What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EI) also called emotional quotient (EQ) is the ability to understand, perceive, express, and regulate emotions. Emotionally intelligent people are self-aware, who can manage depression, anxiety, or anger.
Emotional intelligence is a crucial part of social intelligence developed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1990, 1993, 1995, 1997).
Emotionally intelligent people are never overwhelmed by happy situations, rewarding situations, or depressed in gloomy situations. They tackle the environment very well, knowing what to speak to friends suffering from depression and stress, and can give the right suggestions to encourage friends. They are emotionally smart and can succeed in jobs, marriages, parenting, academically.
It is said, “IQ gets you hired, EQ gets you promoted”.
Qualities of Emotional Intelligence
There are suggested five qualities of emotionally intelligent people used to have. These are 5 key qualities of emotional intelligence. Those qualities make them build good relations among others. The qualities are:
Self Awareness (knowing our own emotions)
This is the ability to understand one’s own feelings, moods, emotions, and needs. People with high understanding and knowledge about their limitations and strength perceive and regulate their behavior according to the situation and see how his or her behavior affects them. Because these people can monitor their behavior effectively, they can make intelligent choices.
Self Management (managing our own emotions)
A person with high emotional intelligence, who knows his own emotions well can control and manage impulses and outbursts effectively. The person with high emotions managing skills remains calm in difficult situations, shows confidence, and can foresee the consequences that may erupt when acting on impulse.
The self-regulation of emotion helps him or her become popular among colleagues. For example, people who can not control their temper are avoided by many people and will lose promotions.
Self Motivation (motivating ourselves)
It is a person’s internal urge to maintain and manage emotional behavior in a stable manner, even when difficult situations and hurdles arise. This self-motivated behavior equips the person will self-leadership and self-reinforcement constructive thought, which allows the person to remain optimistic and pursue the goal with strong willpower and enthusiasm.
These self-motivated people can be active, motivated to work extensively and work hard on the task to achieve the long-term outcome.
Empathy (recognizing and influencing other’s emotions)
The ability to understand and sense another person’s feelings, sentiments, emotions, and thoughts is empathy. It implies being sensitive and taking another person’s emotions as his or her own, but, not adopting them.
Empathy allows one to read another person’s mood and act accordingly. It involves both affective and cognitive components. Effectively a person feels what another person is feeling and cognitively a person understand. For example, I feel your pain, I understand your pain.
Social Skills (handling relationships)
It is the ability to manage and handle the emotions of other people. People who are strongly motivated to control their behavior have the skills to guide other people’s emotions. They have the ability to mix and form favorable relationship networks. These people usually help others who are usually suffering from emotional crisis and are good at giving feedback that does not make the sufferer, angry or resentful.
Application of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is nowadays highly valued in organizations. The importance of EI is rising as it can generate successful relationships, high performance, and low turnover.
People who can detect emotion in others, control their own emotions handle social situations well, and can take advantage of the situations. The following are some applications of emotional intelligence.
To Excel in Business and Career
Some people benefit from business and create new jobs around the world because they can read others accurately and adapt to new social situations. The ability to perceive emotion can lead them to better business and promotion of the individual self and the organizational goals. A high level of EI means the person performs well, is given responsibility, and is respected as a valuable person.
A person with EI is skillful to recognize the facial expressions of others, is always with positive gestures, optimistic attitude when handling the employees, employer, and colleagues around even in hard times. An individual is promoted not only because he has academic excellence but also emotional excellence.
To Manage Anger Emotions
Emotional intelligence enhances the ability to manage our own emotions. It is said that the emotion of anger is the most difficult to manage among other negative emotions. The symptom of irritation rage, harsh voice, and negative verbal and non-verbal gestures all can be corrected if a person has a firm knowledge of EI.
Expression of anger does not reduce it, rather it adds flames to anger making situations even worse. If a person tries to console him/herself getting the mind off from the causes of anger and deviate to the same humourous or pleasant feelings anger may vanish. This is possible only when the individual can handle emotional intelligence.
Develop Relationship
Emotional intelligence enhances the ability to get along with others. Helping others and being helped by others enhances the chances of the person being able to survive and reproduce. It helps to develop a long-lasting intimate relationship, friendship, and leadership.
Development of Pro Social Characteristics
Increased sense of emotional intelligence is associated with other positive characteristics and traits such as a sense of well-being, achievement motivation, sociability, confidence, optimism, decision-making ability, willpower, and self-efficiency. An individual will proceed to an altruistic personality. Emotional intelligence teaches the art of living with harmony and peace.
Selection of Employees
Everybody likes to be amidst people who are friendly, caring, and have positive emotions. For a moment, imagine you are the boss of the human resource management department. Whom would you select? A nagging, problem creator, angry, and tensed person?
You would always choose a person who has control over their temper, give a positive gesture, and develop a successful relationship with your plans and program. A person, who handles his emotions, managing, them always leads organizational goals toward progress. These persons can handle difficult situations in the organization.
Develop Healthy Life Style
A person who has control of emotional intelligence has a healthy lifestyle because s/he develop the relationship between their behaviors and their health, promoting motivation and skills to practice healthy behaviors and directly modifying poor health practices, increasing people’s positive emotional responses, ratifications, and in general subjective well being (SWB).