Emotional Intelligence

Developing emotional intelligence is all about how to succeed by developing your emotional intelligence, understanding your strengths and weaknesses better and doing the inner work.

Because the way you handle yourself and others makes such a big difference in your own success and happiness as well as the success and happiness of those around you; both career-wise and personally, it is to the advantage of all that we get it right. Eliminating knee-jerk responses and simply agreeing with something because it is the easiest way are things that we constantly need to be on guard for and this is where emotional intelligence comes in.

Here are some of the more important elements of emotional intelligence:

Self-Awareness and Self-Honesty

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize that you are experiencing an emotion, identifying and classifying that emotion in such a way that others will be able to know what emotion it is that you are experiencing.

Self-awareness also incorporates being able to identify the appropriate source of the emotion and the capacity to be able to delay acting upon it until you’ve considered the most positive course of action.

The self-honesty part is closely tied to self-awareness in that you need to be able to recognize all your own strengths and weaknesses realistically, and not idealistically. This includes the identifying of those emotions that you are experiencing honestly, openly and frankly with yourself and others and not simply saying what you think they want to hear.

Emotions are Outcomes

Accepting that emotions are outcomes and that they are caused by something, someone or your interpretation of both or either and being able to distinguish the difference between emotions, actions and emotive actions is another fundamental factor in developing your emotional intelligence.

The importance of this facet of emotional intelligence is fundamental to who we are and our personal “world view” which means that one is able to avoid being overwhelmed by any particular emotion, and being able to delay taking action until you’ve considered the consequences of your actions.

Phobias are but one example of an inappropriate fear such that the fear emotion overtakes an individual so completely that they are unable to function in a more normal natural way. For instance agoraphobia; which is a condition characterized by an inappropriate and irrational fear of public or open spaces, often to the extent that the sufferer may cease completely from venturing outside of their residence.