The Importance of Emotional Intelligence

By Yassmine Aref Gadalla

 Many people are not completely aware how important emotional intelligence is in their lives. We attempt to read many books and articles about this matter just for the knowledge, but we ignore the fact that if we apply emotional intelligence in our daily life and work, it could lead us to somewhere else that we never expected.

The key skills of emotional intelligence could be learned by anyone, at any time. Imagine if you are able to overcome, control and get over your daily life stress with just being emotionally aware of everything that goes right there around you.

Emotional intelligence could be summarized in the ability to express your emotions and to control them at the same time, understand and interpret to others feelings.

There are four easy steps that can lead you to the emotional intelligence you always wished to have;

The first one is sensing the emotions: you should concentrate and accurately perceive the message someone tries to tell you, this actually involves not only understanding the person's intended words but also watching the non-verbal signs, body language and facial expressions.

The second one is reasoning with emotions: we should use our emotions to promote thinking. Emotions help in prioritizing what we pay attention and react to. 

This means that emotions play a very big part in guiding our minds to believing things that might or might not happen. We naturally react to things that attract our minds.

The third one is understanding emotions: emotions may carry whole different meanings at many times, some people can express their anger in an indirect way, this can actually be very obvious in the example of the angry boss; he can scream, shout and give you a very hard time just because he has an issue related to your work, or he experienced a bad morning with his wife. 

We should never get confused in understanding the reasons behind people's reactions and that's why training yourself to have emotional intelligence can help you in this matter.

The fourth and last one is managing emotions (the ability to manage your emotions): Emotions are valuable, and offer a bounty of benefits. 

Once we're able to process and cope with them effectively, we can then learn a lot about ourselves and our needs. If you feel something, let it out, do not engage yourself in another action hoping you can distract your feelings, this can lead you to many problems.

Managing and controlling your emotions and feelings are very important; it is a step towards reaching the emotional intelligence of knowing how to perfectly understand people around you with the least words and actions they make.

Some people see emotional intelligence as an inborn characteristic and others say it could be learned and strengthened, as for me, I can definitely say that it can easily be learned and practiced. 

You may face some difficulties at first, but with trying many times, it will at the end easily work.