Emotions accompany us every day of our lives and play a fundamental role in the way we build our experiences, influence our decisions, the relationships we have with other people and the behavior we display every day.
Although we may not realize it, we are experiencing some emotion at every moment of the day, and having the ability to recognize them is the first step to develop what we call emotional intelligence.
But what is emotional intelligence? This term is related to the ability to use our emotions and our reasoning capacity, jointly, putting it at the service of an objective.
This means that being more intelligent with emotions is not really being more sensitive, nor acting purely driven by emotion, but we say that someone is intelligent with their emotions when they are able to recognize and use their emotions as a source of important information and energy for behavior, putting all this energy at the service.
Emotional intelligence is a key skill in building greater personal and social well-being in people’s lives. Simply put, it is the ability to use reason and emotion together to achieve fuller and more effective results. It is the capacity that human beings have of what a person can achieve.
To build the skills that help us to be better in this area, it is essential to work on self-knowledge, since this is the first level of development in this area. We need to be aware of what we feel at the moment we are experiencing it, and achieving this requires being able to identify emotions, having an emotional vocabulary to be able to call them and distinguish them from each other, and to recognize which are the elements that make an emotion arise in us.
Then comes the challenge of regulating our own emotions, which we could translate into the ability to choose what to do with them, instead of reacting as a result of our emotion. To the extent that we are able to channel it then we can be more effective in many areas of our life, ceasing to be “governed” by what we are feeling at a given time, to be able to use our emotional states as a means of transportation to go where we really want.
Thus, when people think about enhancing their personal well-being, improving their quality of life, having more satisfactory interpersonal relationships or becoming more assertive and effective in achieving our goals, we have to think about developing emotional intelligence, which is why this branch of knowledge and human development has grown, and will continue to grow, all over the world, because finally, human beings have realized the enormous power of the emotions that live in us.
This path, like any great journey, begins with a simple step. That is why I invite you to investigate and learn more about this powerful line of human empowerment based on our own emotions.