Bringing Emotional Intelligence into life

When the concept of Emotional Intelligence was exposed in a book, many years ago, it was such a novelty that it seemed everybody was speaking about it. But one thing I’ve noticed: very few were working on that.

Many years later, emotions are on the top – just look at the present headlines and you can see emotions. Look at your workplace and check the emotions present there. What about your family?

So, can we work on that emotional intelligence now?

According to Daniel Goleman, it means basicly 4 things:

• To know your own emotions.
• To know how to deal with them.
• To know others’ emotions.
• To know how to deal with them.

It seems easy enough and yet, its impact may change lives. Why? Emotions are a shortcut at times of reaction or decisions, bypassing the need of reasoning and reflecting, and going into the action in hand. By knowing your own or others’ emotions, an individual is able to understand that and help reflection and reasoning to meet the emotions.

For instance, if someone just wants to marry another person he just met one week ago, it will be difficult to talk the person out of it, but using creative techniques like storytelling or even a little role play it is possible to awake the reasoning behind the decision and help the person to think it over.

How do you manage emotions? As any management acting, first you need to know them. Then, you need to have some skills, techniques or a relevant education that enables you to deal with them.

However, good managers don’t simply deal with things, they attain success by using energy in a very effective way, comparing to results. So, it is not only techniques that will help convincing another person to not get married yet, many other things are required, like: empathy, spirituality would be helpful, listening to the other’s point of view, etc. Developing emotional intelligence is a very effective way to live better and help others to live better too.

My message here is simple: dust your favorite Emotional Intelligence book and use all that knowledge into your day-to-day life.