7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence
Patrick Merlevede, Denis Bridoux & Rudy Vandamme
Crown House   ISBN 189983650-0
What a great idea for a book - utterly wasted.
This book suffers from two truly fatal flaws in a book about "emotional intelligence":

1. It isn't about emotional intelligence
2. The text is written with a complete absence of "emotional intelligence"

This book was originally published in Belgium (1999) as 7 Lessen in Emotionale Intelligentie, and then translated and expanded with the assistance of Denis Bridoux for publication in the UK (2001).  I mention this because a significant part of the book's awfulness rests, in my opinion, with the total lack of effective editing.

Given that none of the three authors is British or American, and none of them has English as their first language, I would have thought that the publishers would make careful editing a number one priority.  But apparently not.  As a consequence the book is written in a rather hectoring style that is probably (and I mean this quite seriously) wholly acceptable in France and Belgium.  But to use that same style in a book aimed at an Englsh-speaking, and significantly different culture, shows, in my opinion, a very poor understanding of the target audience.  It shows, in fact, a lack of emotional intelligence, and is surely something the publishers should have spotted and advised the authors about the moment the idea of publishing the book in the UK was considered.

Some competent editing should also have been applied to the final draft of the book, since the copy I have in front of me is well-stocked with grammatical errors such as:

'An answer you could receive might be, for example: "If I fail, I am not worth living." '
(page 88.   Italics as in the original)

And basic inconsistencies such as this warning:

'Because the question "why?" invites a rationalization, aim to avoid using it.'
(page 91, and see also page 264)

almost immediately followed by the instruction to "explore emotions and the values which hide behind them" by asking questions such as:

"Why do you have this emotion?"
(page 92)

and:

"Why do you deduce that ...?"
(page 92)

As a side note, it was interesting to find that Michael L. Hall, in his review of this book on the Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk website - taken from his own Neuro-Semantics Newsletter - writes:

'Unafraid to ask the "why" question, the authors ...'

"Unafraid to ask"?  Looks more like "Thoroughly confused about whether to ask the 'why' question", if you ask me.

An editor might also have pointed out that although the authors assert that:

"We designed our chapters as independent units, so that you can read them separately in whatever order you like.""
(page 4)

the fact is that the text contains so many references out to other chapters - both backwards and forwards - it isn't easy to read the book sequentially from front to back (or back to front), let alone as "independent units".

And surely they would have checked the Index where, for example, there are no less than 92 entries for the word "Other".  Who, I wonder, thought that "other" belonged in the index at all?
Just how ludicrous this "indexing" is can be judged by the number of references to multiple pages.  In the case of "other" the longest reference is to pages "227-238".  Normally a multiple page listing means that the named topic is the main subject being discussed in that block of pages.  In this index it simply means that the word or phrase appears, often in a variety of contexts (e.g. "other person", "other perceptual positions", "other people", "other hand", "each other", "other cases", etc.), on a number of adjacent pages (e.g. from 227 to 238 inclusive).

As to the charge that this book is not about emotional intelligence - it is actually nothing more than yet another overview of NLP - consider the following evidence:

Daniel Goleman acknowledges in all of his books on EI that most of what he is writing about is derived from other people's work, including the late David McClelland (Harvard U.), Peter Salovey (Yale U.) and John Mayer (U. of New Hampshire), Reuven Bar-On (Institute of Applied Intelligence), and Richard Boyatzis (Case Western Reserve U.).  Merlevede and his co-authors, however, ignore everyone except Goleman and Salovey, and even they get only 10 mentions between the two of them (according to the index), in a book that is nearly 400 pages long.
Incidentally, in a book that has pretensions to professional respectability, to name only one author of a co-authored article or book - in this case the team of Mayer and Salovey - is an unacceptable breach of etiquette.

By the same token, in Goleman's 1998 book Working with Emotional Intelligence, Table 1 (pages 26-27) - The Emotional Competence Framework - there is a list 25 emotional competencies divided up under five sub headings, which in turn are grouped under two main headings: Personal Competence and Social Competence.  In other words, Goleman provides us with a total of 32 competencies and headings.  Yet a search of the index of 7 Steps..., reveals just seven matches, including only three of Goleman's sub headings and neither of the main headings, and one of the sub headings is only mentioned in passing!

The authors' own explanation is that they have based their work on Peter Salovey's [sic] original definition rather than Goleman's.  Which would be a lot more credible if it weren't for the following facts:

• We are told (pages 8 and 353) that Peter Salovey defined "emotional intelligence", yet the model actually made its first appearance in an article called Emotional Intelligence, written jointly by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer (in Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9, 1990)
• In the whole of 7 Steps... Salovey is mentioned just three times.  Mayer isn't mentioned at all.  But Daniel Goleman is mentioned 7 times!
• We know that Goleman based his definition of EI on the Salovey and Mayer model, yet we are told (page 11) that Goleman uses "vague terms such as perseverence, self-confidence, enthusiasm and self-motivation" to which "The definition of Peter Salovey ... adds self-awareness and empathy" (italics added)?
  What on earth is this supposed to mean?  The terms "self-awareness" and "empathy" are sub-headings in Goleman's 1998 model, in which Goleman was adding to, or at least expanding upon, Salovey and Mayer's definition, not the other way round.
• Despite claiming Salovey's work [sic] as their starting point, the authors never tell us what the Salovey & Mayer 1990 model looked like, nor do they even mention the fact that the model was "enlarged, clarified and [re-organised]" for presentation in the 1997 book, Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence Implications for Educators (Basic Books, New York.  pp.3-31).  In fact there is no reference to anything Mayer and Salovey have done after 1990.
• The authors mention Salovey once or twice, yet use only Goleman's 5 stage model (see top of page 353), and 7 Steps... itself is divided into seven lessons, based around a totally NLP-oriented agenda.
• The list at the top of page 354 strongly suggests that the real basis for 7 Steps... is Cameron-Bandler & Lebeau's work The Emotional Hostage, which is mentioned several times elsewhere in the book, including a full review on page 362.

• In the section Bibliography and Further Reading, 10 NLP books are both listed and reviewed, Goleman's first two books (Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence at Work) are just listed, and none of Salovey and Mayer many articles and books appear at all!

I personally find it difficult to believe that the authors actually know what Emotional Intelligence is.  Thus in Lesson 2, after a brief exercise on how to learn to accept a compliment, we find this comment:

"Incidentally, if you feel wicked enough you could apply this even to false compliments, receiving them as if they were real and kindly meant.  There is nothing more disarming than paying somebody a false compliment, expecting the person to feel the hidden barb and be wounded by it, and instead to see it accepted as if it was true, and even honestly reciprocated!  That would be real Emotional Intelligence, now wouldn't it?"
(pages 87-88)

No, it would not be "real Emotional Intelligence", leastways not by any standard I know of.  More like dishonest oneupmanship.

So if it isn't about EI, how does the book stack up as yet another review of NLP?
In a world already awash with books on the basics of NLP, 7 Steps... adds little or nothing to our existing knowledge.  Moreover, despite the fact that all three authors list themselves as experienced trainers, they have apparantly decided that, contrary to popular opinion, (and their own advice, see page 131), the best way to eat an elephant is to cut it into very large chunks.  Thus, as mentioned before, the bulk of the text has been shoe-horned into just seven "lessons", which range in length from 31 pages to 65 pages (most being in the low 40's).
Nor does the officious, pseudo-academic style of the writing and the confused and confusing organisation of the text add anything to the reading experience.  For example:

• Although "anchoring" is frequently mentioned, we are never told exactly how to create an anchor.  When should the trigger be set and released, for instance?
• On page 64 (lesson 1) we are instructed to carry out an activity not covered until Lesson 3.
• On page 140 the authors launch into a discussion of "some cases of alcohol abuse we have worked on."  In fact they refer, rather briefly, to a single case - in the middle of which is an advertising spot for the subject of "meta-states" - after which the discussion breaks off entirely (page 141), never to return to the subject of alcohol abuse again.
• The authors also claim that L. Michael Hall's "discovery of Meta-States is revolutionizing the field of neurolinguistics" (page 141, footnote 2).  In reality, however, Hall's work on "meta states" seems to have had very little impact on NLP as a whole.  And in any case, how come these authors apparently don't know that Gregory Bateson was addressing the subject of meta-states (being angry about being angry, etc.) at least as far back as the early 1970's?
• Another classic is the observation in the section on calibration:

  "Tests carried out using oscilloscopes ... have shown that ... the voice of people in a resourceful state is clearly displayed as a rounded sine wave, the voice of people in unresourceful states is displayed as a saw-tooth shape."
  (page 308)

  But what is the point of this information?  Are the authors saying we should take to using oscilloscopes whenever we need to do some calibrating?

As to the accuracy of the presentation of NLP, the authors and editors seem to be unaware of such basics as the significance of the hyphen in "neuro-linguistic" which is absent throughout most of the book.  Indeed, in the index "neuro-linguistic" and "neurolinguistic" are treated as though they were synonymous.
Just for the record, according to Alfred Korzybski, the hyphen serves the function of showing that the labels neuro (i.e. neurology) and linguistics refer to two separate entities brought together as the title of an interactive process which occurs within the wider context of the process called neuro-linguistic programming.  When the hyphen is removed the resulting term "neurolinguistic" is, in fact, a nominalisation, in which content takes precedence over process.  It's a common enough error amongst newcomers to NLP, but not very re-assuring from people who claim some degree of expertise in the subject.
And this certainly isn't the only place where the authors have apparently "lost the plot".

Take this section (pages 36-37), where the authors struggle to describe what emotions are:

"Emotions, feelings and moods are called internal states. ..."

By whom?  Is this supposed to be the authors' definition, an "official" NLP definition or what?
I must confess I thought a "state" had a cognitive dimension as well as an emotional dimension.

"How do you distinguish an emotion from a sensation or mood?  We classify the recognizable forms as emotions: anger, fear, joy, loneliness, sadness, pain, jealousy and all kinds of variations."

Who are the authors referring to when they say "we"?  Themselves?  NLPers?  The world at large?
What do they mean by "recognizable"?
Come to that, what does that phrase "and all kinds of variations" mean?
And where does this list come from, anyway?
Defining the full set of emotions is a subject still very much open to debate, as far as I know (see, for example, Rediscovering Emotion by David Pugmire, Edinburgh University Press (1998)).

The authors continue:

"We do not, however, always feel such a strong emotions as these."

Which "these"?  If the authors have already listed the emotions, however vaguely, how come they are now implying the existence of another set of "weaker" emotions?

"Nevertheless, we experience an emotion or mood at many times."

Hang about!  We started out by asking "how do we distinguish an emotion from ... a mood" (see above), which is a perfectly valid question.  Indeed, though the authors seem to be fudging the issue completely, psychologists are generally agreed that there are defineable differences between emotions and moods,  For example, whilst moods tend to last quite some time (not always, just usually), for periods measured in hours or even days, emotions tend to be of considerably shorter duration, usually measured in minutes or even seconds.
Why, then, do these authors seem to be saying that an emotion is the same thing as a mood?

And what do they mean by the phrase "at many times"?  It could reasonably be said that we are in a mood of some kind, and experiencing some emotion or other almost all of the time except, possibly, during non-REM sleep.  So

"Thus you may feel responsible, relaxed, strong, etc.  Such feelings are present but weaker and less defined than emotions.  States relate to such feelings."

Run that by me again?  Didn't we say that emotions, feelings and moods are states?  Or are they just called states?

"A state is an internal experience which is vaguely present in the background."

No, I don't know what they're on about, either.

"Although it can strongly influence your self-esteem it can seem elusive and you may not even be aware of it at the time."

What "it", precisely, are we discussing here, I wonder?  Does "it" = "state"?

"Emotions, in comparison, always play in the foreground of your mind."

What, precisely, do the authors mean by "mind", in this context?
And are they claiming that we are always fully conscious of whatever emotion(s) are running round our amygdalae at any given moment?
I don't think so!  If this were the case, why would we need to define "recognizing one's emotions and their effects" as an EI competence (i.e. Emotional Awareness)?

"The concept of developing Emotional Intelligence first of all means managing and using emotions in the restricted sense."
(Italics as in the original)

Well yes, managing and using the emotions are certainly genuine EI skills or competences, but what on earth does "in the restricted sense" mean?

"However, why should we limit ourselves to emotions?  This would seem like offering us an impoverished palette or a restricted diet, lessening the range of our emotional life."

If we "limit ourselves to emotions" we are "lessening the range of our emotional life"?
I realise that none of the three authors has English as their first language, and maybe this passage does make sense in the original Belgian; but surely it can't be that hard to recognise that, in English, this claim simply doesn't make sense?

"This is why in this book we henceforth choose to use the generic name 'emotions' to embrace the concepts of recognizable emotions as well as feelings and vague moods."

So if I understand the authors correctly, it has taken them nearly a full page of text just to say that they are going to use the word "emotion" to refer to any human activity that isn't "thinking" or "behaviour"!
Which would be fair enough, except for one or two small points.  In the first place, as we've already seen, the literature on emotions draws a clear distinction between an "emotion" and a "mood" in terms of duration, intensity, etc.  The problem of how to talk about these things at a general level without creating semantic confusion, as these authors have done, is solved by use of the terms "affect", "affective", etc.  I can only assume that the authors have not read the relevant literature.
In the second place, Goleman goes to great lengths to describe what he means by "emotion" - namely mental activity originating in/controlled by the amygdala and the associated functions in the brain and the accompanying physiological reactions.  Moreover he quotes numerous studies related to how the amygdala functions, how it interacts with and affects the functions of neo-cortex, etc., etc.  So why was it ever necessary - IF this book were genuinely about Emotional Intelligence - to enter into such a rambling and non-productive discussion of "emotions", "feelings", "moods", "states", and so on?  Why not just use Goleman's definitions?
Perhaps there is a clue in the fact that topics like "amygdala", along with the work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, are yet more elements of the EI story which are never mentioned in 7 Steps....

This book is, in my opinion, a pointless waste of paper, ink, and the reader's time and patience.
Not recommended for anyone at all, for any reason, ever.