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Understanding and managing our emotions to lower stress has become more than necessary.
Skills for self-knowledge, emotional management, and efficient communication have become a critical need in pandemic times. Every day comes with new information to process. The intense conditions in our world today bring social symptoms like doomscrolling, echo chambers, and radicalization, which force us to rethink the way we teach reasoning and communication, especially if the interactions are not face-to-face.
What do we need to navigate our current situation intelligently, empathetically, and humanely? Besides critical thinking, self-questioning and fact-checking could be considered crucial skills to adapt to a reality where we coexist more behind a screen than in person. Thus, we need to pay attention to the benefits of learning about emotional intelligence.
The importance of managing emotions
When we consider emotional intelligence (EI), we mean the ability to understand, use, and manage our own emotions to reduce stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and de-escalate conflicts.
A high level of emotional intelligence allows us to build healthy and balanced relationships in our family and at school and work. It is also the primary tool for positive self-criticism, a beneficial resource for suspending negative judgment when we assess our qualities and areas of opportunity to improve.
Emotional intelligence rests on five fundamental pillars that provide mechanisms to understand the root of emotions, learn to navigate through them, and lay the foundation for effective communication.
The five pillars of emotional intelligence
Elaine Houston, a positive psychology researcher and writer with a B.Sc. with honors in Behavioral Science, penned a piece for positivepsychology.com on the five elements that comprise emotional intelligence, these components were first mentioned by author Daniel Goleman in 1995.
Self-awareness is the stepping stone where the whole structure of emotional intelligence begins. It is the ability to recognize and understand our emotions and how they impact others. This introspection is the first step to identify aspects of behavior or emotions in our psychological profile that we need to change, either to be more at peace with ourselves or to adapt to a specific situation. Self-awareness also meets the need to recognize what motivates us and fulfills us.
Emotions in themselves are not negative; what would be disruptive or harmful is mishandling emotion. Self-regulation helps avoids this, focusing on the ability to handle destructive feelings and adapt to changes. People who master self-regulation are good at resolving conflicts, reacting quickly, and managing responsibility or leadership.
Motivation is essential to achieve our goals. Emotional intelligence gives us the tools to motivate ourselves, focusing on personal fulfillment, satisfaction and moving the need for recognition or external reward to the background. Thus, the commitment to oneself takes priority over the need to generate the desired reaction in others.
The ability to recognize and understand how other people feel and consider these emotions before interacting with them is known as empathy. It allows us to understand the dynamics that influence the relationships we manage in the family, school, and office. For empathy to help us relate better, it must go hand-in-hand with a solid, well-constructed, and positive self-concept. Self-concept is roughly the image we have of ourselves, our own perception of the abilities, particularities, and other aspects that make us the person we are.
Social skills are the last piece of the puzzle, consisting of the mechanisms necessary to understand the emotions of others, establishing a distance between theirs and ours while simultaneously building a communication channel to connect with them in our interactions. In exercising these faculties, skills such as active listening and verbal and nonverbal assertive communication are acquired.
Why is emotional intelligence indispensable?
Academic skills and professional experience enable us to perform specific jobs. Emotional intelligence gives us the ability to do that work more efficiently and improve performance, considering the measures we must take to understand and care for our mental and physical health and others.
In this context, where teamwork and remote interactions have become the norm, developing the skills to function better in a group and communicate clearly (while lacking the advantage of face-to-face interactions) is essential to thriving in a post-pandemic world.
Had you heard before about emotional intelligence? Have you applied it in your class or work environment? Do you think it is a necessary faculty for communication in today’s world? Tell us in the comments.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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