Emotional Intelligence: A Skill and Talent Must for Success

When Emotional Intelligence or EQ made its first appearance in the mid 1990’s it was the missing link in explaining the success of people that were deemed low in the traditional IQ scale and were considered much less likely to succeed than their peers with higher IQs. The idea of emotional intelligence challenged the traditional belief of success being correlated solely to how intelligent you were intellectually but decades of research has shown that emotional intelligence may be just as important if not more.

Success in any field is predicated heavily on one thing, and that is how well you are skilled at working with people. An individual that possess unbeatable technical skills without the ability to collaborate with people will likely remain stagnant in his or her career. And the reason for that is simple; we are social creatures and the ones that succeed are the ones that can create a likeability factors with others. No one wants to be led by someone they despise or do not respect, or work with someone that does not know how to function as a team supporting others to achieve a common goal. People with higher emotional intelligence have developed a skill that helps them maneuver the social constructs of society with relative ease and therefore creates a much greater chance of success in whichever endeavor they chose to pursue.

Let’s look at what the components of emotional intelligence look like in the most basic form. According to the author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Travis Bradberry, “Emotional intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.” In Travis’ words:

Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.
Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

These two skills fall under personal competence, meaning the greater the level of these two skills you have the better you are able to stay aware of your own behavior and manage them more effectively. An example of a self-aware person would be someone that is able to see when they begin to feel the emotions of anger triggered by an event outside of them or someone who is able to observe their nervous reaction to meeting a new person for the first time. Self-management in these cases then would be the ability to overcome the emotions of anger and chose a different reaction when faced with a similar circumstance. And in the latter case it would be to stay calm and positively direct the interaction when meeting someone for the first time.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; in the words of the author:

Social Awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.
Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.
In contrast to the first two the social awareness is the ability to be in tuned to others emotions and using the awareness to manage people effectively. An example would be someone walking into a room and picking up the dominant emotion in the air but also have the ability to distinguish individual emotional states of everyone in the room. If this person is in a positon of leadership then effective management would be speak in reference to the dominant emotion while being sensitive to the individuals’ state of mind.

When you understand emotional intelligence it becomes pretty obvious why this is a skill that is becoming more and more important in determining the level of success you will enjoy in your personal or professional life. The good news is that like any other skills, the skills needed for enhancing your emotional intelligence can be learned. This will be the topic of my next blog post so stay tuned.