By Mehreen Ayub 

 

Emotional intelligence is the best predictor of success in your life, it’s not IQ nor a number. Basically, the EI term is quite a recent one as compared to intelligence Quotient IQ.  EI can be simply defined as the ability to recognize and understand emotions by using awareness to manage yourself including your relationships with others.

Categories of Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence can be divided into 2 competencies:

Personal and social competencies. The first 2 are personal competencies as mentioned below while the last two are included in social competencies.

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Social awareness
• Relationship management

1- Self-awareness

Is the ability to perceive accurately your own emotions and stay aware of them as it happens and keep on top of how you tend to respond to them in certain situations and with certain people.

How to improve Self-awareness

1. What do you think and feel? (see your emotional self who you are? Boss, parent, siblings, or an employee)
2. Watch your emotions like a Hawk.
3. Track your emotions in difficult conversations or meetings and learn your tendency in stressful, sad, painful situations.
4. Use paired sharing (peer or supervisor)
5. Own your actions (take full responsibility for what you say and do).

2- Self-management

Is the ability to be aware of your emotions to stay flexible and positive in your behavior. Managing your emotional reactions to all situations and people.

How to improve self-management?

1. The first and best victory is to conquer your own self.
2. What are the triggers that will blow you emotionally?

Examples include emotional red flags & breakdowns; Like Angry tirades, use of sarcasm and inappropriate humor, withdrawal, and isolation, holding grudges, aggressive behavior, and email letter bombs.

3- Social Awareness

Ability to accurately pick up emotions in other people and understand what is really going around with understanding what other people are thinking and feeling even if you don’t feel the same way.

How to be socially aware? 

It requires  Empathy, which is the ability to see the world from another’s perceptive and to identify and understand others’ situations, feelings, motives, and time in observing, asking, and listening.

1. Spend extra time observing asking and listening
2. Maintain eye contact.
3. Give the speaker your full attention
4. Playback and summarise.
5. Suspect your judgment
6. Read body language
7. Decipher emotions in speech tone.

4- Relationship Management

Is the ability to be aware of your and others’ emotions to manage interaction successfully. It is useful for ensuring clear communication and effective handling of conflict.

How to improve your relationships?

1. Seek to build high-quality trust in relationships.
2. Try to discover what role emotions are playing in your interactions with others
3. If you sense tension or other emotional reactions in a person’s body language or speech ask questions to seek understanding.
4. Be quick to settle disputes, differences of opinion, and misunderstandings.

If your emotional abilities aren’t in your hands if you’re not self-aware if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions if you don’t have empathy and have effective relationships then no matter how smart you are, you aren’t going to get very far.

Aristotle‘s example is perfect to quote here that anybody can become angry; that is easy but to be angry with the right person to the right degree and at right time for the right purpose and the right way.

Emotional intelligence can lead to improving individual performance by having a balance of personal and social competencies.