What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is all about being able to understand emotions of others and yourself. On face value emotions seem very obvious to what they mean. Only with great emotional intelligence can one see that Anger may be Love in disguise. Emotional intelligence focuses on four pillars. Self-management, Self-awareness, Social awareness & Relationship management.

Self-Management

• The ability to control and manage your own emotions and feelings. This is all about understanding how emotions can hinder your objectives and what you can do to still reach your goals.

Self-Awareness

• This connects a lot with self-management but it's about how once you recognize your true emotions and how they change you. When I'm Angry I tend to not think about things and act in the moment, I need to take a breath and re align before doing anything in this state.

Socail Awareness

• Social awareness is about empathy, you can understand the emotions of people around you and how the interconnect with yourself and others.

Relationship Management

• Using your emotional intelligence skills you are able to foster healthy relationships.

How is it different to IQ

IQ is a very structured measure of academic intelligence. Mainly focused around analytical thinking, problem solving, memory retention, and spatial recognition. IQ does not mean someone is smart it is a test about their capability to be so. There is research that suggests high EQ people have a higher chance of success in life vs people with high IQ.

IQ is almost static, it can't really be grown upon. EQ on the other hand can be.

Why is it important?

For me the main reason it is important is because it has the ability to be approved on. Also when we talk about IQ and EQ something like EQ can be utilized in any scenario, with IQ it is limited to situations where someone's capacity to learn is needed.

The research into this topic as well pointed to the fact that high EQ has a greater correlation for ones success in life compared to IQ. This paried with the ability to improve and EQ vs an IQ to me gives it a greater weighting making it more important.

In the listening and looping task it was also evident how sometimes you can be more focused on what you can add to a conversation to fully listen to someone and hear what they are actually saying. Not having any pressure to interject and add to the conversation gave me the ability to fully lsitend and really pay attention to more than the words being said. Really made me realize how much can be missed. This to me links to a high EQ and the ability to go beyond just the words and really foucs on any other social ques.