Please correct me if I'm wrong but I think you are talking here, in fact, about emotional intelligence, right? This what you are calling here Emotional Quotient?

If that's so, this is one of those things that are not that easy to learn especially if someone neglects it. I agree and like very much that saying:

Life can be a cruel teacher, but its lessons are worth learning.

The only thing I hate about it, as it seems to me, its ability that the exam on which we failed last time, every next time would be bigger and harder to solve.

Therefore, I was always telling my kids whenever they would like to skip, push aside or run away from something to "better walkthrough that fire now when its flame is relatively small, as otherwise, that same thing is waiting for them around the corner somewhere in their future, but it would be harder to detect and solve it, and the flame of the fire they would still have to go through would be bigger and more burning."

In other words and no matter if we are aware or not, consciously willing or not, our life is tiled with all sorts of tasks, and I hate when it happens that the one I managed to avoid and overjump hits me right in the face when I expected it the least. And it seems life has that almost unmistakable habit as well as even some sort of 'perpetuum mobile' determined ability to teach us something new or to polish already learned.