What Is Emotional Intelligence?
It is important to know when EQ is getting priority over the IQ!

Emotional intelligence introduced decades ago, and since then this concept is made the intangible key towards success. However, as the idea spread, it gets its part of misunderstanding and criticism by the students of psychology. The confusion can be dangerous for your career when you are expecting to encounter an intelligence test during a screening process.

First, you need to understand that psychologists and researchers do not agree on one definition for the term of the emotional intelligence. There are several complex concepts behind these definitions. However, the core of every definition is the human ability to make your emotions work for you rather than against you. 

Second, the emotional intelligence deals with how behaviors and social complexities are managed and navigated and what impact it has on thoughts that affect decisions and positive results. There are four basic skills categorized under two competencies: personal competency and social competency.

Personal competency

This competency level in understanding what is emotional intelligence includes self-awareness and self-management skills and has its aim upon yourself rather than your interactions with other people around you. Personal competence is your ability to know your feelings and maintain control over them along with managing your tendencies and behavior. 

•    Self-awareness: This ability allows you to accurately observe your feelings and emotions and stay aware of them as and when they happen.

•    Self-management: This ability allows you to use awareness of your emotions to remain confident and flexible in your behavior.


Social Competency

This aspect of emotional intelligence mainly works with social awareness and relationship management skills. Social competency can be explained as your ability to understand the moods of other people, along with their motives and behavior to improve the quality of all your relationships. 

•    Social awareness: This is your ability to understand the emotions of other people and determine what is going in actually. 

•    Relationship management: This is your ability to use self-awareness of your as well as other’s emotions so that you can interact with them effectively.

Emotional intelligence and personality are different aspects

For those who are eager to know what is emotional intelligence and how it is different from personality can understand this in a simple way that EI taps a particular type of human behavior which is distinct from intellect. EI cannot be predicted based on the intelligence level of a person. EI is a set of skills which can be improved through practice. 

On the other side, personality is a style which defines who you are. It is basically related to understanding your preferences like inclination towards extroversion or introversion. Moreover, personalities can also not be used for predicting emotional intelligence.

 Benefits of emotional intelligence

As explained previously, emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and manage your emotions and make them work for you. Under this head, this concept includes several underlying benefits which include:

•    Those who have a good level of intelligence are much better in understanding their psychological state which means that they can handle stress effectively and are less likely to suffer from any type of depression.

•    If you have a good level of emotional intelligence, you are more likely to be successful in forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships along with fitting within those group situations.

Emotional intelligence is a part of the human psyche which can be developed as well as improved by practicing skills. IQ and EI tend to measure different aspects of human intelligence and psyche.

Emotional intelligence can be developed

The interaction between your rational and emotional brains is the physical source of EI and is the key to understand what is emotional intelligence. Brain starts the pathway for EI. Your primary senses enter the spinal cord and travel all the way to your brain before you can reason. However, their first place is to settle over the limbic system which is that part where emotions are generated. It allows you to have an emotional reaction to different situations before the rational mind can get engaged. There should be effective communication between emotional and rational centers of the brain.


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