WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, use, and manage emotions—moods, feelings, and attitudes. There are many competing theories about EI, some of them complex. While experts vary in their definitions and models, all agree that emotions are real, can be changed for the better, and have a profound impact on whether a person is successful.

In the simplest terms, emotional intelligence consists of two general abilities:

  1. Understanding emotions involves the capacity to monitor and label your feelings accurately (nervousness, happiness, anger, relief, and so forth) and to determine why you feel the way you do. It also involves predicting how others might feel in a given situation. Emotions contain information, and the ability to understand and think about that information plays an important role in behavior.
  2. Managing emotions involves the ability to modify and even improve feelings. At times, you need to stay open to your feelings, learn from them, and use them to take appropriate action. At other times, it is better to disengage from an emotion and return to it later. Anger, for example, can lead you to act in negative or antisocial ways; used positively, however, anger can help you overcome adversity, bias, and injustice.

The first key step in learning to control your emotions and use them in productive ways is to understand that you and your emotions are not one and the same. You can stand apart from and observe your emotions; you are separate from them. Whatever your emotions at any given moment, you might be using them to filter your perception of a situation by magnifying all the negative details and filtering out all positive aspects—without realizing that you’re doing this. You might even pick out a single pleasant or unpleasant detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes distorted. If you are feeling sad, you might view the world in a certain way, while if you are feeling happy, you are likely to interpret the same events differently.

Another important step in becoming more emotionally intelligent is developing an awareness of how your emotions affect you. When you start paying attention to emotions instead of ignoring them, you will have a better emotional understanding of different situations, and therefore be able to respond to these situations more appropriately. You can learn not only how to cope with life’s pressures and demands, but also how to harness your knowledge of the way you feel, which can lead to more effective problem solving, reasoning, decision making, and creative endeavors.

A number of sophisticated tools can be used to assess emotional intelligence, or you can take the short questionnaire on the previous page to begin thinking about it. Even without a formal test, you can take a number of steps to get in touch with your own EI. You’ll have to dig deep inside yourself and be willing to be honest about how you really think and how you really behave. This process can take time, and that’s fine. Think of your EI as a work in progress.

Stay Motivated

Overcoming Tough Challenges

Think about a challenge you have experienced in college that made you want to throw in the towel. How did that challenge affect your overall motivation for doing well in college? What lessons did you learn from the experience, and how can you use those lessons in the future to maintain your motivation?