Emotional Intelligence—Why is it Important?

Emotional Intelligence—Why is it Important? IQ used to be talked about frequently, which refers to intelligence quotient. Gradually, I find that whether I could get along well with my classmates, whether I could keep calm and restraint when treated unfairly or whether I could control my bad emotions without hurting others’ feelings, all of which have nothing to do with how difficult math problems I’m able to solve or how big educational results I can achieve. Although I start to quest the secrets of emotional intelligence, the concept is still not clear enough to me, why is it important and how does it affect me? I will be discussing and looking into the importance of emotional intelligence from different aspects of our life in this paper. The concept of emotional intelligence is vague to many people. Basically emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to identify, deal with and manage emotions in positive ways and capacity of a high degree of self-awareness and a skill of empathy. Initially, Edward Thorndike (1930s) describes the concept of "social intelligence" as the ability to get along with other people, which could be the origin of emotional intelligence. Svetlana Lazovic (2012) points out in his article “The Role and Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Knowledge Management” that there are four main essential skills of emotional intelligence: Self-awareness, which means the ability to understand the emotions and actions of ourselves; Self-management, which means that people can manage feelings and control bad emotions; Empathy, which also can be called as social-awareness, meaning the ability to understand what others are thinking or feeling and to communicate with other people effectively; Motivation, which means always being able to encourage oneself when facing troubles or under pressure. These four elements are easy to explain, but really have huge effects on people’s quality of relationships, career success and overall happiness.