Know your emotions and emotional intelligence

 

 

From self-confidence, empathy to self-control; understanding and managing your own emotions can speedup success in all areas of your life. Your emotional consciousness facilitates a deeper understanding of who you are, enabling you to easily get along with others. As with many aspects of life, your emotions affect your performance and influence your decisions. You might have noticed some people often feel misunderstood, gets upset easily, become overwhelmed by the emotions and have problems being assertive. Whereas some remains calm and composed even during stressful situations, and also handle difficult people tactfully and diplomatically. That’s where emotional intelligence comes in, to drive your emotions in the right direction.

Emotional Intelligence is about how well you identify and manage your own emotions and how you react to the emotions of others. It helps you to make better informed decisions about what matters most to you. In fact, you can also easily identify and understand impact of your emotions on your mood, behaviour, performance, along with your interaction with other people. Moreover, you will also have the ability to manage and keep the disruptive emotions and impulses under control. Additionally, maintaining strong positive outlook also helps you to stay calm and think before you speak or act. Basically emotional intelligence is all about building a strong sense of self and learning to observe yourself in your actions.

However, emotional intelligence involves a realistic self-assessment of your own capabilities as well as knowing how others perceive you.  Considering different perceptions will further help you become more socially aware. For this purpose, you can ask your professors, supervisors, managers, colleagues, friends, or family about how you respond to difficult situations, how adaptable you are or your day to day interactions with them.  This will help you gain insight into their thoughts and a closer look on how well you relate with them. Although you may feel anxious, may be uncomfortable for asking their opinion. Yet their response will aware you to predict their feelings and belief that may be very different from yours. As a result, you will develop right behavioural pattern along with more adaptability to a variety of situations and circumstances. In this sense, you will acknowledge yourself and others, thus, promoting development of empathy which is important for social interaction. To act empathetically is a proactive approach, coupled with ability to include others needs and allows your resourcefulness to leverage with the thoughts and ideas of others. Hence, being empathetic gives you invaluable insight to predict the attitudes, expectations and intentions of others.

Since emotions are an instant response to specific triggers; they are not just positive or negative. Sometimes they could be misleading if you always react to them abruptly. By accepting positive emotions or erasing negative ones is not the solution instead you must appreciate and accept all of them. Take a moment to look at your emotions from an objective viewpoint, and then be honest about what’s causing them and how they are influencing your actions. At times, it is a good idea to step back and question your emotions before you choose the best way to respond to them. As you gain a better understanding of your emotions by questioning them you can avoid making mistakes easily. Likewise, cultivating positive emotions helps to overcome emotional barriers that are preventing you to suppress the negativity. To the best of your ability, think of situations or activities that bring about positive mindset. Furthermore, timely managing your emotions in more constructive ways shows that you use emotions intelligently.  

Emotional intelligence is a set of skills and behaviour that can be learned, developed, and enhanced. It starts within you, realising how effective you are at controlling your own emotions and feelings. Once you understand how your emotions shape your thoughts and actions, you can have greater control over your behaviour and develop the skills to manage yourself more effectively. Certainly measuring emotional intelligence is a lifelong process which requires constantly acknowledging your own emotions, thoughts and being considerate of others feelings. Above all it seems pertinent to remember a key factor, that is, to consciously manage your emotions and be understandable, and responsive to the needs and values of others.