What is a spiritual and emotional IQ? If you would have asked me these questions before I read a lot of personal development books, I would have had no idea what you were talking about. As a result of not having this type of knowledge, my life back then was not really going in a good direction. I was just going through my life, having experiences on a day-to-day basis and those experiences were impacting me in any which way. I was confused and not really getting what I wanted out of life.

Beginning in 1998, I started to transform my thinking and my mind by reading personal development books. I started to understand themes and recurring situations that were occurring in my life. All of these were based on belief systems that I developed throughout my life. Some of these belief systems I was taught through friends, family, parents and school, while other parts came from my own experience.

One of the things these books taught me was the understanding of what a spiritual and emotional IQ is. Your spiritual and emotional IQ is essentially your ability to see a bigger picture and see cause and effect in your life at a level that’s probably far beyond what the average person would consider.

The thing is, in life, most of us believe that so much of what happens to us is just random chance. But we also tend to believe that we’re sort of destined to have life pan out a certain way. But people with a high level of spiritual IQ would say “There’s a cause and effect relationship for everything that happens in the physical universe.” And these people can see an even bigger picture than that and a more complex situation because they can understand the kind of expected outcomes.

When I started learning about spiritual and emotional IQ, I was able to see how I was spending every bit of energy, every minute of every day, and every resource that I had to create mostly everything that I didn’t want to have in my life. I spent so much time when I was younger worrying about labels because I was told I was a shy kid, so that’s the label I bought into. But it wasn’t until I raised my spiritual and emotional IQ that I started to understand that labels weren’t important.

I had the desire to do something that was outside of what my personality was, so I decided to become an entrepreneur. Thinking about what an entrepreneur is like, I thought they were almost like super people. They’ve got levels of boldness, courage and charisma that people like myself don’t have. But I changed my mindset to get out of the pigeon-hole I was in and was able to make myself the successful entrepreneur I am today.

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Shane Krider is a successful personal development life coach, producer, speaker, author and entrepreneur. Along with his wife, Shane is the co-host of Born to Prosper’s Mind Power, which which is a self-help podcast which challenges its listeners to delve deep into their minds to find success. In addition, Shane travels the world in luxury to speak to aspiring entrepreneurs at conferences and workshops to inspire them to find their own pathways to success. Shane Krider is part of The Prosperity of Life Network, a United States-based personal development business with a presence in 52+ countries.