Emotional Intelligence determines the quality of your life

Emotional Intelligence, known as EQ, is one of the most important skills that we need to develop in our lives.
It is about being intelligent about emotions.

This is a skill anyone can develop. Another skill is Intelligence Quotient, known as IQ. It predicts how well you will do in your school years and how much salary you can make over the course of your career because it says what job you can get into, like being a business executive, engineer, doctor, or lawyer.

But once you are in those professions, everybody is about as smart as you are and that’s where EQ kicks in. People who emerge as outstanding performers or best leaders have high emotional intelligence.

EQ is a set of skills that we learn in life. It’s a combination of self-awareness, managing your emotions well, empathy, tuning into other people, and putting all that together to have harmonious or effective relationships.

EQ has been talked about for centuries. Philosophers talked about it, for example, Socrates said, “Know thyself.” That’s self-awareness. This became very popular around 1995 after Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence. This was for the first time that for a popular audience, EQ had become well known.

I recently delivered a talk at the conference on The Neuroscience of Willpower. There are many common names for willpower: determination, resolve, self-discipline, self-control and so on.

Psychological scientists define willpower as the ability to employ a “cool” cognitive system of behaviour rather than a “hot” emotional system. This is a conscious, effortful regulation of the self by the self.

The cool system is cognitive in nature. It’s essentially a thinking system, incorporating knowledge about sensations, feelings, actions, and goals – reminding yourself, for instance, why you shouldn’t eat the marshmallow.