Emotion Intelligence: Part 1 of my simple EI guide
What is EI?
With everything going on I recently found myself reading about emotional intelligence. which made me feel like now would be a good time to write about it along with my own personal thoughts and opinions. A reminder for everybody on such things is good once in a while. ;-) So this will be part of my simple emotional intelligence guide. In this we will be covering “what exactly is EI?”
Again what the heck is Emotional Intelligence exactly?(EI)
Much like IQ that is a bit of a loaded question. You ask three different people and you're bound to get three different answers. The simple answer is that EI is a measurement of your ability to understand and manage your emotions. It also means your ability to understand other peoples emotions and react to them. There tends to be a lot of misconceptions on what EI is. EI is not:
Always being nice to someone
Fake Praise
Manipulating people
Anything that has to do with being fake or insincere
EI is about having a healthy range of emotions, understanding them all. Being able to work with them. Instead of letting them control you or your actions. And having good perception of how emotions influence other people. Much like IQ this can get crazy complicated. The Wikipedia page, which I will link below lists three different models alone. So people can't even fully agree how to measure EI or what it means exactly. EI is just the emotional equivalent of IQ.
Where IQ is all about things such as the logical, mathematical, problem solving ability of your brain. Your EI is all about how you understand, use and manage your emotions in a positive manner. How you respond to stress, how you help others in managing negative emotions. It's your ability to project positive emotions and controlling negative emotions. This falls in line with someone that everyone including yourself feels at ease with. You can talk to them about anything without ever feeling pressured or judged and they listen. That person would very likely score higher on the EI scale.
Why is EI important?
EI much like IQ is somewhat subjective. Generally people who are successful, in leadership positions and other things will score high in IQ (and lately EI now that it's becoming more common) though there are exceptions. But the human mind is so complex that I always caution people to never take these kind of things as instant truth. Just like if you score high for IQ or EI and you shouldn't let it go to your head (so to speak ^_^ ) don't let a low score bother you either. Both of these things should be taken with a grain of salt. Why? Because again it's very subjective. Also neither are perfect which is why there's so much disagreement even among experts in these fields. These are meant to be measuring tools to help gauge where you're at.
Many studies have found a positive correlation with high EI. This includes greater happiness in life. Better job performance, higher pay, better leadership, better relationships professional as well as personal. Better conflict resolution ability, more success and the list goes on. Same time people have called into questions how accurate some of these studies are. Best suggestion, use IE has a guideline to see where you are at and if you might be in need of improvement in it. The simple answer is that we are humans and human beings are emotional creatures. Because of this emotions play a vital role in our lives. Maybe one day when we are machines that won't be the case but until then...
How can I test (measure) my EI?
Yes you can! Funny thing is EI has been around for a while now. Wikipedia alone says how it was first mentioned 50+ years ago though at the time it was called something else I believe. Although EI continues to get some criticism on if it is a true intelligence or as important as IQ it has continued to gain in popularity. It has gotten popular to the point where individuals and corporations give serious thought to how it impacts them. People such as Travis Bradberry or companies such as TalentSmart have done various studies and tests to measure emotional intelligence. They have found things such as high EI equaled better pay, being a top performer at work and accounted for slightly over 50% of on the job performance and success. The easiest way to test yourself is using various online exams. There are short 10 questions exams or more accurate 300+ questions exams. I'll leave links to both. Feel free to tell me what your score is. ~_^
So now what?
Now you have a basic but solid understand of the What, Why and How when it comes to EI. This is really just to get your feet wet and save you the trouble of reading 10 plus articles to get the general idea. People tend to write to much... myself included.
Key Points
IE is about how your manage the entire range of emotions. Happy, sad, angry, agitated, relaxed. How you interact with other people along with other people, how you respond to their emotions and your ability to understand other peoples emotions.
So I hope you enjoyed part 1 here. Check out the resources below. If you enjoyed this post please feel free to upvote, follow and resteem. Leave any comments or let me know what your score on the exams was.
In the upcoming parts I plan to dive into more detail on every topic. In part 2 we will dig into this deeper with more specifics about how a high or low IE impacts (most likely) things such as your personality and how a person generally handles emotions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/emotional-intelligence-why-important.html
https://www.arealme.com/eq/en/ (I scored a 160)
https://globalleadershipfoundation.com/geit/eitest.html
https://www.psychologytoday.com/tests/iq/emotional-intelligence-test
Great post! I actually read something recently stated by a Psychologist on Big Think and they were explaining that our other problem with emotions is that in English we have a limited amount of words that describe the way we feel. Happy, sad, angry, etc. but in other languages, there are words that explicitly explain feelings and which opens up their definition of emotions and feelings.
That's actually pretty fascinating thank you for that info. I'll be looking into that further. I'll admit that in everything I've read I hadn't seen that theory before. in a way I could see how that makes sense though. Difficulty in expressing how ones feels could lead to problems. I found psychology and the human mind endlessly fascinating.