What is emotional intelligence?
Generally speaking, emotional intelligence refers to how-well we identify and handle one's own emotions and the emotions of our relationship with others. Emotional intelligence can be broken down into a few sub-categories for us to understand the concept further:
- Self Awareness: knowing/to identify what we're feeling and why. We can do this by using a moral compass.
- Self Management: the ability to harness those emotions which means to handle them in effective ways so they don't create obstacles and disturbs one's process. This leads onto tuning or adapting to those emotions, to be able to learn and grow.
- Empathy: knowing what the opposition is feeling, to understand and to be considerate to their emotions. It's all about the opposition.
There are various definitions and classifications, however, they all generally allude to the same thing. I thought the above explanation was the most relevant today and also the most important - in my opinion.
Empathy
For this blog, I wanted to touch on empathy. Simply because I believe this trait is lacking in today's society. Empathy strengthens bonds with people, whether its your parents, siblings, friends, spouse, co-workers and so on. It does not only apply to relationships in regards to friendship and love, but also within the working environment. For example, knowing how your team-mates feel towards certain tasks, understanding their strengths and weakness builds rapport, which equals to enhanced team work.
The way I like to understand empathy is by the phrase, "putting yourself in other people's shoes". It's to feel what the other person is feeling. To take it a step further, its to experience their emotions to gain an insight, to get a perspective so we can perceive an understanding. Once we retrieve that understanding, then we can relate to that person and improve the relationship, it becomes healthy. Its all about the quality of life.
But how does one apply empathy? Its simple. For example, from a marriage perspective (for the ease of the reader), you start by active listening. Paying attention (being attentive) to the opposition when things are been expressed. Taking a mental note and just being there. Sometimes it requires a lot of patience, depending on the situation. To put it in a nutshell, it comes down to how much you care and whether you want to use the opportunity to bond, in result to reach closeness, a goal, to differentiate, come to common terms, being considerate and so on. If you haven't guessed yet, empathy has a heavy relation with communication. Once you learn to empathise, your communication with that person automatically improves because you learn and show a connection.
Once you get to that state where empathy is used for correlation and understanding the emotions, a bond is usually made or improved. The relationship does become open in terms of sharing/expressing feelings. When you show that you care and are considerate to the opposition's feelings, the trust of that relationship strengthens. If you can empathise well, the opposition generally is more open with you because they trust you. As the trust grows, the more information and feelings are shared.
Overall, empathy is utilised to understand the state of mind of the opposition or to gain the outlook of another within one's self. By doing this we can understand, strengthen bonds, develop trust, prevent future conflicts and be considerate. Also, its a great technique to become a better communicator and listener.
It's a self-less trait with much mutual benefit and this is something I love.
Ayaan.
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