Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to monitor one's own and other people's emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.

Imagine if you couldn't understand when your co-worker is angry or your friend is sad. This ability is referred as Emotional Intelligence. In the simplest terms, emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to perceive, control and evaluate emotions. There exist many different schools of thoughts while some give EI importance over IQ and suggest that emotional intelligence can be learned and strengthened, while others claim it is an inborn characteristic.

Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer have been the leading researchers on emotional intelligence since 1990. In their influential article “Emotional Intelligence,” they defined emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence. Later Daniel Goleman’s book on Emotional Intelligence described that to be successful EQ is more important than traditional IQ measures.
Emotional intelligence impacts many different aspects of your daily life, such as the way you behave and interact with your colleagues, customers, seniors and family. EQ matters more than our Intellectual ability (IQ) to effectively deal with these stakeholders as it helps in building stronger relationships, achieving career goals and successes at work.
For better understanding we can say that there are two important aspects of EQ
- Your ability to identify, control and express your emotions
- Your ability to understand, interpret and respond to the emotions of others
So now we probably know why people who are academically brilliant still are unsuccessful at work or socially inept or fail at building good relationships. Even employers have now realized that skills like Maths, verbal, and logical reasoning are not the enough to predict the ability of the employees.
While cognitive skills (IQ) can get you in the company, but it is your emotional skills that help you thrive in the job.

So how we can improve our emotional intelligence?

1- Self Awareness- Learn to recognize your emotions, understand their origin and segregate them into strengths and weaknesses. This will be the first step towards understanding your emotions. Your body language, facial expressions and other nonverbal signals gives important queues to understanding emotions. Self-awareness is the foundation to emotional intelligence.

2- Self Management – Here you need to balance your emotions. For example, if in some situations you get angry than make a conscious effort to control your anger or if there are situations where you need to be more assertive than pull yourself to make your point. An important part in controlling your emotions is being able to recognize stress triggers and bring yourself back to calm and relaxed state.

3- Social Awareness- It is about understanding other’s emotions, accordingly adapt and provide response. For example, if your boss is acting angry, it might be because he is dissatisfied with your work; or it could be because he had a fight with his wife. In both these cases your response would be different. Keeping awareness about your surroundings, reaction of people is critical to providing a rational response to the situation.

4- Relationship Management- Effective relationship management can largely define your success at work. So you need to give importance to building relationships, maintain existing relationships and manage conflicts effectively. Be open and agreeable to other’s suggestions, respect difference of opinions, accept your mistakes and show empathy to others. Successful relationship management is the key to building strong emotional intelligence.

http://www.vmock.com/blog/how-important-is-emotional-intelligence-in-a-workplace/

http://trendyslimdiggy..com/2014/08/emotional-intelligence-ei-is-ability-to.html

Nice piece.

insightful!

Nice1 tho I've that book.