Emotional intelligence also called as an Emotional quotient, is the capability of an individual to recognize their own emotions and those of others, differentiate between different feelings and label them correctly. It is said to include three skills; namely emotional awareness, the ability to harness emotions and applying them to tasks like thinking and problem solving, and the ability to manage emotions, which includes regulating your own feelings and cheering up or calming down other people. Here is all you need to know about emotional intelligence.
All you need to know about Emotional Intelligence!
Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence is something that’s present with us, however, in intangible form. It has a profound effect on our behavior, social complexities and personal decisions which help us achieve our desired outcomes.
Emotional Quotient is composed of five core competencies which are listed below.
Competencies of Emotional Intelligence:
Below are the five skills of emotional intelligence as per Daniel Goleman who helped popularize this concept of the emotional quotient in 1995.
a) Self Awareness: Self-Awareness helps you to perceive your emotions accurately and makes you aware of them as they take place in your life.
b) Self-Management: Self-management enables you to use your awareness of feelings to stay flexible and positively push and direct your work in the right direction.
c) Social competence: Social competence is composed of your relationship management skills and social awareness. This helps you understand other people’s behavior, moods, and motives in order to improve your quality of relationships with them.
d) Social-Awareness: Social awareness is your ability to understand and accurately pick up on the emotions of other people and understand what is really going in their minds.
e) Relationship Management: Relationship management is your skill of using your own emotions and others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.So now let’s discuss how you can acquire Emotional Intelligence in your personal and professional life. Of course, you can do it by practical applications, but before that, you will need to gain some more insights about them and how you can do that. Yes of course by reading some good books which will make you understand the concept of Emotional Intelligence in a better way.
Below is the list of the top ten books on Emotional Intelligence which you can read to gain some more insights into Emotional Intelligence.
1) Working With Emotional Intelligence: Written by Daniel Goleman, this one is packed with fascinating case histories of victories, disasters, and dramatic turnarounds from more than 500 organizations around the world. Quite possibly his best work.
2) Emotional Intelligence 2.0: This one from Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves delivers a step-by-step program for increasing your Emotional Quotient. It has an online assessment given to you as a baseline of your current EQ status.
3) Coaching for Emotional Intelligence: The Secret to Developing the Star Potential in Your Employees: This book written by Robert Wall provides a carefully planned strategy to help managers address issues which make coaching for Emotional Intelligence more challenging than coaching for performance alone.
4) The EQ Edge: The authors of this book Howard Book and Steven Stein offer some surprising yet fascinating insights into what it takes to become a top lawyer, cop, school principal, and CEO. This book lays out some top Emotional Intelligence factors across different types of jobs from HR professionals to customer service representatives.
5) Go Suck a Lemon: Strategies for Improving your Emotional Intelligence: this book on EI written by Michael Cornwall is meant really to stop you in your tracks so that you can self-assess whether you’re truly emotionally intelligent.
6) The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights: This book again from Goleman brings us his simple writing style which emphasizes on the more recent neurological research on emotional intelligence.
7) Primal Leadership: The essence of Primal Leadership is on creating good feelings amongst the people they lead. They implement this by maintaining these same positive feelings in themselves. In addition, they create and sustain change and build an EI competent organization.
8) The EQ Difference: A Powerful Plan for Putting Emotional Intelligence to Work: The author of this book describes the profound effect emotions can play in all aspects of work life, right from performance to peer relationships, and throws some light on how one can improve his/her interpersonal relationships just with some simple changes in their actions and thoughts.
9) The Language of Emotional Intelligence: The Five Essential Tools for Building Powerful and Effective Relationships: this book is an excellent script which describes how to use EQ to build successful and better relationships with everyone in your life. The author Jeanne Segal shows the usage of five basic tools of Emotional Intelligence to improve communication.
10) The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book: This book resembles Emotional Intelligence 2.0 written by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves and helps readers assess their own EQ, learn more about what EQ means, and get advice on developing their EQ at work, at home, and for personal well-being.
Emotional intelligence and Human Behavior:
Emotional quotient taps into our fundamental element of human behavior which is different from our intellect. There is no connection between IQ and emotional intelligence as you simply cannot predict the degree of emotional intelligence on one’s smartness. Intelligence helps you learn and acquaint new things and it is the same at age of 50 as it was at age 15. Emotional quotient on the other hand is a flexible skill-set that can be learned and enhanced with consistent practice. Most of the people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, however, you can also develop a high degree of emotional intellect even if you do not have the same from your bir
Your personality is the final piece of your puzzle. It is a stable style which defines each of us. Personality is the outcome of our hard-wired choices such as inclination towards extroversion or introversion. However, as IQ personality cannot be used to predict one’s Emotional Intelligence. Also like Intelligence quotient personality is stable over a period of time and does not change. Our personality, emotional intelligence and intelligence quotient each have their unique role in defining the character of a person.
Conclusion:
Thus, we can conclude that Emotional Intelligence plays an important role in our lives and helps us in achieving our desired goals. Unlike IQ emotional intelligence has no internal limitations and one can acquire the same and improvise it over a period of time. It can help you to arrive at your conclusion and thus help you in simplifying your thought process.