What Is Emotional Intelligence And Why Is It Important?

Author : Nandini Sharma

Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient is the capability to ascertain, understand and manage your emotions while realising how they need to be delivered and what prompt they have on others. It is also the ability to acknowledge, understand and rouse the emotions of others.

Emotional Intelligence has five components, which give a more clear understanding of the concept:

  1. Self-awareness

  2. It is the ability to perceive, accept and interpret your emotions and temperament. Self-awareness includes understanding how your emotions affect the way you observe and carry out tasks and how your attitude and conduct, projected by your emotions, affect others. Self-awareness allows you to comprehend the relation between your feelings and the behaviour emitted on the basis of those feelings. It allows people to know their errors and work on them. It throws light on people’s constraints and strengths.

    In order to be self-aware, you need to work on examining your emotions by taking note of how you express your emotions and react during a given situation, and accordingly analyze them while experimenting ways to rectify the unseemly ones. This way you become more vacant to form new judgements and point of views, making you more accepting of new opinions, interactions and information. It grants self-reflection, permitting you to change faults and be more sympathetic and mature.

  3. Self-Regulation

  4. Self-regulation and self-awareness go hand-in-hand, though they seem to be overlapping at times, one flows by another. It suggests conveying your sentiments suitably and appropriately. Self-regulation means governing your emotions on the basis of what their impact may be on others and the situation. It is pertinent to know that it does not stand for obscuring one’s feelings, it is simply to know when and how to express your emotions. Self-regulation helps in controlling your actions and behaviour during emotional triggers caused by the remarks of others and avoiding mishaps.

    It allows you to become more compliant to change and reasonably resolve disputes and tension, even preventing them in cases of miscommunication.

  5. Motivation

  6. Emotional motivation plays a crucial role in intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation stands for working towards a substance which dwells on interests and delight and does not have any external accomplishments. It permits understanding about the importance of compensations other than money, fame and approval, and attaching greater value to emotional fulfilment.

    As emotional intelligence provides awareness about your strengths and limitations, it presents you with a platform to know how to work on yourself. Inquiry surrounding growth and learning is a vital result of intrinsic motivation. It offers optimism by preventing discouragement from failures and supplies means to correct them. Those who have significant emotional intelligence are committed towards their desires and happiness and persist towards their goals with high expectations of achievement.

  7. Empathy

  8. Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and experiences of others and provide emotional support accordingly. It differs from sympathy, as sympathy abides by feeling sorrow for the inconveniences dealt with by others.

    An effective way to be empathetic is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. Being empathetic not only stands for responding supportively but also sensing their emotions beforehand and attempting to make them comfortable. Being empathetic allows social relationships to bud, by enabling you to understand the personalities of others and treating and addressing them accordingly.

  9. Social Skills

  10. Emotional intelligence needs to be demonstrated by interactions. The ability to understand emotions seems futile without presenting this knowledge in day-to-day communications. Emotional intelligence is helpful in social interactions by assisting us to comprehend the temperament of the ones around us and behaving with them hence. This skill comes in hand while building stable professional rapport as well.

    These five components thoroughly state the importance of emotional intelligence (quotient), and why it is not undervalued to intelligence quotient (IQ). It is crucial to know about its value as it is common for us to let our emotions get the best of us and take their toll on our work and relationships. With its help, we can reasonably deal with conflicts and complex situations, by taking responsibility for our remarks, providing valid solutions and coping better with our environment.

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