Emotional Intelligence Foundations

What’s emotional intelligence about? Emotional intelligence is about using your emotions to inform your thinking and using your thinking to understand and manage your emotions.

For many of us, with so many competing demands, concerns and commitments in our lives, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stressed, to become unsure and confused, to misunderstand or be misunderstood by others.

With emotional intelligence, by understanding your emotions and how to manage them, you are better able to express how you feel, what you want and don’t want, while at the same time acknowledging and understanding how others are feeling and behaving.

It’s a dynamic process; the extent to which you can understand and manage your own emotions influences your ability to understand and manage other people’s emotions. And the more you understand other people’s emotions, their intentions, motivations and behavior, the more appropriately you can respond and the more effectively you can interact with them.

Emotional intelligence can help you to live and work with others more easily; forge stronger relationships, both in your personal life and at work. You are more able to sense and manage the emotional needs of others. You are more able to think before responding and know to give yourself and others time to calm down if emotions become overwhelming.

Developing your emotional intelligence can help you to lead a happier life because thinking and behaving rationally and calmly in difficult situations puts you in a better position to handle feelings and situations that you may have found difficult and challenging in the past.

But emotional intelligence is not only about understanding and managing difficult situations and emotions. It’s also about knowing how to engage the ‘feel good’ emotions that can give you and other people positivity, confidence, support, motivation and inspiration.