We often talk about emotional intelligence in the workplace, but emotional intelligence is also important in everyday life. To be fulfilled and to do well in your role, emotional intelligence is needed. While having a high IQ can get you places, unless you can truly understand your own and others’ emotional needs, then you will find it difficult to succeed, especially in some roles such as nursing.
Having a strong sense of your emotions and understanding the idea of emotional intelligence will allow you to have more success at work, create strong and meaningful relationships, and achieve any personal or professional goals. If you want to know more about emotional intelligence and how it can be applied to your life, read on for more information.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to understand, use, identify and manage emotions in order to gain a positive response. For example, those with high emotional intelligence will be able to communicate effectively, relieve stress, overcome challenges, empathize with strangers, friends, colleagues, or loved ones, and be a dab hand at conflict resolution. Your emotional intelligence level will impact on a myriad of different factors in your life, including how you are with others and how you behave in situations.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your own emotions and emotional state, as well as the emotional state of those around you. This allows you to engage with others and helps people feel comfortable around you. This is important in a number of settings, including those in managerial positions who may need to have difficult talks with employees. Understanding your own emotions and the emotions of others allows you to relate to people, almost like putting yourself in their shoes. Those with high emotional intelligence will have much healthier relationships, a more fulfilling life and usually achieve much greater success than those unable to empathize and communicate effectively with others.
The Four Signs of Emotional Intelligence
When we speak about emotional intelligence, there are four main factors to consider that help you to understand your own state of emotional intelligence. The first one is self-awareness, and this basically refers to how well you know and manage your own emotions. Before you can even think about understanding the emotions of those around you, you need to have a good grasp of your own. This means having confidence in yourself, recognizing how your emotions can influence the way you behave and the thoughts you have, as well as understanding your own weaknesses and strengths. When you demonstrate self-awareness, you have started your journey to emotional intelligence.
Self-management comes after self-awareness and is the ability to control your emotions and not let them get the best of you. When you are self-managing, you are controlling any impulsive behaviors or feelings and instead of managing any bad emotions in a more positive way. You will also be good at taking initiative, following through on any commitments and adapting yourself when circumstances change. Social awareness refers to the ability to understand others’ emotions, concerns or needs. This includes picking up on any social or emotional cues from others, feeling comfortable in social events, and recognizing power dynamics when in an organization or group setting. Finally, you will have good relationship management skills. This means you can develop good, therapeutic relationships with those around you, but also have the ability to break these relationships off in a work environment. Those with all four of these abilities will communicate well with others, influence and inspire those around them, and work well as part of a team and as a leader.
Also Read: Emotional Regulation Strategies
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
If you haven’t already figured, emotional intelligence is pretty important for all areas of your life. Whether you want to do better in school, at work or with your own personal relationships, having great emotional intelligence allows you to understand yourself and those around you. Being smart can get you places, but to be influential, you need to understand others and have good emotional connections with them. This will allow you to feel the most fulfilled with your life in every aspect. Emotional intelligence can impact many parts of your life – below are just four of the main ways it can influence your life in a beneficial way.
Relationships
No matter where you are in life, relationships matter. Whether this is relationships with friends, colleagues or a partner, emotions are important. Understanding your own emotions in situations as well as the emotions of the people around you ensures that you truly understand each other and can express how you feel. This sort of communication is essential to build a strong and meaningful relationship that will last.
Mental Health
Not knowing how to deal with your own emotions can lead to mental health problems. Not understanding how to control stress can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression. This means you need to come to terms with how you deal with situations in order to overcome them. If you are prone to mood swings and cannot control feelings of anger or frustration, you may end up damaging relationships or feeling isolated.
Physical Health
Stress doesn’t just impact your mental health, but your physical health too. Those who are bad at dealing with their own emotions may be damaging their physical health in more ways than they realize. The first and main step to improving and recognizing your own emotional intelligence is knowing how to deal with your own stress in healthy ways. The inability to do so could cause elevated blood pressure and an increased risk of stroke.
Work Life
As stated many times, emotional intelligence can help you out at work massively. For some jobs, emotional intelligence is a required skill, as without it you cannot deal with others. This means those that work in counseling or healthcare settings need to have strong emotional intelligence to help aid complete strangers in their recovery. If you want to climb your career ladder, emotional intelligence gives you the skills needed to be liked and to lead well.
How to Improve Emotional Intelligence
Understanding what emotional intelligence is and why it’s important is the first step in improving it. You can then begin to look at your everyday life and apply these skills. Another way to improve emotional intelligence is with emotional intelligence training. There are many training courses available in emotional intelligence, enabling you to understand how to apply these skills to real-life situations to get ahead. You can attend public sessions, or you may want to consider looking at some of the training options online.
Knowing the steps to become more emotionally intelligent is one of the first steps to becoming a better version of yourself. Understanding stress and how to deal with it will aid you greatly in this process, and applying your new-found skills to real-life situations is one of the easiest ways to see how emotional intelligence can impact and change situations. Attending training courses in emotional intelligence can aid you in both personal and professional development and is a great way to further understand emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is more than just having empathy for others, and people often know the difference.
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