Emotional Intelligence
by Christelle Quilang 29 April 2022
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence or EQ is about one’s emotional and social skills. It is about understanding, managing, and utilising emotions, yours and others’. Emotional Intelligence is made up of 5 components: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Self-awareness is about being aware of your emotions and how your emotions affect you and the people around you. Self-regulation is about staying in control, staying true to your values and commitments, keeping yourself accountable, and responding to your emotions in healthy ways. For example, staying calm when you’re stressed. Motivation is about consistently working towards your goals, and maintaining high standards for the quality of your work. Empathy is about seeing, understanding and responding effectively to others’ feelings, needs and concerns. Social skills is about developing and maintaining good relationships, communicating clearly, being able to inspire and influence others, working well in a team and managing conflict.
How is it different to IQ?
IQ is about your intellectual or technical abilities, whereas EQ is about how you navigate emotions and social situations.
Why is it important?
Emotional intelligence is important because it helps us be more effective in our professional and personal relationships. Strong emotions, like anger, stress and depression, can lead us to act in ways that promote conflict, violence and ineffectiveness. Knowing how to respond effectively to our strong emotions helps us maintain a sense of safety, peace, and harmony in our professional and personal relationships and environments. EQ helps us manage stress, manage ourselves for success, and maintain motivation, so it’s important for functioning well. EQ also helps us see, understand, and effectively respond to others’ emotions, needs, and concerns, and to communicate effectively, inspire, influence and gain support. This enables us to have stronger professional and personal relationships.