What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your both your own emotions and understand the emotions of people around you. It means to use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively. People with high emotional intelligence are typically better at handling interpersonal relationships, managing stress, and making informed decisions based on emotional insight.

“Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.” Aristotle.

Some Key elements of Emotional Intelligence:

• Self-Awareness: Self-awareness is the ability to consciously recognize and understand your own emotions, thoughts, and behaviours, as well as how they affect you and others. You know your strengths and weaknesses and have self-confidence. 
• Self-management: Self-management is the ability to regulate and control your emotions, thoughts, and behaviours effectively in all situations. It includes adapting to change, handling stress, and maintaining a positive attitude, even in the face of setbacks.
• Social Awareness: Social awareness is the ability to understand and empathize with the emotions, needs, and concerns of others. It means you understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of other people. 
• Effective Communication: It is the ability to communicate effectively. You can convey your message clearly to others and be able to understand what others are saying. You don’t take everything personally and respect the other person’s point of view. 
• Relationship management: It is the ability to develop and maintain relationships. The ability to communicate effectively and influence others with your behavior. You can manage conflicts without being offended and offending other people.  

Why Emotional Intelligence is must?

It is not people with high IQ (Intelligent Quotient) that are successful and happy in life, but the people with high EQ or EI that are successful and fulfilled in life. May be, you know someone with a high IQ, and they are not much successful in their life, apart from scoring good marks in academics. High IQ can get you high marks, one of the top colleges in your city/state/country, but if your EQ is low, then you won’t be able to handle stress or anxiety during your low phases (which in turn, will affect your IQ). We need high Emotional Intelligence for:

• Stress and Anxiety management: We experience stress or anxiety on a regular basis. While some situations are very tough and intense, we tend to stress over small incidents as well. There are two things: one is the situation is stressful and second is we think that the situation is stressful. And most of the time, it is the second scenario. Because we associate ourselves so much with the situation that it affects us more than it should. Stress or anxiety happens when we start to make negative assumptions about the situation or tend to be negative rather than to be neutral or positive. Our mind works on survival mode, so it is its basic function to inform ourselves about the possible dangers or threats, but it is up to you whether we use this functionality to make a positive impact or a negative impact. To control or stop our mind from focusing on negativity, we need to have high EQ.
• Decision making: We are making decisions 24/7 whether we realize it or not. Even when we are not making a decision, a decision is being made (oh, that is quite deep, give it a thought). Decision making is a skill we must learn as our Decisions decide our Destiny. To make good decisions, we should have good control over our emotions. Most of the time, during high emotional states, we are tempted to make decisions while it is the worst time to take any decision. Because when we are in a high emotional state, we focus only on a part of the problem i.e. we are not focusing on the whole picture, we are just looking at one part of it. And making a decision without looking at the whole situation will eventually lead us to make a wrong decision which we regret later. This is why we must refrain from making any decision, no matter how small it seems, when we are feeling a tide of emotions. Good decision making involves looking at the whole situation from different perspectives, looking at all the options we have, considering the pros and cons of every choice and then thinking about it thoroughly while making the final call because sometimes, the decisions we make are irreversible.
• Healthy Relationships: The quality of our life depends on the quality of our relationships and the quality of our relationships depends on how emotionally intelligent or stable we are. To develop strong, healthy and meaningful relationships, we must be able to understand our emotions, control our behavior, communicate clearly, empathize with others so they feel comfortable and safe with us. Healthy relationships can exist only in a healthy positive environment.
• Better Communication: As human beings, we communicate with each other all the time. But there is a huge difference between speaking to someone and communicating with them. Every human being knows how to speak but unfortunately, very few of us know how to communicate. Communication is not only about speaking, but also about listening to the words, the emotions behind those words and understanding those. We can communicate properly only If we are fully present with the other person and being fully present means we are at peace with our emotions. Sometimes we take stuff personally while we should not. Communication has 4 stages out of which we can only control stage 1 and stage 2:

1. What you want to say
2. What you say
3. What the other person hears
4. What the other person understands

• Effective Conflict Resolution: It is obvious that where there are two or more minds involved, a difference in opinions will be there. We must have the capability to deal with these different opinions. Conflict resolution is the art of understanding the situation from everyone’s perspective and respecting their point of view while not being offended by them. Not taking things personal is also a key factor. Having control over our emotions while discussing is the most important quality that we need to resolve conflcts.
• Collaboration: As we humans are social creatures, we must collaborate with other human beings almost all the time, whether as a student, employee or as a family member. We cannot collaborate with others if we can’t control and manage our emotions let alone understand someone else’s feelings or emotions.
• Work Life Balance: Life is all about finding the right balance and finding the correct work-life balance is probably the most important thing in this modern era of stress and responsibilities. We must be able to keep our personal and professional lives separate from each other, else we would make a complete mess of both of them. 
• Leadership: If you want to be an effective leader, then you must have strong control over your emotions. Leadership involves being in-charge of people around you. You must be able to understand each individual and emphatically relate to them, only then you can work well with them. If you can’t control your emotions, then most probably, you will react rather than respond, which isn’t a very healthy trait of a leader.

Key Qualities of an Emotionally Intelligent Person:

Emotionally Intelligent people clearly stand out among those who have a low EQ. Some key qualities of a person with high EQ are:

• They Response, not React.
• Different Perspectives.
• Good Observer.
• Empathetic.
• Handling Criticism.
• Efficient Decision Making.
• Understand Other People.
• Understand their emotions and behaviors.
• Great Listeners.
• Flexible.

How Can you Develop your EQ?

• Practice Mindfulness.
• Open to Feedback.
• Reflecting on Behavior.
• Learn Communication skills.
• Practice learning skills.
• Books.
• Pause.
• Emotional Intelligence Coaching

Benefits of having a high EQ:

• Strong Relationships.
• Professional Growth.
• Low Stress or anxiety levels.
• Positive Outlook.
• Decision making.
• Work life balance.

So, the conclusion is, it doesn’t matter who you are, what your age is, what your profession or what role do you play in society, Emotional Intelligence is something that you must have as it allows you to handle every situation with ease and make better decisions. 

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