Emotional Intelligence

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence is being aware of your feelings and actions and how they affect the people around you. It also means being aware of how other people are feeling, which can explain how they are acting towards you, and being aware of how you act toward them.

Emotional Intelligence can be broken down in to five categories:

Self-awareness: understanding your emotions and how they affect others, as well as being aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

Self-regulation: understanding and monitoring your emotions and controlling them to fit the situation. Motivation: being able to hold out for long term rewards instead of instant gratification.

Empathy: being aware of how other people are feeling and being able to put yourself in their shoes and see situations from their point of view, free of judgement.

Social skills: people with high emotional intelligence are able to build rapport with other people and put them at ease.

How is Emotional Intelligence different to IQ?

EQ describes emotions, feelings and being aware of one’s own, as well as someone’s ability to interact and relate with others, whereas IQ describes intelligence and someone’s abstract thinking and logical reasoning ability when compared to the statistical norm.

Why is EQ important?

EQ is important as it allows people to relate to others and understand their own and others feelings - to feel empathy. This allows people to build and maintain personal and work relationships, deal with conflict, understand the thoughts and feelings of people who hold differing views, as well as manage their own emotions. Having a high EQ also enables helping behaviours, making people more likely to help others instead of judging and standing by.