Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (otherwise known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.
EQ is a extremely important skill in leadership. It is said to have five main elements such as – self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
- Self-awareness
Self-awareness is being aware of oneself. If you are able to understand yourself better, you can acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses, and improve on them. With self-awareness one becomes more efficient in understanding others’ emotions as well and are able build better relationships with other people.
- Self-regulation
Regulating one’s emotions comes after you learn how to acknowledge and understand them. You can keep in check how you deal with them internally and also with others while interacting with them. You can find better ways to say how you feel and make sure that nothing comes out in the wrong way, which can hamper your growth as an individual.
- Motivation
You gain motivation to do better when you understand yourself better. You will be in a position to deal with your emotions in a healthy way and also motivate those around you to overcome their fears and worries about dealing with their emotions. You can prove to be a good leader through leading by example as to how to accomplish your tasks successfully by learning how to work on yourself and your emotions.
- Empathy
Empathy is to understand others’ emotions and what they are going through. It involves putting yourself in their shoes and understanding their perspective. In this way, you build a stronger relationship with them and can also help them find ways to handle their emotions. It is easy to advise from the outside until you go through the same thing.
- Social Skills
How to interact with others and build a rapport with them is based on your social skills, and they improve with being more emotionally intelligent. Social skills can be developed from an early age by introducing them into an educational curriculum for students, once developed, they will help an individual to grow as a more socially sensitive and intelligent being.
Process of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence isn’t something you achieve in one day but a continuous process that involves working on the following aspects:
- Acknowledge emotions:
To not just being emotional, but to understand the origin of your emotions and acknowledge them would help you to handle them in a better way. This also involves showing genuine interest while engaging in conversation with others and retaining what they say so as to connect with them better.
- Differentiate and analyse emotions:
Learn to differentiate and analyze the emotions by acknowledging them and act accordingly. Not all emotions are the same, and not every individual feels the same emotion in necessarily the same way. So to better understand how one reacts to it, you need to have the ability to see the difference between them.
- Accept and appreciate emotions:
Growing to become a more emotionally intelligent person requires one to accept and appreciate their emotions. To not let their emotions take control of them, but to be able to control them. This happens when you have a positive outlook towards the different facets of emotions and learn to appreciate them because emotions are not good or bad; they just receive these connotations from society.
- Reflect on your emotions and their origin:
Try to understand why you reacted in a certain way in a certain situation, try to reflect back on those emotions you felt, and that is how you will be able to track down the reason behind them. When you learn this well, you will be in a better position to handle your emotions and also understand yourself better. When you understand yourself better, then you can make sure that others also see you in the same light.
- Handle your emotions:
Others might advise you to handle your emotions in a lot of ways, but you can only work the best way out to handle them. This is because only you can reach the origin of your emotions and understand how your emotions erupt, and find out the best possible way to not freak out in a situation when things are not going according to you instead; use your methods to avoid these scenarios and learn to perfectly deal with your emotions.
- Handle the emotions of others:
When you learn the art of handling your own emotions, then you can also handle the emotions of others or help them in handling them by themselves. You can understand better how an individual deal with emotions and use them to build better connections with others on an emotional level. This helps you in your professional as well as your personal life.
The Statistics
It’s almost impossible to be emotionally intelligent without a clear understanding of your motivations and who you are. A study conducted by Tasha Eurich, showed that 95 percent of participants gave themselves high mark when being asked to rate their level of self-awareness.
However, using more empirical measures of self-awareness, the study found that only 10-15 percent of the cohort was truly self-aware.
This is a huge gap and suggests that most people are not self-aware. Worse, research shows that CEOs and managers may be the least self-aware out of all cohorts surveyed.
Eurich stated in a Harvard Business Review, that the higher one’s power is, the more they will be confident about their own abilities. The reason is that those at the top have less people to give them feedback.
Managers often don’t receive honest feedback from their employees because they fear that the consequences might be severe. Managers are shielded from criticism and their self-awareness drops.
To become self-aware, it is important to receive constructive and honest feedback. We suggest a 360-degree assessment of your emotional intelligence can provide valuable insight into your EI components and the impact you have upon others.
Many people ignore differences in their EI competencies ratings. They say they are too hard on themselves, or that others don’t understand them. But it is really a sign of a lack self-awareness.
Signs of Emotional Intelligence Status
Emotional intelligence can be described as a collection of skills and behaviour that can be developed and learned. Below are the tell-tale signs that people have a low EQ.
Low EQ
- Often feels misunderstood
- Gets upset easily
- Uses emotional blackmail
- Become overwhelmed by emotions easily
- Does not see or understand the impact they are having on others
On the opposite side of this, people with a high EQ also show signs and some of these are as follows:
High EQ
- Understand the connections between their emotions, and how they behave
- During stressful situations, remain calm and composed
- Influence others towards a common goal
- Use diplomacy and tact to deal with difficult people
- Regulate their emotions to avoid negative impact
Have a strong amount of spacial awareness when dealing with others
Steps to Improved Emotional Intelligence
It is a continuous process to develop emotional intelligence. Each person’s journey is different. The following actions can help you improve your self-awareness and empathy as well as social skills.
- Recognise and name your emotions
These emotions are easy to identify, ask yourself:
- Which emotions are you currently feeling?
- What emotions are most common in stressful situations?
- What would you do in such situations?
- Is it possible to take a moment to reflect on your responses?
EI is possible by taking a moment to identify your emotions and temper your reactions.
- Get feedback
Ask your family, friends, and managers to assess your self-perception. Ask them questions about your ability to adapt and be empathetic in difficult situations, and how you deal with conflict. You may not always hear what you want, but it will be often what you need.
- Read
Study after study has shown that complex characters in literature can increase empathy. It is possible to gain insight into the thoughts, motivations, and actions of others by reading their stories. This can help you increase your social awareness, by seeing tile and a particular situation through their eyes.
Key Learning Points:
- A key part of EI is a level of understanding and self-awareness of a person’s own emotions.
- Once a person has achieved the first component, they can move on to self-regulation. An individual with a good awareness of their own emotions can better manage the emotions and behaviors that come along with them.
- A person with low motivation may be discouraged easily by any obstacle and give up. A person with high motivation realizes that the reward of their personal goals is worth the time and effort spent getting there, even when they face obstacles.
- Empathy refers to how tuned to the emotions of others a person is. Someone with high EI can accurately identify which emotions another person is feeling and can tell the difference between genuine and false emotions.
- A person with higher levels of EI may be better at interacting appropriately with others than a person with low levels of EI.
