Emotional Intelligence and its 5 Components
Emotions are the human feelings that are backed by reasoning, knowledge, or love. There are many kinds of feelings and emotion for various situations and circumstances. According to situations, past experiences or even by social teachings human show some distinct type of emotion in every situation.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, explore, if necessary, control and enhance your own emotional understanding. However, taking consideration of the complete concept of emotion, which mostly depends on the actions of people around us. Therefore, for one to have emotional intelligence one must understand ones feeling as well as the people around him/her.
The components of Emotional Intelligence as follows
1) Self awareness
Self-awareness is the most basic component of emotional intelligence. Everything about emotional intelligence starts from self-awareness. An average Human being can judge and understand their surroundings, even a child not above 10 can judge the moods of his parents or his siblings, it is a basic human skill.
To understand others is a basic skill but to understand oneself if the most important skill. An emotional intelligent person can recognize and understand his own feelings and emotion. In depth, they also know who, what or which situation is arousing those feelings and what effects their feelings or emotions are giving to the people around them or to their surroundings.
Self-awareness is the key element in emotional intelligence because the process of understanding others begins from understanding oneself.
2) Self-regulation
Self-regulation is the next step after self-awareness in gaining emotional intelligence. Self-regulation is simply the regulation of your emotion. Self-awareness makes one known to his/her emotions whereas, self-regulation picks only positive and useful emotion and help to control or discard rest.
let us say, when someone angry is approaching you can have many thoughts and opinions. You can either fight or you can run. However, an emotionally intelligent person if possible, tries to analyze the situation and approach more calmly. An alternative option self-regulating your violence directed emotion can lessen the heat of the moment.
3) Internal motivation
Motivation is the result of hope, actions, guides that keeps you in your goal-oriented track. Often life may not go as planned, it is one of the innate qualities of life, it was and always will be unpredictable. Time to time one’s plan, evaluations, methods may fly right out of the window. However, as having emotional intelligence in you despite unfortunate circumstances one must motivate oneself to stay on track and focus on goal.
It is good thing if you have people around you like family, friends who inspire and motivate you to be OnTrack. However, this may not always be the situation sometimes you have to be the spark of hope yourself. Find your internal motivation and keep pushing forward until your goals become reality.
4) Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of other. Self-awareness, self-regulation, and internal motivation are the aspects of emotional intelligence that is based on oneself whereas empathy is the steps toward another person. Empathy is a primitive human skill that all of us has. Little children also could notice if their parents or siblings are sad and show effort to show affection or mitigate their sadness. Having empathy is one thing but as an emotionally intelligent individual one must understand empathy.
Empathy is built toward those people who we interact in daily life or who are our blood relatives. The closer the individual is to our life, routine, relations more empathetic we become towards that individual. Understanding one’s empathy can dramatically enhance social intelligence of an individual.
5) Social skills
Social skills are the top stage of emotional intelligence. The journey that started from self-awareness are tested here. Social skills are the individual’s ability to interact in the society.
To be an emotionally intelligent person with utmost social skill one must master self-awareness, self-regulation as well as social empathy. The main objective of social skill is to interact, build relationship, develop networks, enhance your social skills, and uplift your social status. Yoga tradition help to teach such social skills and to have a good relationship among people
Unlike mathematics diagnosing the exact outcome in a social environment is hard as substantial number of variables come in play but continuous practice, key observation and discipline comes to play in enhancing social skill.