EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

What is the value of Emotional Intelligence?

"A leader's intelligence has to have a strong emotional component. He has to have high levels of self-awareness, maturity and self-control. He must be able to withstand the heat, handle setbacks and when those lucky moments arise, enjoy success with equal parts of joy and humility. No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can't ignore it."

"Research show convincingly that EQ is more important than IQ in almost every role and many times more important in leadership roles. This finding is accentuated as we move from the control philosophy of the industrial age to an empowering release philosophy of the knowledge worker age."

Emotional Intelligence, (EQ), is defined as the "capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships," according to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, (Bantam, 1998).

In his book Goleman says that people who have high emotional intelligence are more likely to succeed in work and in life, because they're the people who are able to love and be loved, to be self-aware, and to empathize with others. These are key attributes to finding success in life. Without them, IQ won't get you too far.

Dr. Peter Salovey and Dr. John Mayer also have been instrumental in the findings of Emotional Intelligence. They define it as the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage emotions. These leading researches began their work in the subject in 1990. In 1997, they laid out a definition that includes four branches of emotional intelligence. These branches include:

• Emotional Perception: identifying emotions in faces, music, and stories.
• Emotional Facilitation of Thought: which involves relating emotions to other mental sensations, such as last and color, and using emotion in reasoning and problem solving.
• Emotional Understanding: solving emotional problems, such as knowing which emotions are similar or dissimilar and what relations they convey.
• Emotional Management: understanding the implications of social acts on emotions and the regulation of emotion in self and others.