“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.”
Self-awareness:
This refers to people’s capacity to be aware of their feeling and using all their potential to guide their decision making process and decision making. It is the capacity to be aware of their own strength and weakness matching with how others see them compared to what they see in themselves. Emotional self-awareness includes how one has an accurate sense of how one’s emotions impact one’s own performance. If one doesn’t take time out to notice and understand one’s emotions, these emotions have a strange way of resurfacing when one least expect or want them to. It is in a way trying to draw one’s attention to something important. To be aware and objectively feeling one’s emotions and tendencies takes honesty and courage. There are strategies that help one to increase self-awareness to grow.
Self-Regulation:
This is also referred to as Self-Management. It refers to people’s capacity to handle emotions in a way that facilitate the task on hand instead of interfering with the task. It also refers to their capacity to express their emotion at appropriate time. Conscientious and delaying gratification to pursue goals; ability to recover from emotional stress are part of self-regulation. Self-regulation builds upon the most important foundational skill that is self-awareness. It calls for ample self-awareness for effective use of self-management or self-regulation. It is necessary since people have capacity to choose how to respond to an activity linked to emotions and this can happen only when people are aware of it. It is natural for people to experience emotions before they can respond to them and people are hard-wired that way. Once people understand their own emotions and choose to respond the way they want, they acquire the power to take control of difficult situations, react with calmness and take right initiative to achieve their desired goal. If people fail to think about their feelings which include how they are influencing people’s behaviours people shall continue to be a frequent victim of emotional hijacking. Whether one is aware of it or not, one’s emotions will control and will move throughout our day. It is necessary to have good self-regulations built within oneself.
Motivation:
It is people’s ability to constantly inspire them, even when things are not going in their way, by drawing to the deepest preferences to move and guide them towards achieving their goals, facilitates them to take initiative and excel. It is also the capacity to handle their emotions well at the time of setbacks and failures. Intrinsic motivation is considered one of the important emotional intelligence skills. People who are emotionally intelligent tend to be motivated by things which go beyond normal external rewards like money, name, fame, recognition etc. Such people are driven by a passion to fulfil their inner satisfaction and goals. They work in harmony with their inner self and seek rewards which are more internal and help them to move towards peak experience. Such people who have these traits in abundance tend to be action-oriented. They set challenging and achievable goals and focus on performing better. They show exemplary commitment and good at taking initiative and lead their team from front.
Empathy:
It is the people’s capacity to sense or experience what others are feeling, being able to put them in their perspective and building good rapport and adapt to diversity in people. It is their capacity to look at others from the shoes of others. This is also one’s capacity to set aside one’s prejudice, likes and dislikes when one interacts with others. When empathy is improved people evolve themselves to be better individual. Empathy gives success in all people’s endeavour and meaningful relationships besides better quality of life. In simple terms empathy is one’s ability to trust others. When other individuals feel that they are cared by them, they command their trust. Once the trust is built, others are more open to them and meaningful productive discussion can happen. The trust paves way for sharing information, feelings and thoughts.
Social skills:
It is people’s capacity to handle emotions in relationships well and correctly assessing social situations; interacting proactively, using these skills to persuade, negotiate and settle disputes amicably and playing a good role in teamwork. This skill is of paramount importance today as people move working as a team in every aspect of their life. Day in and day out people keep interacting with others be it in office or at home or at recreational clubs. When one interact with diverse, heterogeneous variety of people, social skills becomes very important as one needs to respect others and move in a way that is comfortable for all. One needs to be ‘open’ in one’s relationship. Being open means one’s ability to share information about oneself to others. People can use self-management skills to choose how open they want to be and what need to be shared. Social skills under the umbrella of emotional intelligence comprise of “persuasion and influencing skills, Communication skills, Conflict management skills, Leadership skills, Change management skills, Building rapport and Collaboration and cooperation i.e. Team working skills”. (skillsyouneed.com)
All the skills forming part of emotional intelligence can be acquired, enhanced through a systematic practice and training. This makes emotional intelligence accessible to all. Various research finding are available now with the benefits of emotional intelligence in handling various emotional issues arising in day-to-day.
Emotional intelligence is now gaining popularity in industry and recognized as one of the highly preventive skills in managing mental health. Many corporate now prefers their employees to have good emotional intelligence. EQ recognized even at selection of candidate for managerial and above positions. People high on EQ tend to have less of occupational stress and are proved to be better leader. The best part of EQ is it can be acquired through training. EQs are assessed using various scales. Some of the important scales that can help are “The Schutte Self Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT)” and a few other standard tools are available
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