intelligence. However, the most important thing to remember when hearing this is that most of this can be learnt by the majority of people if they know how.

Neuro-linguistic programming, developed by a linguistics professor and computer scientist in the late 1970s, is such a method for improving emotional intelligence for many. The originators of this school of thought made keen observations on how people were able to change their beliefs and behaviors with minimal effort and they modeled these skills and were able to impart them to others.

For example if we understand the belief change cycle that naturally occurs in our lives we can see that it has a definite structure behind it. this sequence usually starts with a firm belief held by a person that can then change to be open to doubt its validity which then moves to being open to believe something new which then finally moves to a totally new belief based on new evidence or a new frame of reference that they have developed.

Heres a real life example to further explain the above process. for many people when they are children they are taught to believe in Santa Claus because their parents told them, the first frame of reference, then at times they realize that something is not quite right and that someone may be placing the presents there. this stage is where they become open to doubt. Finally it dawns on them that the presents are being put there bu mum and dad and so they become open to believe something entirely new until their suspicions are finally confirmed and they have a totally new belief system operating.

Now NLP has developed some great methods for handling and changing negative or unwanted beliefs that we may have accumulated or learnt during our lifetimes. the techniques allow us to gently and respectfully alter our acquired belief to something else that is much more empowering and useful so that we don't have to keep running the old patterns that hindered our lives in some way.

Knowing that there is ways and means of altering our behavior and erroneous belief systems can be empowering in itself. Many of us need to update our beliefs that hold us back at times and this is a good use of emotional intelligence and can help us tremendously in the day to day management of our lives.

I suggest you buy a basic NLP book to start with and read it a few times to get more understanding of the simple power of this methodology and then locate an NLP coach by searching the internet. It could be a decision that changes your life.