Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability any of us has to recognise, understand, and manage their own emotions or those of others. It is a skill set that we cultivate from early in our lives and helps us incrementally improve our decision-making, communication and ability to build and maintain relationships. It was proposed to have 5 main components, by Daniel Goleman, who first introduced the term in the mid-1990s as part of his work as a psychologist and science journalist. The five components are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

Self-awareness is to the ability to recognize and understand one's own emotions and how they influence thoughts and behaviors. For example, if we are feeling stressed and anxious, we may become more irritable and short-tempered. By being aware of this, we can take steps to manage our stress and avoid lashing out at others.

Self-regulation is the ability to manage and control one's own emotions. For example, if we are feeling angry, we can use techniques such as deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, or mindfulness to calm ourselves down.

Motivation is the ability to use emotions to drive behavior and achieve goals. For example, when feeling inspired and motivated, we may be more likely to work on a creative project or pursue a new goal.

Empathy is the ability to understand and respond to the emotions of others. For example, if a friend is going through a difficult time, we may be able to sense their sadness and respond with comfort and support. Empathy is sometimes divided into two different types of empathy: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand other people's perspectives and emotions without necessarily feeling them ourselves. Emotional empathy refers to the ability to feel what other people are feeling.

Social skills are the ability to build and maintain relationships with others. For example, if we are able to effectively communicate and collaborate with our colleagues, we may be more successful in our work environment.

The difference between emotional intelligence and IQ may seem like something obvious, after reading the above, but let us take a moment to reflect on this. IQ mainly refers to the ability a person has to process, retain and use infrometion in their (mostly mental) field of awarenes in order to solve problems to a level of complexity using tools like visual and spatial processing, knowledge of the world, fluid reasoning, working and shor-term memory and quantitative reasoning. A keen eye can see how both frameworks operate in a similar way but in different fields, relevant to separate but overlapping aspects of any person's everyday life. Which sphere of our human experience is relevant to which is really the main differientiating factor between both, and how the relationship between these parts of ourselves and our surrounding reality works tells us to what extent we have been able to develop them.

It would be easy to say that one is more important, better or stronger than the other, but we would be ignoring the fact that, when both these skillsets work in harmony is when we see the best expression of human capacity being explored. Just as we need one hand to wash the other, emotions inform us about what we know and the thinking mind creates a conceptual framework for us to hold and understand our emotions at an operational level. For those of us striving to find happiness in this birth, emotional intelligence gives us tools to understand what it is we need in order to be happy, as well as helping others and being helped by others in this pursuit.