One way of thinking about EQ includes self-awareness and self-management as components of your overall EQ (which may also include understanding others, for example).

So, being aware of this is good. Being aware that you are causing the issues you face is great.

However, you seem to have the attitude (from this limited sample) that this is a concrete fact of life (that's my understanding from your post).

If you're aware that some aspect of your "over friendly nature" takes away from your ability to lead your team effectively, and you don't adjust, you're not practicing sound self-management, which is an important aspect of EQ (just like some folks need to be aware that they become angered easily and adjust accordingly).

My advice is to pretend like you came to yourself for advice with your current situation. Using your ability to understand others, what would you advise? What practices should change? You may find that this exercise will give you more "next steps" than will other folks taking stabs in the dark online.

A final thought is this. You care about your team being effective and satisfied with their leadership. Currently, you aren't providing what they need. You're actually not displaying excellent EQ in this way. How can you put aside your natural tendencies to offer your team what they need?

In Catholicism (and probably in some other religions), there is a practice of an "examination of conscience." It has helped me to make improvements of the kind you refer to.

Basically, the essence is to take 5 minutes at the very end of the day to think back through each hour of the day, perhaps with a couple of focus questions (eg "did I become angry, even internally"). You use your will to sincerely regret anything that you think was wrong, and maybe use a bit of problem solving to see how it could have gone differently.

Five minutes at the end of the day (maybe it stays on your mind as you sleep? but that's just my bro-science) every day for a month should help you make some small steps.

This is great, do you have any more resources where one can learn about this?

Sorry for the late reply, but most resources I know about would get more specific about particular morality of the religion. If that's what you're looking for, you should get plenty of results searching for "Catholic examination of conscience."

Catholicism really is a beautiful religion.

I don't intend to mock you -- I am sure there is much more relevant context to your life decisions, and they're your own, anyway.

However, I have observed friends seemingly get caught in a pattern: go to a top school, so you can have a high-paying job, so you can afford to send kids to a top school, so they can get high-paying jobs, so that...

In some folks' lives, the value of the "top school" seems to have a circular definition (not true for all folks, of course). It's a little sad, because by breaking out of that pattern, many more possibilities open up (like working in important and fascinating science for lower pay).

Well, I live in Spain - the qualitative difference here between a standard public school (the ones you can go to are the closest ones and we live in no fancy neighborhood...) and a private one simply is that in the public school not even I understand the English teacher (yes, that seriously happened to me), while the private school at least has the standards I was used to (I went to school in Austria). So overall, for me the issue here is mostly about the rapidly growing inequality gap and our society's relentless, unhealthy obsession with [market] performance & efficiency at all costs.

But yes, I totally understand what you are referring to - having my kids go to a private school means we have a number of those "circular types" you described to cope with...

"What one practice, if removed from your day/week, would hurt you the most?" (be ready with a follow up question if he just says "eat" or "sleep" or whatever - "do you approach that in an intentional way? have you had to tune how you do that?")

"Is there anything I should be asking, but I'm not?" - has occasionally yielded interesting responses for me.

A friend was talking to a young girl in a school in WV.

  Friend: What would you like to do when you grow up?
  Girl: I wanna draw, like my daddy.
  Friend: Wonderful, is your daddy an artist?
  Girl: Naw, he draws a check every month.

(ie, her dad receives some type of welfare check every month (perhaps disability, unemployment, etc.), and this is what she aspires to do)

I appreciate your call to take a cause seriously by making changes in one's personal life.

That said, every time I read someone advise "stop having babies" to combat climate change, I am reminded of the South Park episode wherein the overzealous hunters claim that deer overpopulation will cause some deer to die, so they need to kill the deer to prevent overpopulation and future deer deaths.

I think the "second military" you describe is more of a "minimal readiness for SHTF situation" group.

Because no politician wants to go down in history books as the person who let the military shrink and lose readiness for a WW3. Sure, maybe the American military has indeed lost readiness, but it's more nuanced and can't be pinned on one person. So just like other parts of this thread suggest, it's a giant CYA operation.

Maybe playing the instrument isn't actually the hardest part for a pianist, but for us string players... ;)

I did ctrl-f for "iq" at diversitymemo.com and only came up with a reference to a comparison Damore made about types of scientific evidence the left or right tend to ignore.

The comment in question was not referring to IQ of males or females in any way.

So I am not sure where your accusations regarding IQ come from.

Serious: do you see that your response is exactly what the memo was about? He's claiming that the pre-judgment that the topic is toxic is harmful. To argue against him by re-asserting that which he questions will not be persuasive.

Are you saying my argument - that sharing a 10 page personal essay, or whatever to all your coworkers is toxic - is invalid, because in it, he asks not to be prejudged?

That's ludicrous. You don't do things that make potentially thousands of your coworkers uncomfortable internally just because you want to make a point. Human Resources is a thing for a reason.

Put it on medium and be done with it.

I think you may have raised a good point - was this the appropriate forum/channel/whatever to offer his observations, questions, and criticisms?

He suggests that Google has a culture of sharing pretty openly and of offering criticism and even commentary on important issues. It would be good to have additional evidence of this to evaluate whether his statement was indeed matched to the appropriate environment.

(I am not and have not been a Google employee, so IDK for sure. I know that at my company, there are indeed particular fora in which this sort of thing could be raised. I can imagine at some companies this would not be possible, so you raise a great question. Thanks!)

It was a memo about a matter that's internal to Google, so I don't think publicly publishing it would have been appropriate. And doing so would have surely created an even larger furore.