Essay Example on Emotional Intelligence: Awareness, Self-Regulation & Social Skills

Introduction

Goleman (1995) defines Emotional Intelligence (EI) as the ability to identify and manage emotions based on personal and social views. The basis of emotional intelligence is on elements such as emotional awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Self-awareness is made up of emotional awareness, accurate self-assessment, and self-confidence. Self-awareness engenders being aware of oneself and understanding their emotions on how they occur and improve (Emmerling and Goleman, 2003). Emotional intelligence begins when one understands their own emotions, self-consciousness, and being able to manage the emotions, self-regulation, and use the emotions to achieve one's set goals, self-motivation. When one can understand and manage and understand their emotions, they are also able to understand the emotions and feelings of other people, empathy, and the power to influence them, social skills.

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However, one should not think their emotions as being positive or negative but rather as appropriate or inappropriate. For instance, anger is a substance of negative emotion. However, anger can be reasonable in some given situations and appropriate emotions. In such cases, emotional intelligence makes people recognize their source of anger and have a clear genesis of the emotion. Self-regulation also comprises elements such as innovation, self-control, trustworthiness, adaptability, and conscientiousness (Emmerling and Goleman, 2003). Having knowledge of being aware of one's emotions, self-regulation skills emphasize appropriately managing the feelings and proportionally. Self-management skills are skills relating to emotions that occur at any given time or at a given situation and how one can control them appropriately.

Self-control is the basis of self-management, but the other tenents are also essential and relate to how one promptly behaves, whether virtuous or not. Social skills encompass relationships and interpersonal skills. These skills are crucial to leadership and how to influence and persuade, conflict management, and working teams, according to Tuckman. Social skills comprise many skills and competencies, with many originating from personal confidence and self-esteem (Emmerling and Goleman, 2003). Developing one's social skills in being easy to talk and having excellent listening skills, sharing, and trustworthy, one also develops their charismatic values and become attractive to others. The overall impact is improved self-esteem and confidence, which impacts positive personal dialogue and improved understanding in accepting one's emotions.

Goleman (1995) integrates emotional intelligence to the workplace. Goleman posits that an emotionally intelligent worker has skills based on social and personal competence fields. Personal competence emphasizes self-management while social power stresses on managing relationships. The release of Goleman's book in 1995 titled Emotional Intelligence was a gateway to many business people who accepted that success of business depends on personal qualities including self-control, cooperation with fellow workmates, and perseverance.

Six Steps on Improving Emotional Intelligence, Ramona Hacker

To begin with, Ramona feels that making decisions is not based on emotional intelligence but somewhat rational. Ramona relates to having learned about the mysteries of emotional intelligence five years back. She described her emotions to college when she minded less of her emotions towards her friends. Ramona emphasizes the fundamental basis of emotional intelligence as being on understanding oneself as well as understanding the emotions of those around oneself. She describes emotional intelligence from the words emotional and emotional information (Hacker, 2020). Emotional has to do with a persons expression or having strong feeling while emotional intelligence is pivoted on three skills including emotional awareness relating to empathy, the ability to harness emotions and apply them in making critical decisions and problem-solving, and the ability to manage emotions including controlling ones self-emotions as well as calming down other people and cheering them up.

Emotional people do not have high emotional intelligence since they display their emotions freely without considering their impacts. Ramona emphasizes on showing emotions in appropriate circumstances. For instance, there are circumstances where anger can be accommodated, while other situations do not call for anger. Teenagers tend to channel some feelings like fear or loneliness into aggression. Ramona relates that her family background did not teach her how to manage emotions, but rather she would lose her friends (Hacker, 2020). Judgment within the area of relationships, at work, may not be solely generated by racism sexism, but the root cause is emotional intelligence due to failure in understanding their differences. As a way of understanding persons from different backgrounds, emotional intelligence is crucial in our societies.

Ramona argues that the current society does not give kids chance to connect to their emotions. She feels that parents are only after their kid's academics, sports, instrument playing, among other values other than getting to know their feelings. The fundamental part of emotional intelligence is understanding who we are, and for children to learn, parents have to be their role models. When learning a new skill, one has to be aware of their incompetence, the path of learning involves conscious competence to conscious incompetence. However, it is not easy to move from conscious incompetence to conscious power in the same way as emotional intelligence (Hacker, 2020). Ramona develops a six-step method towards improving emotional intelligence, including acknowledging emotions, differentiating and analyzing emotions, accept and appreciate feelings, reflecting on feelings and tracking their genesis, handling one's emotions, and handling the emotions of others.

It is important to note that handling oneself emotions can also be made easier by learning on other people's emotions too. This is because people have different understanding and it is important to ask how the other people feel since it can help them develop their emotional intelligence. Ramona feels that Emotional intelligence need to be introduced in schools to teach children on how to manage their emotions. Children should be given space to talks and express their emotions so they can learn (Hacker, 2020). She argues that the topic can also be in the form of case study so they can understand each other in school.

Conclusion

Conclusively people should be authentic when asked on their emotions. At times people do not need to substitute their emotions with their current feelings but rather need to acknowledge and accept whatever emotions they have. I agree with Ramona in that the current society is filled with sad generation with beautiful pictures. People are afraid of telling their emotions and go with the current way of being fine always rather than what is in their heart. Different emotions as displayed in the when act differently and are used in different situations. We have to accept our emotions since emotions are not good or bad but gotten from society. Knowing why we feel the way we do can be helpful in handling the emotion and there are a myriad ways of handling emotions. Writing the emotion down can help in pulling the distance between the person and the emotion.

References

Emmerling, J., and Goleman, D., 2003. Emotional Intelligence: Issues and Common Misunderstandings. Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, (1)2-32.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Issues in Paradigm Building. In C. Cherniss and D. Goleman (Eds.), The Emotional Intelligent Workplace, (pp. 13-26), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Hacker, R. (2020). Six steps to improve your emotional intelligence | Ramona Hacker | TEDxTUM. Retrieved 3 February 2020, from https://www.ted.com/talks/ramona_hacker_6_steps_to_improve_your_emotional_intelligence?language=en