A workplace where teams collaborate seamlessly, conflicts are resolved swiftly, leaders inspire with empathy and understanding educational setting is made easier, and smoother relations are built.
This can be achieved not through a tool or a gadget but achieved by unlocking the superpower within us all.
This is commonly known as the 'Emotional Intelligence'. Emotional intelligence (otherwise known as emotional quotient EQ), is developed through self-awareness by understanding your own emotions and grasping how others feel.
It requires practice to be able to understand and manage emotions effectively, handle relations with care, and gain social skills like being empathetic towards others to succeed in personal and professional life.
Considering it is capability to have a pervasive impact on different life dimensions. Let us delve into emotional intelligence and further explore how it influences life journey.
Emotional intelligence begins by confronting with patience and exploring your thoughts about challenges encountered in your relationships with yourself and others.
Emotional intelligence is not born within you, it is gained through practice and education. By education, we are not reflecting the usual kind of education, rather it is specifically about understanding: How to interpret yourself, where your emotions arise from, how your childhood shaped you, and also how you might best navigate your fears and wishes.
Psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey, 1990, defined it as the sum of four skills and developed the most relevant model of emotional intelligence. These relate to perceiving emotion and is defined as the ability to detect them in faces, pictures, and voices including ourselves. It is the foundation of emotional intelligence that makes processing of sentimental information possible.
Using emotions is the ability to align our hearts with our brains, people with high emotional intelligence can perceive their changing mood.
As a result, many change what they do to channel their feelings effectively. Understanding emotions is our ability to comprehend the complex relationship between feelings, it involves recognising and describing how moods evolve and change over time.
While managing emotions is known to regulate feelings in ourselves and others, people who are good at that could control their sentiments and manage their moods, while having the ability to influence the emotions of others.
Keeping emotional intelligence intact can be challenging. We might note someone who’s smart but struggles in their personal life, someone with quite a fortune but is restless and sad, or someone powerful but is intolerant and lacks empathy.
We are therefore pointing to a deficit, highlighting the importance of emotional intelligence. Often, we overlook the influence of small gestures like a touch, a smile, or a kind word.
These acts of caring have the power to turn someone’s life around. Individuals who synchronise with their emotions can better understand and empathise with others, making emotional intelligence especially valuable for leaders.
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