Tech Talenta / People Power

Emotional Intelligence - Are we conscious of our ability to master our emotions?
In our hyper active lives there are quite a few doctrines we use and emotional intelligence is one of them. In 1990, scholars like Mayors and Salovey wrote academic papers on emotional intelligence. Salovey and Mayer defined emotional intelligence as the ‘Ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions (1990).

The entire gambit of Emotional Intelligence encompasses five main characters:
• Self awareness: Knowing your emotions, recognizing feelings as they occur, and discriminating between them efficiently.
• Mood management: Handling feelings effectively as per their relevance to the situation and reacting appropriately.
• Self-motivation: ‘Gathering up’ your feelings and directing yourself towards a goal, despite self-doubt, inertia, and impulsiveness.
• Empathy: Recognizing feelings in others and tuning into their verbal and nonverbal cues.
• Managing relationship skillfully: Handling interpersonal interaction, conflict resolution, and negotiations tactfully.

The importance of Emotional Intelligence to manage the hustle bustle of the modern life:
Research in brain-based learning suggests that the emotional health is fundamental to effective learning. The most successful individuals generally demonstrate the understanding of how to learn. You would agree that this is not rocket science, however the key ingredients for this understanding are: confidence, curiosity, intentionality, self-control, relatedness, capacity to communicate, ability to cooperate. These traits are all aspects of Emotional Intelligence. Building one’s Emotional Intelligence has a lifelong impact. In corporate world Emotional Intelligence in training programs has helped employees cooperate better and motivate more, thereby increase productivity and profits.

Daniel Goldman, an authority of this subject argues that “Emotional Intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them”. Psychologists mean something very specific when they refer to raising intelligence. Recall that an intelligence is the capacity to engage in valid, abstract reasoning and it requires (depending upon the situation), the capacity to learn and remember the material / information, to find similarities and differences among different ideas, to discover rules and generalize principles across what is encountered, and similar mental activities. In the realm of emotions, for example, it involves understanding the general nature of emotions, the meaning of the individual emotions, the capacity to uncover similarities and differences among emotions and to engage in other, related mental activities.

Robert Plutchik has identified 8 basic emotions. They are anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, curiosity and acceptance. These emotions reflect in an individual’s actions at his/her work place.

We must ask ourselves this question: While we understand it is very important to manage one’s emotions, are we conscious of our ability to master the art of our emotions?

This article is written by our HR Consultant.