What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, analyze, express, and manage your own emotions while also being able to recognize and respond to the emotions of others.
Emotional Intelligence is just as important as IQ when it comes to truly understanding ourselves and others. It is also a necessary component to achieving and maintaining peace.
"All learning has an emotional base," - Plato.
Emotional intelligence has been referred to as a subset of Social intelligence and an important component used to guide our overall thinking, decision making, and actions.
The 5 Domains of Emotional Intelligence
Self Awareness
Self Awareness involves recognizing and understanding what our emotions are. This is not always an easy task. Sometimes we take on the emotions of others on a subconscious level or our emotions just feel like a jumbled mess.
We need to take a screen shot of what we are feeling and analyze it, separate our feelings from the feelings of others, and get to the root cause of our feelings in order to correctly identify the emotion and why we are feeling it.
Managing Emotions
This involves controlling and managing our feelings, taking a step back to analyze what we are feeling before acting impulsively, regulating our emotions and responding appropriately, as well as accurately responding to the emotions of others.
Social Awareness
Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and empathize with the emotions of others. It is a key component to achieving and maintaining peace.
Relationship Management
This aspect of emotional intelligence helps with building rapport, compromise, finding common ground, and conflict resolution.
Emotional Reasoning
Once we have awareness and understanding of our emotions, they can help guide our reasoning, cognitive abilities, and decision making and subsequent actions.