What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence refers to the ability of controlling your own emotions and understanding people’s emotions.
There are five key elements associated with emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.
A person with high emotional intelligence refers to someone who can identify emotions of themselves and others, and knowing what outcome it brings.
It it not easy to control other people's emotions, however noticing how people feel through the way they act,
will give a better understanding of how to have a better relationship with them.
How is EQ different to IQ?
EQ is an ability of understanding your emotions as well as other people’s emotions, which stands for emotional quotient. This can be improved and learned when trained.
However, IQ, intelligence quotient, is a measure of people’s intelligence level, which cannot be improved.
A person with high IQ can learn fast, better understand and implement knowledge and show abstract thinking followed by logical reasoning.
A person with high EQ can recognise their own emotions and know how to not let it control their behaviour. They are also able to recognise other people's emotions and know how to interact with them.
Many people may think that the people who are successful in life have a higher IQ compared to EQ, however the researchers say that the people with higher EQ are much more successful in life.
Why is EQ important?
EQ is important for all humans as EQ plays a huge role in building relationships with others.
A higher EQ means that it will be easier to build relationships with your team and help to reduce team stress, leading to reduced conflicts and increasing job satisfaction.
This can happen through high interpersonal skills, which is a part of emotional intelligence. A team member who can control their emotions really well
can think more objectively prior to making a decision in a project.
Empathy and understanding also plays a crucial part in team. Once you get to really understand their situation and understand their emotions, you'll be able to build a much more
stronger relationships with them by making them feel more comfortable.
The most important part of emotional intelligence is really getting to know your own feelings first, and not letting the emotions control how you behave.
Relating back to myself
After the research of EQ and IQ, I would like to train my EQ. I feel the lack of EQ when I sometimes find it hard to understand what others are feeling. This makes it difficult for me during team projects, because I struggle to understand what everyone's going through. As of now, I understand that EQ plays an important role, so I will try and learn to increase my EQ and have a better communication skills by understanding what others are going through/feeling.