What is Emotional Intelligence?

An individual’s ability to perceive, evaluate and control their emotions is often referred to as Emotional Intelligence or EI. Although a learned response, this ability to monitor feelings and emotions can be strengthened and enhanced. Emotional Intelligence is therefore an understanding of how to use emotion to get along with other people.

The Key Elements Of Emotional Intelligence

Behaviour, emotion and the ability to communicate provide the foundations to understanding and working with emotional intelligence. There are five key areas that make up the concept of emotional intelligence and they are: knowing your emotions, managing emotion, self motivation, recognising and understanding the emotion of others and managing relationships. These, combined with other principles such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), empathy and Transactional Analysis, form the basis of the development of an individual’s emotional intelligence.

How To Use Emotional Intelligence

Awareness of how to perceive, understand, use and manage emotion is an invaluable skill that is of great benefit to everyone. Being able to detect, comprehend and decipher emotion requires understanding, acceptance and the willingness to explore human emotion and thinking. Without a good grounding and understanding of this it becomes difficult to direct emotion so that it works in your favour.

Business, training and organisation knowledge and understanding can be enhanced by using emotional intelligence to gain more insight and awareness of people and situations. Individual understanding of personal emotion, and how to best act in response to these, can greatly impact on the behaviour or others and situations and circumstances experienced. Interpersonal skills, management ability and style and attitude to others can all be improved and developed by using emotional intelligence concepts and resources.

The Importance Of Understanding Emotion

Whether in business or personal relationships good people skills is a requirement that impacts on the level of communication we have the ability to demonstrate and use. Social-emotional awareness, getting along with others, negotiating, decision making, seeking resolution to conflict and other emotional management skills are essential to our emotional growth and well-being. Emotional intelligence also has educational importance as without it understanding the needs of others, through personal interaction, becomes more difficult.

Life skills based learning, through the exploration of emotion, combines understanding with knowledge and takes into account personal values, attitudes, skills and thinking. Communication, self- awareness and self management and an individual’s inter-personal skills can then be explored and improved with the use of emotional intelligence learning techniques and exercises.

Complementary Links

By the very nature of exploring personal awareness emotional intelligence opens a door to understanding compassion and humanity on a deeper level. This, in turn, increases awareness of spirituality and love, and can provide a stepping stone to understanding the value we all have as humans. Understanding self, and others, and how emotion influences situations will help create better awareness of intention, response and behaviour.

Emotional Intelligence Resources

There is a wide range of resource materials available to individuals eager to understand and explore their own emotions on a deeper level. There are online emotional intelligence tests, course, books and other evaluating methods on offer, which can all help an individual gain more insight into the management of emotion.

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