Emotional quotient (EQ) is the capacity to recognise, practice, and manage your own emotions in affirmative ways to release stress, communicate efficiently, empathise with people, overcome challenges and resolve conflict.

Emotional quotient helps build stronger relationships, succeed at work, and achieve career and personal goals. It can also help to connect with self-feelings, turn targets into action, and make primed decisions about what matters most.

1. Emotional Quotient Skills:

• Self-management. You’re able to control impulsive feelings and behaviours, manage your emotions in healthy ways, take initiative, follow through on commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances.
• Self-awareness. You recognise your own emotions and how they affect your thoughts and behaviour. You know your strengths and weaknesses and have self-confidence.
• Social awareness. You have empathy. You can understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of other people, pick up on emotional cues, feel comfortable socially, and recognise the power dynamics in a group or organisation.
• Relationship management. You know how to develop and maintain good relationships, communicate clearly, inspire and influence others, work well in a team, and manage conflict.

2. The importance of emotional quotient (EQ)

Intellectual ability or your intelligence quotient (IQ) isn’t enough on its own to achieve success in life. IQ can help one get into college, but it’s one’s EQ that will support you handle the stress and emotions when facing your final exams. IQ and EQ exist in tandem and are most effective when they build off one another.

3. Emotional quotient effects:

3.1 Performance at work. High emotional intelligence can help you navigate the social complexities of the workplace, lead and motivate others, and excel in your career. In fact, when it comes to gauging important job candidates, many companies now rate emotional intelligence as important as technical ability and employ EQ testing before hiring.

3.2 Physical health. If you’re unable to manage your emotions, you are probably not managing your stress either. This can lead to serious health problems. Uncontrolled stress raises blood pressure, suppresses the immune system, increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, contributes to infertility, and speeds up the ageing process. The first step to improving emotional intelligence is to learn how to manage stress.

3.3 Mental health. Uncontrolled emotions and stress can also impact your mental health, making you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. If you are unable to understand, get comfortable with, or manage your emotions, you’ll also struggle to form strong relationships. This, in turn, can leave you feeling lonely and isolated and further exacerbate any mental health problems.

3.4 Relationships. By understanding your emotions and how to control them, you’re better able to express how you feel and understand how others are feeling. This allows you to communicate more effectively and forge stronger relationships, both at work and in your personal life.

3.5 Social intelligence. Being in tune with your emotions serves a social purpose, connecting you to other people and the world around you. Social intelligence enables you to recognise friend from foe, measure another person’s interest in you, reduce stress, balance your nervous system through social communication, and feel loved and happy.

4. Increasing EQ

Key proficiencies can aid in building EQ and enhance the capability to manage emotions and link with others.

4.1 Self-management
For a person to engage his EQ, he must be able to use your emotions to make constructive decisions about self-behaviour. When he becomes overly stressed, he can lose control of his emotions and the ability to act thoughtfully and appropriately.
Think about a time when stress has overwhelmed somebody. Was it easy to think clearly or make a rational decision? Probably not.

When he became overly stressed, his ability to both think clearly and accurately assess emotions, self and other people’s becomes compromised. Emotions are important pieces of information that tell you about yourself and others, but in the face of stress that takes us out of our comfort zone, we can become overwhelmed and lose control of ourselves.

With the ability to manage stress and stay emotionally present, you can learn to receive upsetting information without letting it override your thoughts and self-control. You’ll be able to make choices that allow you to control impulsive feelings and behaviours, manage your emotions in healthy ways, take initiative, follow through on commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances.

4.2 Self-awareness

Managing stress is just the first step to building emotional intelligence. The theory of attachment indicates that your current emotional experience is likely a reflection of your early life experience. Your ability to manage core feelings such as anger, sadness, fear, and joy often depends on the quality and consistency of your early life emotional experiences.

If your primary caretaker as an infant understood and valued your emotions, it’s likely your emotions have become valuable assets in adult life. But, if your emotional experiences as an infant were confusing, threatening or painful, it’s likely you’ve tried to distance yourself from your emotions.

Enable to connect to your emotions having a moment-to-moment connection with your changing emotional experience is the key to understanding how emotion influences your thoughts and actions.

To build EQ and become emotionally healthy one must reconnect to your core emotions, accept them, and become comfortable with them. You can achieve this through the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness (being conscious or aware of something) is the practice of purposely focusing your attention on the present moment—and without judgment.

The cultivation of mindfulness has roots in Buddhism, but most religions include some type of similar prayer or meditation technique. Mindfulness helps shift your preoccupation with thought toward an appreciation of the moment, your physical and emotional sensations, and brings a larger perspective on life. Mindfulness calms and focuses you, making you more self-aware in the process.

5. Developing emotional awareness

It’s important to learn to manage stress first so one will feel more comfortable recoupling stout or disagreeable emotions and changing how one experiences and responds to one’s feelings.

5.1 Social awareness/consciousness

Social awareness assists you to acknowledge and understand the mainly nonverbal signals others are regularly using to communicate with you. These signals let you know how others are really feeling, how their emotional state is changing every moment, and what’s truly important to them.

When groups of people send out similar nonverbal signals, one is able to read and identify the power dynamics and pooled emotional experiences of the group. In short, you’re empathetic and socially comfortable.

5.2 Using mindfulness to shape social consciousness

To build social consciousness, one needs to acknowledge the significance of mindfulness in the social process. After all, you can’t pick up on subtle nonverbal cues when you’re in your own head, thinking about other things, or simply zoning out on your phone. Social awareness requires your presence in the moment.

While many of us pride ourselves on an ability to multitask, this means that you’ll miss the subtle emotional shifts taking place in other people that help you fully understand them. You are more likely to further your social goals by setting other thoughts aside and focusing on the interaction itself.

Following the flow of another person’s emotional responses is a give-and-take process that requires you to also pay attention to the changes in your own emotional experience. Paying attention to others doesn’t diminish your own self-awareness. By investing the time and effort to really pay attention to others, you’ll actually gain insight into your own emotional state as well as your values and beliefs. For example, if you feel discomfort hearing others express certain views, you’ll have learned something important about yourself.

5.3 Relationship management

Working well with others is a process that begins with emotional awareness and your ability to recognise and understand what other people are experiencing. Once emotional awareness is in play, you can effectively develop additional social/emotional skills that will make your relationships more effective, fruitful, and fulfilling.

Become aware of how effectively you use nonverbal communication. It’s impossible to avoid sending nonverbal messages to others about what you think and feel. The many muscles in the face, especially those around the eyes, nose, mouth and forehead, help you to wordlessly convey your own emotions. 

The emotional part of your brain is always on—and even if you ignore its messages—others won’t. Recognising the nonverbal messages that you send to others can play a huge part in improving your relationships.

Use hilarity and play to alleviate stress. Hilarity, amusement and play are natural remedies to stress. They reduce burdens and help keep things in perspective. Laughter brings the nervous system into balance, reducing stress, calming down, sharpening the mind and making one more empathic.

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