Signs of High Emotional Intelligence

By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

Some counselling seeks not only information and advice for people in need but also emotion from them. In this day and age, emotional quotient can matter more than intelligence quotient. This is because most problems in the modern world tend to arise not because of peo­ple’s knowledge but because of their sudden strong emotions. Thus, many signs of higher emo­tional intelligence will be de­scribed comprehensively here. By Salovey and Mayer, emotion­al intelligence is defined as the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings or emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. In light of their definition, Goleman expanded emotional intelligence into five basic emotional and so­cial competencies: knowing one’s emotions or self-awareness, man­aging emotions or self-regulation, motivating oneself or intrinsic mo­tivation, recognizing emotions in others or empathy, and handling relationships or social skills. The signs of high emotional intelli­gence are celebrating small wins, thinking objectively, maintaining healthy relationships, being em­pathetic, becoming aware of our own emotions, setting boundaries, and bouncing back from setbacks in this article.

•Celebrating small wins

Some people, myself includ­ed, may find small wins childish to celebrate. Of course, small wins often contribute to big success in the future. Such wins will very likely be the first step towards a great thing, too. As doing the same thing every day looks boring, we should alter our daily lives to a greater or lesser degree by such activities as throwing a birthday party, cooking something after exams, and buying snacks, books or clothes for self-reward. Never ever be ashamed of holding our little wins.

•Thinking objectively

To put it simply, thinking ob­jectively is not thinking subjec­tively by which people favour their likes and egocentrism. Objective thinking has no personal feelings or bias as well as can never deviate from universal truths or responsi­ble behaviour. This way of thinking also involves making critical and logical decisions. Thinking objec­tively usually offers self-reflec­tion, self-acceptance, sympathy, empathy, equality, equity, peace, tranquillity, life satisfaction, and even happiness rather than ego­tism, ethic violations, criticism, conflicts, and regret.

•Maintaining healthy rela­tionships

I do not think that a long-last­ing relationship like friendship and loveship will crop up quite easily. This relationship is particu­larly founded on mutual under­standing and respect. Needless to say, it is not difficult to break up the relationship just in the space of a few seconds. It would be bet­ter if a relationship that might be severed later on did not develop since the beginning. These days, healthy relationships are ex­tremely rare. Those relationships are, therefore, worth establishing, strengthening, forging, restoring, and cementing.

•Being empathetic

As far as we can see, people are living in different places under diverse circumstances, namely, parental influence, genetic influ­ence, teacher influence, peer in­fluence, positional influence and environmental influence. Hence, it cannot be expected that they will have similar thoughts, words, and behaviours even in the same situ­ation. Whatever situation others encounter, we should not always think about it like `If I were you...’. We will have to put ourselves in their shoes to some extent but on the bright side. To be empathetic calls for powers of endurance and patience as well.

•Getting aware of our own emotions

It is generally assumed that emotion is a temporary mental state which cannot be controlled with our eyes shut. There are two types of emotion: 1) positive emo­tions – fulfilment, safety, comfort, joy, pleasure, etc. and negative emotions – grief, fear, envy, ha­tred, test anxiety, etc. Strangely enough, body shaming like call­ing `fatty’ and sexual harassment like denuding teasingly mean no emotion or neutral emotion, espe­cially for boys, in which those be­ing shamed or harassed feel very little or nothing about these cases. Nevertheless, we need to take good care of our own emotions mainly because those with anger mostly make mistakes, whatever they do. More importantly, both positive emotions and negative emotions should be a good drive to overcome their related unde­sirable effects.

•Setting boundaries

Hooke’s Law states that as long as the elastic limit of a body is not exceeded, the strain is directly proportional to the stress causing it. Similarly, everybody must have the boundaries of anything, such as relatives, teacher-student rela­tionships, and financial manage­ment. Beyond boundaries are full of backlogs, debts, difficulties, pre­dicaments, and escapism so often. In actual fact, setting a boundary is not a mere restriction but a per­sonal freedom in which someone can do his utmost depending on the materials and energy of his.

•Bouncing back from set­backs

Actually, humans only have two great choices: life or death. To be able to live, one needs to strug­gle for survival chance. It should be believed that there is still our hope for living on so long as we are breathing in and out, at the very least. We humans will surely run into hard times, setbacks, failure, and success one day or another. We can bear up with nothing but these challenges for our longev­ity. We ought to bounce back or resurrect our lives pretty quickly without depression every time we are beset with heaps of setbacks.

Myself there are quite a few to say about emotional intelli­gence. Emotional intelligence has been observed to correlate significantly with extroversion, openness, and conscientiousness. Also, EI is negatively associat­ed with alexithymia and alcohol consumption but positively with life satisfaction, social network size and quality. Senior managers with a high emotional intelligence employed in public sector organi­zations develop positive work at­titudes, behaviour, and outcomes. This intelligence moderates the effect of work-family conflict on career commitment but not job satisfaction. Three approaches to measuring emotional intelligence have been used: self-report tests, reports made by others, and abil­ity-based tests.