In the last instalment I introduced the concept of Emotional Intelligence and how it impacts our daily dealings with people, life circumstances and criticism. I wrote that Emotional Intelligence is split between our personal and interpersonal skills, our personal and social competencies. Within each of these are a range of skills which are the elements of emotional intelligence.
They are as follows:
Personal Skills
Self-awareness: is the skill of being aware of and understanding your emotions as they occur and as they evolve. Emotions are either appropriate or inappropriate.
Anger is usually associated with being a negative emotion. However, anger can be a completely reasonable and appropriate emotion in certain circumstances – emotional intelligence allows us to recognise our anger and understand why this emotion has occurred.
Self-management: by being aware of your own emotions you can learn to manage them appropriately and proportionately.
Self-management skills relate to the emotions you are feeling at any given time or in any given circumstance and how well you manage them. Fundamental to self-management is self-control.
Self-control is NOT masking or hiding your emotions but recognising and controlling them appropriately. This means NOT making rash decisions or over-reacting to a situation but remaining calm and rational, making balanced decisions based on what is really important and not just how we feel in the spur of the moment.
We have all reacted badly or inappropriately to events or situations in the past, and we will all do the same in the future. Reflective practice, (thinking back over situations we handled poorly), enables us to analyse and understand why we acted in the way we did, this in turn can help us behave more intelligently in the future when faced with similar circumstances.
In the next instalment we’ll look into criticism.
