How Emotional Intelligence impacts your life

How Emotional Intelligence impacts your life

Do you want to connect with others, make more important decisions, find and follow the purpose, and lead a better-wholehearted life? Emotional Intelligence may be the missing ingredient, as it is a person’s awareness of his own emotions and his ability to use that awareness in life situations. How properly do you understand yourself, and how can you use that knowledge to succeed in the community around you?

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand and recognize emotions in yourself and others and utilize this awareness to manage your relationships and behaviour.

Do you recognize the nature of the emotions you feel? Can you handle those feelings without letting them dominate you?Can you retain the motivation to get your job done? Are you sensitive toward sensing the emotions of people around you and responding effectively? If the answer is “yes” to these questions, you have likely got the skills that form the basis of ’emotional intelligence.”

Emotional Intelligence: 

Emotional Intelligence forms the juncture at which emotion and cognition meet. It facilitates our capacity for empathy, resilience, communication, stress management, motivation, and the ability to navigate and read a plethora of conflicts and social situations. This very terminology refers to your capacity to process and regulate emotional information effectively and accurately, both within yourself and others, to utilize this information to guide thinking and actions.EI matters, and if cultivated properly, it gives you a more fulfilled life.

Importance of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence provides a framework to manage appropriate emotional responses, considering that these responses may be consistent or inconsistent logically with particular beliefs. When a student’s life evolves and enters a professional life, “emotional intelligence” is one of the important aspects that must be equipped cohesively for managing stress and dealing with the changes more productively and effectively.

Categories of Emotional Intelligence:

• Self-awareness:  

It is the ability to understand one’s own emotions and their impact on others. It is the initial step toward introspective self-evaluation, and it enables you to identify emotional and behavioural aspects of one’s psychological makeup, which you can then target for change. Emotional self-awareness is about what motivates you and what brings you fulfilment.

• Self-regulation: 

It is the ability to manage one’s disruptive or negative emotions and adapt to the changes in circumstances. Those who have a grip over self-regulation excel in managing conflicts, adapt well to the changes, and are more likely to take responsibility.

• Motivation: It is the ability to self-motivate with a keen focus on achieving self-gratification instead of reward or external praise. The individuals who are capable of motivating themselves tend to be goal-focused and more committed.
• Empathyis the ability to understand and recognize how others feel and consider those feelings in social situations before responding. Empathy allows the individual to cohesively understand the dynamics that influence the relationships, both at the workplace and in personal life.
• Social Skills: It includes managing others with emotional understanding and building rapport while connecting with people through skills such as verbal and nonverbal communication.

Emotional Intelligence has played an important role in mental and physical health and academic success and attainment in professional domains. People with higher Emotional Intelligence perform better than those with lower Emotional Intelligence.

In the present agile workplace, there is an increased emphasis on the importance of Emotional Intelligence over academic qualifications. How can meaningful progress be achieved if you do not recognize and acknowledge the exact point from starting?

Emotional Intelligence plays a vital role in success, whether interacting with others and improving your interpersonal communication, achieving success in your social relationships or the workplace, dealing with stress, or sharping decision-making skills.

Benefits and values of Emotional Intelligence: 

The benefits and value of Emotional Intelligence are vast in terms of professional and personal success. It is one of the core competency invocations, which supports professional and academic success, boosts communication skills, and improves relationships. People having higher EI tend to give better performance than those with less EI.

Proficiency in Emotional Intelligence is a prerequisite in intense or prolonged areas of emotional work such as social work, nursing, management roles, and the service industry. High EI improves the psychological and physical health of people and encourages performance in business and academics. It is an integral part of developing meaningful relationships. Studies have proved that there are significant links between successful interpersonal skills and high EI.

People with higher levels of EI have a greater propensity for cooperation with others, empathy, and affection for others. Persistent stress and accompanied prolonged negative effects such as depression, anger and anxiety precipitate the progression of diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, infections, delay in wound healing, and conditions such as arthritis and atherosclerosis.

The value of EI is tremendous, as its development encourages several positive traits, from effective communication to resilience, stress management to motivation, all of which are seen as conducive to achieving physical, personal, and occupational success and health.

Self-regulation, Self-management, and EQ: 

To an extent, our emotions are driven by the impulses over which one has little control, but on the other side, we possess the capability of self-management and self-regulation. There is a need to work on it. Consider a surgeon carrying on with his duty despite a losing patient or a calm pilot despite an aircraft’s jammed landing gear. This kind of self-regulation is built based on refined self-awareness and is an important part of emotional intelligence, which is honed by exercising the capacity to liberate oneself from an impulse-driven reaction.

People having the capability of self-regulation are less likely to be confrontational in an aggressive way and are away from making snap decisions. Self-management and self-regulation don’t mean the absence of anger. Instead, it is about keeping yourself within a controlled sphere of emotions, hence not allowing yourself to be sailed away with emotions. Instead, you keep the perspectives of self-analysis to give a response rationally.

 Resilience and Emotional Intelligence:

Resilience has an underlying perseverance component that motivates endurance in the face of obstacles. The component of perseverance is the key aspect for motivation of endurance in the whirlpool of  Emotional Intelligence is a valuable tool to be utilized in the face of adversity. It has the potential to sharpen leadership abilities effectively. It helps you practice resilience more smoothly, so you can be less likely to succumb to the bad impacts of stressors. The facets of Emotional Intelligence are related to alleviating the negative effects and challenging the physiological responses to stress.

The EI scores positively correlate with a person’s psychological well-being while negatively correlate with burnout and depression. Proper measures should be taken into consideration to elevate Emotional Intelligence to reduce the susceptibility to depression. EI is firmly correlated with an individual’s performance and advancement, as there is a strong mediational link between resilience and the motivation to achieve.

Is Emotional Intelligence more Important than IQ? 

High IQ is no guarantee of success. Our success in life is determined by both IQ and Emotional Intelligence. In reality, it is not a case of EI versus IQ. Instead, both have quite a considerable value. Where IQ determines the extent of cognitive complexity and, at an extent, it determines the levels of academic achievement, EI determines the selection of people who can be the best leaders in top management positions.

IQ has less connection to both life success and work as compared to Emotional Intelligence. It is because IQ is less of a predictor of how well you will perform in your walk of life, and what more matters is, in fact, the ability to manage frustrations and get along with other people with controlled emotions.

Emotional Intelligence and Motivation: 

Motivation is the basic psychological process we use to stimulate ourselves into action to achieve the desired outcome. It is directly proportional to success, and EI is linked with motivation. Whether it’s about personal goals, health, or work, an emotionally intelligent individual properly understands the deeper meaning of aspirations and the self-motivation skills mandatory for achieving them.

Four elements makeup motivation, i.e., the personal drive for us to improve, commitment to our goals, the readiness to act on the opportunities we are presented with, and the aspect of refined resilience. Motivation arouses, directs, energizes, and sustains performance and behavior. Intrinsic motivation pushes us to achieve our full potential. An Emotionally Intelligent person, in addition to

possessing the skills for self-motivation motivates others as well.

Emotional Intelligence to deal with stress:

If you have the right skills at your disposal, stressful days are completely manageable. Individuals with high emotional Intelligence have sufficient self-awareness for recognizing and responding to negative feelings to avoid escalation. Misunderstood and uncontrolled emotions exacerbate the vulnerability to various health issues, including depression and anxiety.A deficit in Emotional Intelligence and self-regulation leads to lower well-being and exaggerated response to stressors.

EI and decision making: 

Emotional Intelligence is strongly connected to personal development; it impacts how you manage your behavior and navigate the social complexities and our decision-making. An authentic understanding of the emotions we feel can have a huge impact on our decision-making ability. If we can not look at our emotions objectively, how can we avoid misguided decisions based on them?

Negative emotions related to anxiety can impede the decision making and problem-solving approach of ours, both in personal circumstances and in the workplace. The sense of recognizing emotions that are problematic in forming rational decisions has obvious benefits in the decision-making process. Hence getting EI training is quite an effective strategy for introducing decision-making skills to aid in understanding the consequences of bad decision making. Understanding the consequences of emotions allows you to make an objective decision.

Is Emotional Intelligence and success is related? 

Same as happiness, ask someone about their perspective of success, and you will get various answers. But as described earlier, IQ alone is not enough for success; you must have the fortitude to manage stress. For example, in a working setup, managers who can outperform their peers have experience and technical knowledge and utilize the productive strategies associated with Emotional Intelligence to manage conflicts effectively, reduce stress, and improve success.

 EI and communication: 

Let’s consider effective communication in a living environment, and more specifically, conflict resolution in that environment. People with higher emotional intelligence are far more likely to approach a better conflict resolution level collaboratively.

The process of successful negotiation ( in terms of conflict ) is strongly linked to higher EI levels. Those with low levels of EI mostly react defensively, escalating the situation of conflict, while the individuals with higher Emotional Intelligence own the skills to communicate without escalating tension effectively.

Emotional Intelligence and Happiness:

Emotional Intelligence facilitates happiness, contributing to self-actualization, which contributes to happiness in a feedback loop of contention. Happiness has a link with intelligent behaviour. People with higher EQ (emotional quotient) are more empathetic, have better self-monitoring and social skills, cooperate better in relationships, and have more affectionate relationships. Apart from motivational value, happiness monitors a person’s immediate well-being, interjecting a positive mood in how he copes with daily challenges, demands, and pressures.