What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is an awareness of your actions and feelings, and how they affect those around you. It is our ability to recognize emotions in ourselves and others, to understand their effects, and to use that knowledge to guide our thoughts and behaviors.
Your level of emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in how you communicate and relate to others, which in turn affects your journey to achieving your goals. We can’t run away from the fact that it influences personal achievement, decision making abilities, career success, leadership, and life satisfaction. According to research emotional intelligence, or EQ, might even be more important than IQ!
So why the fuss? Why is Emotional Intelligence such a big deal?
Now that we have a better understanding of what emotional intelligence is, let’s explore why it’s even important at all. Why all the fuss right?! According to research, emotional intelligence can help you build stronger relationships, achieve success at work or school as well as smash your career and personal goals! Not bad …
Truth is, the smartest person in the room isn’t always the most successful. There are a lot of brilliant minds who are unfufilled and unsuccessful at work, in business or in their personal lives and relationships. It turns out, being a bright mind just isn’t enough to achieve success and smash your personal goals. You will still need emotional intelligence to manage stress, pressure, emotions and relationships which are key to your success.
Your emotional intelligence affects:
Your Performance in business or at work. In short, high emotional intelligence can help you navigate the social complexities that come with the workplace/ business, lead and motivate others, and excel in achieving your own goals.
Your Relationships. When you are aware of your emotions and understand them, you are in a better place to control them, express how you feel and understand how others are feeling. This leads to effective communication with colleagues, surbordinates, suppliers, family etc … allowing you to build strong relationships.
Your Decision Making. Having a clear and authentic understanding of your own emotions why you are feeling them can have a huge impact on your decision-making abilities. A higher emotional intelligence helps prevent decision making based on emotional biases, whereas lower EI can lead to poor decisions.
Your Motivation. Emotional intelligence matters for motivation, and motivation matters for success. An emotionally intelligent individual understands the deeper meaning of their aspirations and the self-motivation skills required to achieve them.
Your Physical and Mental Health. If you’re unable to manage your emotions, you are probably not managing your stress either. This can lead to serious health problems. Uncontrolled emotions and stress can also impact your mental health, making you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. If you are unable to understand, get comfortable with, or manage your emotions, you’ll also struggle to form strong relationships. This in turn can leave you feeling lonely and isolated and further exacerbate any mental and in turn physical health problems.
Your Happiness. What really is happiness? Seems simple and straight forward enough until you try to define it. Though the true meaning of happiness means different things to different people, emotional intelligence still matters for happiness irrespective of your personal interpretation. If we think of happiness in terms of overall life satisfaction, we can agree that developing a higher EI can positively impact your own wellbeing and happiness.
How to improve your Emotional Intelligence
The good news is that emotional intelligence is a learnable skill, it can be developed! Yay! You just need an understanding of what it is (which you now have), learn some tools to help you and practice them. Here are some ways to improve your EI:
- Constantly observe how you react to people, their words and actions.
- Do a self-evaluation. Never forget to introspect your own behavior, your choices, your reactions and actions.
- Examine how you should react to stressful situations.
- Take responsibility for your actions. If you hurt someone’s feelings, apologize directly, don’t ignore what you did or avoid the person.
- Recognize your feelings. Observe your emotions as you experience them and identify them for what they are: anger, hurt, jealousy, happiness.
- Use mindfulness: You must always think from other people’s perspective, learn to empathize, to understand a reason why someone did something.
- Listen with tolerance, compassion and empathy. Attune yourself to the emotions of others, and you can respond in the most appropriate way to any circumstanc
Conclusion
Emotional intelligence can be a key to success in your life especially in your career or business. The ability to manage people and relationships is very important for all leaders and entrepreneurs.
People with a higher EI are better able to understand and relate to others, muddle through challenges, make decisions, and achieve desired outcomes. All the best on your journey to improve your EI so you can achieve your career, business and personal goals!
Absolutely love this! EI needs to be practised everywhere, as mentioned on the blogpost. Without it, our behaviour/actions may be irrational. What an eye-opener. Thank you 😀.
You’re right EI plays a crucial role in our day to day life