- Emotional Intelligence, or, what is commonly referred to as EQ has been claimed to be the key to success in life!
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the capacity to use, perceive, manage, understand and handle emotions. It is a complicated concept that has been defined in many other ways. However, the definition of EI involved 4 main components.
- Self-awareness: The capacity to recognize and understand your own emotions.
- Self-management: The capacity to control your emotions and not let them control you.
- Social awareness: The capacity to understand the emotions of others.
- Relationship management: The ability to build and maintain positive relationships with others.
If want to know more about EI.
Some psychologists came up with the idea of emotional intelligence and introduced it in the year of 1990. Dr John D. Mayer is an American psychologist at the University of Hampshire, and Peter Salovey is the professor of psychology and twenty-third president of Yale University. The concept of emotional intelligence was introduced by Dr John Mayer and Dr Peter but later popularized by another psychologist. Since Daniel Goleman has popularized the concept in his 1995 book EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, he became father of emotional intelligence. The book helped to raise awareness of emotional intelligence and was a bestseller in year 1995.
So Why emotional intelligence?
Several studies were done by psychologists on EI. The study titled ‘Emotional intelligence as a Fundamental construct in personality and social psychology’ has been used different methods to evaluate the emotional intelligence of eighty-four students. They used observing ratings, self-report questionnaires and performance-based tests.
It’s found that EI is not related to having a high IQ. It claims that EI has four main abilities.
- Perceiving emotions- capacity to understand the emotions of others and yours.
- Understanding emotion- capacity to understand the consequences and causes of emotions.
- Managing Emotions- capacity to regulate them.
- Using Emotions- The capacity to motivate others and yourself, to build strong relationships and decision-making.
This study also claims that IE is different from general intelligence. It means that you can have a high IQ but a low EI or vice versa. Instead of IQ, it’s more relevant to personality and mental health or social skills.
The study name was ‘Development and validation of a measure of emotional intelligence’, conducted by Haggerty, Malouff and Schutte, Cooper, Golden, and Dornheim in the year of 1998. The study showed that EI is an important skill for success in both personal and professional life. The study also suggests that EI may be a valuable tool for practicing academic performance and job performance.
Benefits
Sometimes we are just not good at maintaining our relationships at the work place or with friends and family. EI helps us to understand what changes we can make to maintain our relationship or what skills we can develop to maintain the relationship.
People with high EI are able to manage their emotions and stress. Coping up with difficult emotions would be easy to manage for an individual with a high EI. This can lead to developing a good physical and mental health. EI leads to improve better ability to make decisions by considering all the relevant factors, including others, as well as your own emotions. Improving social awareness and leadership can be the core factor in learning emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is important for success in many areas of life, including personal relationships, work, and school. People with high EI are better able to manage stress, resolve conflicts, and build strong relationships. They are also more likely to be successful in their careers due to good time management skills.
So, basically, it can help to build relationships, reduce team stress, reduce conflict, improve job satisfaction, allow you to stay calm under pressure, and help to make effective communication.
- There are many different ways to improve your emotional intelligence. Some common methods include.
- Observe and describe emotions or practising self-awareness
- Firstly, you need to understand how you can start to practicing it. So pay attention to your emotions and describe them. Learning how those thoughts and emotions are affecting, it’s the best way to improve in EI at the first stage.
- Recognize or learn your emotional trigger
- Understand the idea behind your triggers, so find the healthy way to express your emotions. You can use journaling or writing your thoughts about your emotions. Such as what happened and how it affected you? It is very important to understand that we always try to suppress our emotions, so here, instead of suppressing them, we can focus more on how we can express or experience them in a healthy way.
- Practice regulating or learn to manage your emotions
- Developing social awareness and developing empathy
- Paying attention to others’ emotions and how they are feeling can lead to improving your EI. It is very important for anyone in helping professions like health counselling or teaching. But it’s also very helpful in any relationships.
So now, how are you going to work on your empathy? There are a number of ways to develop empathy, like listening to others’ stories and taking a perspective- taking exercise or reading fiction. By developing empathy, you can understand their thoughts and emotions very easily. So,instead of asking what and why they did. We can reframe it as what makes them feel to do it? So it’s not that hard to feel one’s shoes, is it? - Improving your relationship management skills
- This can include building your communications skills, resolving conflicts peacefully, and strengthening relationships.
So, learning how to build and maintain positive relationships may be quite difficult but not impossible with the various strategies.
1. Communication skills –
we all know communication is the main key for any kind of relationship, whether it’s personal or professional and, of course, it becomes more impactful with emotional intelligence.
2. Resolving conflicts peacefully –
Conflicts are unavoidable in any kind of relationship, but how you handle it can make all the difference. Individual with high EI are able to resolve the issue in more constructive and peaceful way. Sometime just listening and stay calm during fight can give you list amount of way to deal with it and compromising in some situation.
3. Strength relationship –
The strong relationship are important and its play major part in our lives, whether they’re with friends or family and co-worker.
Here you need to understand that the strong relationship don’t just happen by chance. It takes work and effort but the rewards worth it. Showing appreciation or kindness, genuineness can play vital role in any kind of relationship. Mutual efforts and expressing your affection with open conversation or just being present during hard times can lead to strong bond.
- Stress management
- Stress is the normal part of life. But too much stress can stress can take a toll on our physical and emotional health. Keeping dairy, breath awareness, the five senses worksheet or exercise.
- Promote wellness
- Seeks professional help
- Please don’t be afraid to seek professional help if you’re struggling to cope up with your thoughts or emotions.
A psychologist can help you with resources and tools to get back on the track.
Yes, it takes time and requires your constant effort to build emotional intelligence but, it’s worth it.
- Emotional intelligence is a lifelong skill that can be improved with practice. If you are interested in improving your EI, there are many resources available to help you get started. So you can start from here.
There are some ice breaking activity for enhance you emotional intelligence.
https://symondsresearch.com/group-ice-breakers/
LetsGetHappi…
Pooja Valmiki
PSYCHOLOGIST
@LetsGetHappi