Have you ever questioned your abilities, your potential or your intelligence when facing a challenge? It is possible that you may even have dismissed an opportunity for fear of your intellectual capacity to reach a goal.
And though the common thought is that success depends on our intellectual capacity, the Nobel Prize winner James Heckman and his team of researchers have proved otherwise in their latest study, in which they tracked intellectual capacity record data, standardised personality tests results and the categorisation into different educational levels of hundreds of people in the UK, the USA and the Netherlands.
This way, they established the relationship between these elements and success based on each person’s earnings: the result astonished more than one of them, as only between 1% and 2% of the people assessed had an above-average IQ. The study also found that personality traits such as persistence or curiosity better predict the personal and professional outcomes that people experience in their adult life.
Further research by Heckman shows that it is possible to teach people from a young age the skills and habits that are connected with successfulness in adult age, leaving aside the idea that our behaviour is inflexible, as it can adapt to unexpected circumstances and events.
Read more about the biology of habits
Aim at Behavioural Intelligence!
We define the term “behavioural intelligence” as the ability to think, get energised and respond in an effective way, simplifying the answers, to our surroundings. Studies show that intelligent behaviour is that which is adaptive to the context, meaning that a human being is intelligent when they can differentiate between adaptive behaviours according to each specific environment and function with the appropriate level of behavioural activation, showing different psychological and sociological aspects. In addition, experts claim that the standards of intelligent behaviour are personal persistence, interpersonal coherence and output differentiation.
This article is an invitation to doing some introspective work, through which you can discover your own behavioural profile, decision making, leadership and sales style and motivators through the PDA Assessment, a tool which does not classify behavioural profiles as “good or bad”, but describes the characteristics of each individual person.
