Emotional intelligence is a very important and most demanding topic in psychological research in recent years and many experts and professionals now believe that a person’s emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) may be more important than their IQ and is recently a better mediator of success, quality, and worth of relationships and interactions and overall happiness.
Daniel Goleman promoted it in 1995 in the title of his bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can Matter More than IQ. Goleman defined emotional intelligence as:
“Emotional intelligence is defined as understanding one’s own feeling first and sympathizing the feelings of others and then regulation of emotions in a way that increases encouraging living”.
According to him, emotional intelligence is more important for personal success than IQ and secondly unlike IQ emotional intelligence can be improved. He discusses five domains for emotional intelligence that are;
- Knowing your emotions
- Managing your own emotions
- Motivating yourself
- Recognizing and accepting other people’s emotions
- Managing the emotions of others.
These five domains represent four quadrants first two are personal competence and two represent social competence. When we talk about emotional intelligence in a layman’s terms, it is simply defined as
- When we Identify and understand our emotions and responses and it called as self-awareness.
- we manage to control and implement our emotions, attitude, feedbacks, and responses it is called as self-management.
- we tie our emotions to inspire and motivate ourselves to take proper actions, commit, follow-through and positively work towards achievements of our goals. It is called motivation.
- When we recognize the feelings of others know their emotions and make use of that understanding to relate to others more effectively, this is called empathy.
- When we build relationships, communicate to others in a social gathering, lead discuss the conflict, and always work as a part of a team. This is called social skills.
Importance of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence has great importance in all field of life and with the help of EQ, we perform better in personal matters as well as professional matters. Now I discuss why emotional intelligence is important in our life.
- Physical Well-being: Emotional intelligence helps to develop the ability to take care of your bodies and manage our stress that has a huge impact on our overall well-being. It also helps to manage stress and maintain good health.
- Mental Health: Impacts of Emotional intelligence has huge on our attitude and outlook on life. It also helps to lessen anxiety and avoid depression and a high level of emotional intelligence link with a positive attitude and a happy outlook on it.
- Relationships and Afflictions: Emotional intelligence help us for better understanding and managing our emotions and it helps to understand the needs and feelings of others for better and stronger relationships.
- Success: Inner motivation can also be accomplished with advanced emotional intelligence and it increases self-confidence and increase focus on our goal to achieve success.
- Conflict Resolution: Emotional intelligence also helps us to resolve conflicts effectively because by developing emotional intelligence we are in a better position to understand the needs and desires of others. It is easier to give what they want if we can perceive effectively.
Emotional intelligence is comprised of five basic components the first is knowing what are you feeling. The second is managing your feelings, like distressing feeling. The third is self-motivation. The fourth is empathy and fifth is managing relationships. So now we understand that emotional intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge from your emotions and the emotions of others. It is very useful because the use of information about what you are feeling help you make effective decisions about what to say or what to do. Emotional intelligence is not about soft but it about having the skills to use your emotions too help you make choices.