Emotional Intelligence is the skill of perceiving, understanding, and managing one’s own emotions and feelings and using that awareness to manage ourselves within various relationships and settings.We are basically looking at what is known as a four-quadrant model.
1. Perceiving Emotions: The first step in understanding emotions is to perceive them accurately. In many cases, this might involve understanding nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions.
2. Using Emotions: The next step involves using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive activity. Emotions help prioritize what we pay attention and react to; we respond emotionally to things that garner our attention.
3. Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings. If someone is expressing angry emotions, the observer must interpret the cause of their anger and what it might mean. For example, if your boss is acting angry, it might mean that he is dissatisfied with your work; or it could be because he got a speeding ticket on his way to work that morning or that he’s been fighting with his wife.
4. Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions effectively is a crucial part of emotional intelligence. Regulating emotions, responding appropriately and responding to the emotions of others are all important aspect of emotional management.
To boost overall EQ, psychologist Daniel Goleman outlines five pillars across which people should look to build competency.
1. Self-awareness: If you can develop a healthy sense of self-awareness, you will better understand your strengths and weaknesses, as well as how your actions affect others. This will enable you to continually evaluate your performance and identify areas that require improvement.
2. Self-regulation: Being able to reveal your emotions in a mature manner and exercise restraint in high pressure scenarios is key to your EQ. Instead of bottling up your feelings, you should try to express them with restraint and control.
3. Motivation: Emotionally intelligent people are self-motivated — they want for things beyond money and status. To become self-motivated is to become resilient and optimistic in the face of disappointment; by measuring your success from an inner ambition, rather than a material one, you find it easier to overcome setbacks.
4. Empathy: Empathy is compassion, and understanding of human nature. Developing it allows you to connect with other people on an emotional level and respond genuinely to their concerns.
5. People skills: People who are emotionally intelligent are able to build rapport and trust quickly with others, on their teams and beyond. If you can learn to enjoy rather than tolerate people, and respect them even if you disagree with their opinion, it is more likely you will be trusted in the high-risk, high-pay roles that require a flair for diplomacy.
Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, is the power to discriminate between different feelings, to label them appropriately, and to use the emotional information you gather to guide your thinking and conduct. It is also a key mechanism of adaptation.
