Emotions are inherently neither positive nor negative; rather, they serve as the single most powerful source of human energy, authenticity, drive and can offer us a wellspring of intuitive creative wisdom. In fact each feeling provides us with vital and potential profitable information every minute of the day.
Emotional intelligence is a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way. Emotional quotient or intelligence demands that a person is able to manage and control his or her emotions and possess the ability to control the emotions of others as well. In other words, they can influence the emotions of other people also. It is believed that to be emotionally and socially intelligent, individuals must be able to understand and express themselves, be able to comprehend and build healthy relationships with others, and effectively cope with the challenges, pressures and significant demands placed on the individual on a daily basis.
It is the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotions; the ability to generate feelings when they facilitate thought, understand emotion and emotional knowledge and to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth. Higher scores in emotional intelligence result in greater wellness, happiness, better job performance, more pro-social behavior, and less aggressive behavior. It also correlates positively with positive mood and negatively with negative mood.
Students with higher levels of emotional intelligence are able to better manage themselves and to relate to others around them. This can help them develop improved self-motivation and more effective communication skills essential skills to helping students become more confident learners.
Emotional intelligence for example is important to business graduates who work in all types of workplaces and roles across the globe. This is because Business graduates need emotional intelligence skills to communicate effectively in teams, cope with the stressors of deadlines, foster working relationships with colleagues and industry partners, and ultimately, make decisions under emotional pressure and deal with conflicts that are inherent in many workplaces. Higher emotional intelligence skills are often more effective.
EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT
Emotional intelligence represents a specific subset group of tasks to social intelligence. It does not only encompass reasoning about emotions in social relationships, but also reasoning about internal emotions that are important for personal growth. Emotional intelligence is also more focused than social intelligence in that it pertains to emotional problems embedded in personal and social problems. Emotional intelligence is used interchangeably with emotional quotient (EQ) in many ways, where these terms are representative of emotional awareness and emotional skills. It is pointed out that an emotionally skilled person is skilled in four areas: identifying, using, understanding and regulating emotions.
Emotional intelligence, emotional quotient and emotional intelligence quotient, is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and adjust emotions to adapt to environments.
Emotional intelligence otherwise known as emotional quotient is concerned with effectively understanding oneself and others, relating well to people, and adapting to and coping with the immediate surroundings to be more successful in dealing with environmental demands. It is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict. Emotional intelligence helps you build stronger relationships, succeed at school and work, and achieve your career and personal goals. It can also help you to connect with your feelings, turn intention into action, and make informed decisions about what matters most to you.
WHY EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT IS IMPORTANT
A) IT IMPROVES COMMUNICATION
One importance of emotional quotient is that it improves communication. This is largely because when you have a better understanding of yourself which includes your emotions as well as that of others, you are in a better position to communicate better. Undergraduate students needs this more because they are at that stage of the lives when they have a lot of meetings and conversation to do especially with their supervisors especially during their undergraduate projects and other research works like seminar, paper and dissertation. With communication comes understanding and with understanding comes communication. You must understand to be able to have a good and articulated communication with anyone. This is because you already know how anyone would react therefore; you would know what to say in the course of communication to avoid any sort of rift or misunderstanding between parties. Therefore, emotional quotient leads to effective communication.
B) IT IMPROVES PROBLEM SOLVING ABILITY
Another importance of emotional quotient is that it improves problem solving ability. When one is confronted with problem (s), it takes one that has control of his/her emotions to calm down and look for solution or think a way out of the problem (s). People, who allow their emotions to have a better part of them in any given situation, may find it difficult solving the problem. However, instead of solving the problem, they may end up magnifying it. But those with a higher emotional intelligence are more likely to have the ability to solve problems that confront them rather than getting overwhelmed as no problem ever gets solved by worry.
C) IT RELIEVE STRESS
Emotional quotient or emotional intelligence also has the ability to help you understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways in order to relieve stress. There is a saying that no one understands you better than yourself. The understanding of yourself must also accompany with it your emotions that way you are able to relax and relieve yourself of any stress.
HOW TO BOOST EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT
Because of the importance of emotional quotient in all areas of life, it is also important that we have an understanding of how this emotional quotient can be boosted. Below are few points on how to boost emotional quotient.
A) OBSERVE HOW YOU REACT TO PEOPLE
One of the ways to boost emotional quotient is to observe how you react to people. Since emotional quotient has to do with understanding your emotions and that of others therefore, in order to achieve that you must first of all observe how you react to people as well as how people react in any given situations. That way you can be able to have a control over your emotions and also boost your emotional intelligence overtime.
B) DO SELF EVALUATION
It is advised that we set out time to self evaluate ourselves and this will help us know where we need to make necessary improvement or adjustment. It will also help us to know how well we have performed or are performing towards our desired goals and attitudes. In fact, self evaluation helps in boosting emotional quotient.
C) MEDITATE
Meditation is another way to boost emotional quotient. Meditation is very important and should be encouraged among people of different ages especially adults as meditation can be relaxing, inspiring, stress relieving and recognition of oneself. By recognition here it means a better understanding of oneself that way you avail yourself the opportunity of understand ding your emotions better and improve on them.
D) EXAMINE HOW YOUR ACTIONS AFFECT OTHERS BEFORE TAKING SUCH ACTION
In the course of meditation, it will lead you to examining how your actions affect others before taking such action. You must understand that your actions can affect those around you either positively or negatively. Therefore, you must first of all have a proper examination of your actions and think how this action may affect others rightly before you take such actions.
CONCLUSION
Emotional intelligence is gaining fast momentum and the importance and awareness around the arena is steadily growing. Each individual possess emotions which either drives them to their success or failure. Having said this, if an academic student can utilize, manage and filter their emotions in positive ways with the best or adverse initiations, it is likely that this could influence their adaptation and successful completion of academic courses.