To live in today's world, emotional intelligence is a must-have. Emotional intelligence plays a key role in areas of your life like school, home, work, etc. It's that ability to keep cool despite the pressure from work or life, the ability to understand where someone is coming from without them saying a lot, the ability to identify why people reacted the way they did, and many more. In summary, emotional intelligence is the ability or capability to perceive, control, handle, understand and manage emotions of oneself and that of others. Emotional intelligence helps you communicate effectively with others, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflicts. With emotional intelligence, you don't take irrational decisions, you know how to connect with your feelings and make informed decisions about what matters most to you. Emotional intelligence in its peculiarity is defined by four (4) common attributes:

1. Self-management: With self-management, you're able to control and manage your feelings, behaviors, and emotions healthily, take a fresh approach to deal with problems, and adapt to different situations. For example, if you're in a meeting in your workplace and your boss criticizes you in front of your colleagues, the best way to respond to this situation is to maintain composure, politely excuse yourself and go process your emotions in a safe environment (that's high emotional intelligence) instead of becoming defensive and storming out in anger (that's low emotional intelligence)

2. Self-awareness: This is the ability to persistently and accurately identify your emotions and how they affect your thoughts and behaviors. You can recognize your limitations(i.e your strengths and weaknesses) and also build self-confidence. 

3. Social awareness: This is being able to identify and understand the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person. For example, the ability to know when a coworker is angry or in a sad state, that's emotional intelligence. 

4. Relationship management: In relationship management, you know how to build, handle and maintain good relationships, inspire and influence others, communicate efficiently and effectively, work well in a team and defuse conflicts. 

  While some people might come by their emotional intelligence skills naturally, some people have to learn and develop them. Emotional intelligence is important but what steps can you take to improve your emotional intelligence? Here are some tips: 

✓ Listen: To understand what other people are feeling you have to pay attention to them. Take time to listen to what people are trying to say to you both verbally and nonverbally. Understanding body language goes a long way in listening to someone, you can detect that someone is feeling a certain way or gauge the different factors that might be contributing to that emotion.

✓ Empathize: In empathizing with others sometimes, you might have to put yourself in the person's shoes to understand their feelings and point of view even if you've never been in such a situation before. Practice empathizing with people, imagine how you will feel if you were in such a situation. This would help you build an emotional understanding of a particular situation and also increase your emotional intelligence skills.

✓ Reflect: The ability to ponder or consider the emotions of others is an important part of emotional intelligence. Being able to identify why a person is feeling a particular way, or if there are unseen factors that might be contributing to those feelings, or how your emotions differ from theirs, etc will make it easier to understand the role that emotions play in how people think and behave. 

Conclusion

Emotional intelligence has continued to grab the public's interest since and has become an important factor in understanding the emotions of others and oneself. The importance cannot be overemphasized as it helps to build positive relationships and develop cooperative connections that will enrich our lives.

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