4. Identify Your Role. Ask, how am I contributing to my problems? What is my responsibility in all this? Did I decide to be a garbage disposal? Do I beat myself to death trying to please others? Do I expect things of myself that are unfair? Do I treat myself as a friend or an enemy? Do I allow my mental spectators to drive me to distraction, depression, anger, anxiety? Recognizing your role in your own problems is a positive - but scary - step toward knowing yourself and gaining personal command.

5. State Your Desires. Ask, what do I specifically want to do about my problems? Do I want to be a doormat, a slut, a drunk, a friendless geek? Or do I want to rule my mental spectators? Do I want to stand up to a spectator, real or imagined, who puts me down? Do I want to take command of my education, my bank account, my relationships? Until you can actually list your desires in order of their importance, you will be a victim. However, once you do this, you are on your way to being a victor.

6. Seek Options. Ask, what are my options, and in what order should I place them? What is first option I should concentrate on? The second one? The third? If you have a soul-sucking hangover most mornings, you might opt to give up your booze buddies for some real friends. Secondly, take money you normally spend at bars and deposit it in a college fund for yourself or your kids. If, instead, you're a workaholic and you want to spend more time with your kids, then DO IT. Very few people on their deathbed have said, "If I could live life all over again, I'd spend more of it at work and less with people I love." Choices are involved here, but by weighing options and alternatives, and then making personal choices, you are taking command. Do this and you'll begin to gain real power.

7. Learn Winning Techniques. Ask, how do I rule my real and my mental spectators? Must I collapse in a heap when they point thumbs down? How can I learn to take charge on every level and get a grip on my life? There is no "magic" involved, but you might feel as if there is. Unlike a vanquished gladiator falling at whim of spectators, you decide your own course.

8. Master Your Relationships. Ask, what more can I do to master my relationships by strengthening myself and my perceptions? How do I take command right now in developing my own identification and self-worth? Congratulations! You're working on one person in entire world you can work on - YOU! And any improvements in yourself can't help but enrich your relationships with other people and world around you.

Although this is only a brief overview of each of eight steps for jump-starting your relationships and taking control of your life, you'd be amazed at how significant effects of a few minor adjustments in perception can be.

Unflappable, Garrett shrugged and replied, “Try something else.”

9. High IQ, High EQ: Captain of RCI’s Rhapsody of Seas

Many seniors travel on cruises and when their poor eyesight and bad hips collide with a rocking ship, spilled beverages, and tendering, results are predictable despite all caution. Last cruise I spoke on, I watched captain come down from bridge to visit with a couple sitting poolside. He asked man how he was doing after his fall in dining room, looked at his bruises, ordered drinks delivered, sat and visited.

I know your insurance company would tell you not to do this.

I worked in a law firm at one time and I heard it repeatedly, “If he had just apologized … If she’d even said she was sorry.”

I rear-ended someone 2 years ago. Just flat out didn’t hit brakes in time. The woman told me she had just recovered from a back injury and was scared. SHE was scared? I was PETRIFIED. I asked her to follow me to a parking lot. I spent 30 minutes with her expressing my concern, calming her, offering to drive her home, make phone calls, and saying how sorry I was to have added to her stress.

Believe it or not, I never heard from her again.

10. Low IQ, High EQ: Jen, sales.

Jen never finished college. Her strengths on StrengthsFinder™ are Positivity, WOO (Winning Others Over), Empathy, Communicator, Activator. This is not profile of an intellectual. She makes 6 figures.

11.Unk. IQ, High EQ: Michael Jackson

A tricky one, but, EQ involves creativity, flexibility, and intuition (rather than purely cognitive rules and formulas) and few have produced more hit singles than he. Consider his responses to an interview:

S: “How do you write your songs?”

Michael: ”If I sit there and say I’m going to write a best-seller, nothing is going to happen…. The way I wrote Billy Jean…I was in car and I thought I’d like to make a song with a really cool base line, and I let it go. I just let go. A few days later, beats just started playing in my head….The mistake many musicians make is that they get in way of music. Get out of way. Let song write itself.”

S: “But if you don’t write it, where does it come from?”

Michael just shrugged, paused, and said, “Above.”

12. Unk. IQ, High EQ: Pearl Bailey

”There are two kinds of talents, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, all you have to do is touch it up once in a while.”

Emotional intelligence is where emotions and thinking interface. Winners have high EQs and it can be learned. Why not start today!