Working On Our E.I.
Emotional
intelligence is defined as the ability to understand, use, and manage your own
emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize
with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. To many, this might not
be a topic that awakens your interest, perhaps you consider it useless, boring,
even unimportant, but only a few get to
understand the impact that it can have in your life and how it can
influence your relationships with others.
To learn to know
yourself and your emotions will positively improve your capacity to
successfully interact with others, conflict management, ameliorate your grades
and achieve your personal goals.
Besides, it plays
a key role in your mental health, due to the fact that after reaching complete self-awareness
of your emotions and you get to understand them completely, it improves your
ability of self-management, leads to emotional self-awareness and self-control,
and most important of all, it boosts your self-confidence.
Having defined
Emotional intelligence and after deepening a bit about its importance in our
everyday life, it is time to wonder about what truly means to be an expert on
the Emotional Intelligence area, and it can be understood as learning to move
in these four areas:
Self-awareness –
To learn to know yourself is one of the most important and relevant parts of
the process, there is nothing you can do if you do not reflect on your past
actions and learn from your past mistakes. By doing this, your get to recognize
your own emotions, you know what situations might trigger anger or sadness, you
understand how these emotions reflect on your actions and your behavior. You
acknowledge strengths and weaknesses, which leads to self-confidence. Once you
learn to know yourself completely, you can start working in how your attitude
reflects on others, which leads you to the next step.
Self-management
–This meaning that after a little bit of training, you can control yourself and
your impulses. This will lead you to successfully manage your emotions in a
healthy way for your and for others. It will ameliorate your leadership and
will help you adapting to changing circumstances.
This might seem
easy to achieve, but don’t fool yourself, there is much behind this than what
you can see, due to the fact that learning to fully control yourself does not
only mean controlling what you say and how you say it, in other words, verbal
communication, but is also makes reference to you gestures, your faces, even
the way you move your hands, your nonverbal way of communicating, which
influences the way others perceive you. This is something we all need to pay
close attention.
Social awareness –
This makes direct emphasis on your ability to have empathy toward others, which
means you are able not only to understand your emotions, but also the ones of
others, you sympathize with their needs and you are capable of recognizing how
they feel and how to act according to this.
Relationship
management – After learning to comprehend the ones around you, it is time to
start working on your relationships, after understanding someone, you will get
to communicate with them assertively, you can became a sort of inspiration, a
leader and a key part of solving any type of conflict.
To conclude, it is
remarkable the impact that our emotions have in our lives, it might be hard, it
might seem impossible, but once you take the rhythm of it and learn to know
yourself, control yourself and interact with others, your life will take a turn
of 180°.
As it is said on the
Bhagvad Gita:
“Mind is very
restless, forceful and strong, O Krishna, it is more difficult to control the
mind than to control the wind”
The path might be
hard, but the result is worth a fight.
