What is Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EQ or "emotional quotient") is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, regulate, evaluate, and utilize emotions to communicate with and relate to others in healthy, effective, and constructive ways.
Why is it important?
Developing emotional intelligence will help you build and maintain lasting relationships, navigate difficult situations, manage stress, and communicate with greater clarity.
The ability to express and control emotions is essential, but so is the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others. Some experts suggest that emotional intelligence is more important to your overall success than your IQ or other practical or technical skills.
How do we gain emotional intelligence?
Like all personal and inter-personal skills, emotional intelligence is learned. Most people aren’t taught to explore or understand what they are feeling, where those feelings originate, or how to navigate or regulate the feelings that arise within them. Yet, emotions are a fundamental part of our lives.
Emotions help us understand how we are impacted by the people and situations that we encounter. They also inform us of the areas where we need healing or where we need to develop greater balance in our lives.
Investing in the work of understanding what you are feeling and why is the first step in becoming self-aware, which is the bedrock of emotional intelligence.
The next step is to cultivate emotional regulation, which allows you to feel and process your emotions appropriately. Learning how to regulate your emotions is the first step. The goal is to build resiliency. Resiliency is a measure of how easily you can regulate your emotions and bounce back from challenging situations. As you learn ways to build resiliency, you have more control over how you respond to challenging situations.
Once you have learned to engage your own emotions in healthy and balanced ways, you can begin learning to understand and interpret emotions in others. This will enable you to respond appropriately in social and professional situations, leading to healthier and happier relationships, better decision-making, more effective leadership practices, and increased resiliency.
The Reward
Developing these critical life skills is an essential part of building a more just, humane, and equitable world, as they allow us to access greater empathy, understanding, and awareness. This enables us to more effectively collaborate, cooperate, and support one another. These skills also allow us to build and maintain healthier relationships, which offers us more opportunity for happiness and stability in our personal lives.
It is our hope that you will join us and take advantage of this opportunity to improve your emotional intelligence, to increase your personal capacity for success as well as our collective ability to create a more kind and loving world.
