EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EQ)

• Meaning, components, importance, relevance
• For most people, emotional intelligence (EQ) is more important than one’s
intelligence (IQ) in attaining success in their lives and careers. As individuals our
success and the success of the profession today depend on our ability to read
other people’s signals and react appropriately to them.
• Therefore, each one of us must develop the mature emotional intelligence skills
required to better understand, empathize and negotiate with other people —
particularly as the economy has become more global. Otherwise, success will
elude us in our lives and careers.
• “Your EQ is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates
them and how to work cooperatively with them,” says Howard Gardner, the
influential Harvard theorist.
• Five major categories of emotional intelligence skills are recognized by
researchers in this area.
FIVE CATEGORIES OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EQ)

Understanding the Five Categories of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

• SELF AWARENESS
• SELF REGULATION
• MOTIVATION
• EMPATHY
• SOCIAL SKILLS
SELF AWARENESS

The ability to recognize an emotion as it “happens” is the key to your EQ.

Developing self-awareness requires tuning in to your true feelings. If you
evaluate your emotions, you can manage them.

The major elements of self-awareness are:

• Emotional awareness - Your ability to recognize your own emotions and their
effects.
• Self-confidence - Sureness about your self-worth and capabilities.
SELF - REGULATION
You often have little control over when you experience emotions. You can,
however, have some say in how long an emotion will last by using a number of
techniques to alleviate negative emotions such as anger, anxiety or depression.
A few of these techniques include recasting a situation in a more positive light,
taking a long walk and meditation or prayer. Self-regulation involves
• Self-control. Managing disruptive impulses.
• Trustworthiness. Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity.
• Conscientiousness. Taking responsibility for your own performance.
• Adaptability. Handling change with flexibility.
• Innovation. Being open to new ideas.
MOTIVATION
To motivate yourself for any achievement requires clear goals and a positive
attitude. Although you may have a predisposition to either a positive or a
negative attitude, you can with effort and practice learn to think more positively.
If you catch negative thoughts as they occur, you can reframe them in more
positive terms — which will help you achieve your goals. Motivation is made up
of:
• Achievement drive. Your constant striving to improve or to meet a standard of
excellence.
• Commitment. Aligning with the goals of the group or organization.
• Initiative. Readying yourself to act on opportunities.
• Optimism. Pursuing goals persistently despite obstacles and setbacks.
EMPATHY
The ability to recognize how people feel is important to success in your life and
career. The more skillful you are at discerning the feelings behind others’ signals
the better you can control the signals you send them. An empathetic person
excels at:
• Service orientation. Anticipating, recognizing and meeting clients’ needs.
• Developing others. Sensing what others need to progress and bolstering their
abilities.
• Leveraging diversity. Cultivating opportunities through diverse people.
• Political awareness. Reading a group’s emotional currents and power
relationships.
• Understanding others. Discerning the feelings behind the needs and wants of
others
SOCIAL SKILLS
The development of good interpersonal skills is tantamount to success in your life
and career. In today’s always-connected world, everyone has immediate access to
technical knowledge. Thus, “people skills” are even more important now because
you must possess a high EQ to better understand, empathize and negotiate with
others in a global economy. Among the most useful skills are:
• Influence. Wielding effective persuasion tactics.
• Communication. Sending clear messages.
• Leadership. Inspiring and guiding groups and people.
• Change catalyst. Initiating or managing change.
• Conflict management. Understanding, negotiating and resolving disagreements.
• Building bonds. Nurturing instrumental relationships.
• Collaboration and cooperation. Working with others toward shared goals.
• Team capabilities. Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.
FACTORS AT PLAY

• What factors are at play when people of high IQ fail and those of modest IQ
succeed?
• How well you do in your life and career is determined by both. IQ alone is not
enough; EQ also matters. In fact, psychologists generally agree that among the
ingredients for success, IQ counts for roughly 10% (at best 25%); the rest
depends on everything else — including EQ.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

• We have an intuitive idea that emotions can be distinguished as positive or

negative. Gladness and sadness, love and hate, pride and shame, hope and
fear, for example, seem to fall rather neatly on either side of this distinction.
In philosophy and psychology, however, various criteria are used in drawing
the distinction between positive and negative emotions.

• It is suggested, for instance, that positive and negative emotions respectively

involve a favorable or unfavorable assessment of the situation or else a
propensity to approach or avoidance. It is obvious that with the application of
the various criteria proposed the distinction will be drawn in different places.
VALUE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
• For years, psychology turned its attention to the study of negative emotions
or negative affect, including: depression, sadness, anger, stress and anxiety.
Not surprisingly, psychologists found them interesting because they may often
lead to, or signal the presence of, psychological disorders.
• However, positive emotions are no less fascinating, if only because of many
common-sense misconceptions that exist about positive affect. We tend to
think, for example, that positive affect typically, by its very nature, distorts or
disrupts orderly, effective thinking, that positive emotions are somehow
‘simple’ or that, because these emotions are shortlived, they cannot have a
long-term impact.
• Research has shown the above not to be the case but it took it a while to get
there. It is only relatively recently that psychologists realised that positive
emotions can be seen as valuable in their own right and started studying
them.
VALUE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
• The person behind that realisation was Barbara Fredrickson, who devoted
most of her academic career to trying to understand the benefits of the
positive emotions. The functions of negative emotions have been clear for a
while.
• Thus, fear contributes to a tendency to escape and anger to a tendency to
attack. If our ancestors were not equipped with such effective emotional
tools, our own existence could have been doubtful. Moreover, negative
emotions seem to narrow our action repertoires (or actual behaviours) –
when running from danger we are unlikely to appreciate a beautiful sunset.
• This function of negative emotions can help minimise distractions in an acute
situation. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are not associated with
specific actions. So what good are they, apart from the fact that they merely
feel good? What is the point in feeling happy or joyful, affectionate or
ecstatic?
VALUE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
• The ‘broaden-and-build’ theory of positive emotions, developed by Barbara
Fredrickson, shows that positive affective experiences contribute and have a long-
lasting effect on our personal growth and development. And this is how they do it:
(a) Positive Emotions Broaden our Thought-Action Repertoires
• First of all, positive emotions broaden our attention and thinking, which means
that we have more positive thoughts and a greater variety of them. When we are
experiencing positive emotions, like joy or interest, we are more likely to be
creative, to see more opportunities, to be open to relationships with others, to
play, to be more flexible and open-minded.
(b) Positive Emotions Undo Negative Emotions
• It’s hard to experience both positive and negative emotions simultaneously; thus
a deliberate experience of positive emotions at times when negative emotions are
dominant can serve to undo their lingering effects. Mild joy and contentment can
eliminate the stress experienced at a physiological level.
VALUE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
(c) Positive Emotions Enhance Resilience
• Enjoyment, happy playfulness, contentment, satisfaction, warm friendship, love, and
affection all enhance resilience and the ability to cope, while negative emotions, in contrast,
decrease them. Positive emotions can enhance problem-focused coping and reappraisal, or
infuse negative events with positive meaning, all of which facilitate fast bouncing back after
an unpleasant event.
(d) Positive Emotions Build Psychological Repertoire
• Far from having only a momentary effect, positive emotions help to build important physical,
intellectual, social and psychological resources that are enduring, even though the emotions
themselves are temporary. For example, the positive emotions associated with play can build
physical abilities; self-mastery and enjoyable times with friends – increase social skills.
(e) Positive Emotions can Trigger an Upward Developmental Spiral
• More than that, just as negative emotions can lead one into downward spirals of depression,
positive emotions can trigger upward developmental spirals towards improved emotional
well-being and transform people into better versions of themselves.
VALUE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
• The broaden-and-build theory urges us to consider positive emotions not as an end in
themselves but as a means of leading a better life.
• A lot of interesting research highlights the benefits of positive emotions. In one study
with people who had lost their partners, researchers found that laughter and Duchenne
smiling predicts the duration of grief.
• A Duchenne smile is a genuine smile characterised by the corners of the mouth turning
up and the crinkling of the skin around the corners of the eyes.
• People who laughed and smiled genuinely were more likely to be engaged in life and
dating again two and a half years later, compared to those who felt angry.
• A famous yearbook study traced the lives of women who were attending an all-
women’s college in 1965. The faces of the women in their college photographs were
coded for smiling behaviour and results showed that Duchenne smiles related to less
negativity, greater competence, more positive ratings from others and greater well-
being in their later lives. Another study demonstrated that physicians experiencing
positive emotions seemed to make more accurate diagnoses.
POSITIVE IMPACT OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

• So how much positivity do we need to have for a truly thriving existence? It

appears that the ratio of 3:1 or above of positivity to negativity results in the
experience of flourishing, while anything below this ratio (e.g. 2:1) – in the
experience of languishing.
• So make sure that for every one negative emotion you have at least three
positive ones. But beware, too much of even the best thing can be simply
dangerous. Experiencing positivity at above 8:1 can have counterproductive
effects.
POSITIVE IMPACT OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
Positive emotions can certainly help us on the rocky path to well-being but that does
not make the negative emotions irrelevant or unimportant. They may not feel quite as
good, but they can bring about very positive effects nevertheless. In defence of
negative emotions I propose the following:
• Negative emotions can help initiate fundamental personality changes. A leading
expert on emotions, Richard Lazarus, writes: ‘For the stable adult, major personality
change may require a trauma, a personal crisis, or a religious conversion‘.
• Negative emotions can bring us to our depth and put us in touch with our deeper
selves.
• They can facilitate learning, understanding of ourselves and knowledge of the world.
Wisdom is often gained from experiencing suffering and loss that are the necessary
parts of life.
• Finally, experiencing and coping with negative affect can have positive social
consequences, such as modesty, moral considerations, care and empathy.
POSITIVE IMPACT OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

• Some scholars think that putting all the emotions into two loose bags of
positive and negative is hardly a wise move. Hope, for example, is best
conceived as a combination of a wish that a desired outcome will occur with
anxiety that it might not. What is it then: a positive or a negative emotion?
• Pride is generally regarded as a positive emotion in the West but seen to be a
sin in more collectivistic societies. Love, one of the first emotions to spring to
mind when mentioning the positive, is hardly such when unrequited. Can
smiling and laughing be considered positive emotions when directed at
someone? What we shouldn’t underestimate whilst trying to understand
emotions is that what often makes them negative or positive is the context
within which they occur.
HEALTHY & UNHEALTHY EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
Here is a brief look at the fundamental nature of emotions.
What Healthy Emotions Look Like
• Healthy emotions are emotions that match the experience. For example, a
person gets angry if someone violates a boundary and lets the offender know.
Or, a person gets sad after a disappointment and cries. After the emotion
passes, and unless the situation is extreme and the person is unable to deal
with the intensity of the emotion, the individual is done with the emotion
completely.
What Emotions Should Not Look Like
• Emotions should not become an event that is played over and over again in
the mind each time the negative emotions are re-experienced. Healthy
emotions do not last for days and weeks without reprieve. Alternatively, it is
also unhealthy to repress emotions and pretend that everything is fine.
HEALTHY & UNHEALTHY EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS

What Our Emotions Mean

• Feeling feelings means being aware of how situations and experiences impact
you so that you can use this information to make the best possible choices for
yourself in the future. Emotions are part of your guidance system.

What Our Emotions Do Not Mean

• Emotions are not meant to become a story about how life will be for all time
or in situations like what was experienced. They are not predictive of the
future, of who you are, or of what you are meant to have.
IMPROVE YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Here are 3 ways you can truly heal from the past to create the life that you want to live
in the future.
• Clear Your Emotional Baggage.Just as repeating negative experiences in your mind
helps lock them into place, you can do things to help oust them. The goal is to
disconnect the negative emotions that are stored with painful events so that as you
remember the event without having to experience the negative emotion.
• Create Your New Way of Being.When you let go of repressed emotion and the stories
that you have around it, you need to have a vision for what you are trying to create for
yourself in its stead. If you do not create a new vision of how you want to be, then you
have no choice but to do things that maintain what always has been.
• Reinforce That New Way of Being.It isn’t enough to simply come up with a vision of
how you want to be. You need to take actual steps in the direction of your vision to
reinforce the results that you are getting. Daily deliberate action and acknowledgment
of your progress are critical to seeing the kind of transformation you want to see.
IMPROVE YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

True transformation must involve these critical steps.

• You need to learn about emotional intelligence so that you can be more
skillful in your day-to-day life.
• You need to release emotional baggage so that you are free to encounter life
in the present.
• You need to create a vision of who you want to be, and then take action to be
that person each and every day.