Emotional intelligence
Emotional
intelligence or E.I. is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and
those of the people around you. People with a high degree of emotional intelligence
knows what they are feeling, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can
affect other people. Often people tend to leave aside this important ability, that
affects their decision, attitude, and life.
We as humans are
social being by nature, and you might have listened about people who are so
intelligent that they have a high IQ, but their social life is a mess, right? because of their
lack of emotional intelligence, that is when you know that you can be intelligent but to
succeed in life you need more than that.
Emotional
intelligence not only affects the outside of you, your social life, or friends,
it affects your
health too, your emotions are connected to your health and sometimes we don’t see that.
For instance, when your boyfriend dumps you, you get sad and start eating young
food like crazy, affecting your body, or maybe you overthink things and get stress
raising the chance of getting cancer. Often, we leave aside the importance of our
emotions and the effect that they have on us.
There are some
skills that you can develop to increase your emotional intelligence. Some of them are self-management,
self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship
management.
You must be able
use your emotions to make constructive decisions about your behavior. When you
become overly stressed, you can lose control of your emotions and the ability to
act thoughtfully and appropriately. Managing stress is just the first step to building
emotional intelligence. Social awareness enables you to recognize and interpret the
mainly nonverbal cues others are constantly using to communicate with you. These
cues let you know how others are really feeling, how their emotional state is changing
from moment to moment, and what is enormously important to
them.
Working well
with others is a process that begins with emotional awareness and your ability
to recognize and understand what other people are experiencing. And in this way,
you can have a more successful social life and a calm mind, you’ll know how to manage
situations. Start by
practicing self-awareness. Like with most things emotional, you can’t get better at them
until you know what they are.
When you lack self-awareness, trying to manage
your emotions is like sitting in a tiny boat without a sail on top of the sea of your own
emotions, completely at the whim of the currents of whatever is happening moment
by moment. You have no idea where you are going or how to get
there. And all you
can do is scream and yell for help. You need to understand yourself and your behavior,
what you are doing, how you feel about it, and the hardest part, figuring out
what you do not know about yourself. Get to know yourself and to your emotional
intelligence, manage your
emotions and your life will change for the better.
By Dina Reyes, Step 10.
