Emotional intelligence is a wonderful gift for people who naturally possess it. To be fair, all of us have some emotional intelligence(EI), only that most of us don’t really use it. The power of Emotional Intelligence is so very diverse and it always comes with a set of other related qualities.
So, EI is not just about controlling your own and understanding others’ emotions. Its advantages go beyond what one can list. For example, in day to day life, a person with high EI will be able understand if a person walking towards him could be a serious threat or not, just by looking at their body language. It is the by-product of EI rather than IQ that helps us to compute such decisions.
EI is every where!
At work, EI helps understand what sort of a personality your boss is, even before people tell it out to you. Its not just the boss, EI helps understand the attributes of your colleagues and the work environment very easily and helps you to channelise and project yourself to suit the work environment.
Its not just work, EI helps when it comes to maintaining relationships with friends and family. EI basically helps to understand people regardless of how they try and portray themselves.
Yet another unique aspect of possessing high emotional intelligence is that you never make enemies unless you want to. Emotional Intelligence helps understand what the person you are talking to needs and if you want to avoid any difference of opinion, then you can just play on their side, saying yes and avoiding any conflicts.
I personally felt hairdressers / barbers have one of the highest EI in our society. Most of them can talk about a variety of topics to their clients and they do so without causing any rift in their clients’ ideologies.
Use it to better yourself!
But it is not just about understanding others. It is a very handy tool to look into yourself and succeed. With Emotional Intelligence, you can dissect a situation that has happened in the past and can analyse it from various points of view.
For example, let us say, you were asked to negotiate a contract with your customer and you failed. The first emotion after a failure is anger and frustration on yourself. You might immediately think,
You did horribly bad in the negotiation meeting. You had no answers to the customers questions and had no convincing points to successfully negotiate.
And it is exactly at this point, emotional intelligence can be used to understand what went wrong and what can be improved. EI can help you reason out by swapping positions. So you then think,
Fair enough, i agree i didn’t do very well. But i had no prior information on this subject. I had just a day to discuss this topic with the relevant person. On top of this, this is not my normal job. I just filled in someone else’s position.
By doing so, you have made yourself get rid of the guilt that everything was your fault. On top of it, you have a few learning for the next time. You will need to prepare a bit better, may be talk to relevant people more the next time. It is always better to make life easier by understanding what went wrong and keep moving ahead.
To sum it up…
One of the best ways to start developing Emotional Intelligence is to become more aware and conscious of the surrounding environment. With this newly acquired sensitiveness, Emotional Intelligence will start growing on its own.
It is unfortunate that EI is heavily under estimated by our society. But the truth is, people who have been successful in their life will for sure possess high levels of emotional intelligence. Because, without it, going up is not just difficult, but close to impossible!
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this article is wonderful. the simily of barbers’ E.I is realy true.