Emotional Intelligence is the ability to perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.
Salovey and Mayor, fathers of the concept of emotional intelligence, summarized in this way the ability to recognize and control our own emotions and behaviors—while remaining aware of the effect that these have on others around us. At the same time, you understand the emotional state of other people and use this emotional data to adapt your behavior to achieve the most positive response from them. You are just using emotional data to make sense and navigate the social environment you are in. By viewing emotions as useful sources of information, you are bringing together the wisdom of the limbic system and the rationality of the neocortex. Let's break Salovey and Mayor's definition into four branches: perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions.
Salovey and Mayor's Model of Emotional Intelligence
Perceiving emotions;is the ability to identify one's own emotions and to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts.
Perceiving emotions is the base of the emotional intelligence pyramid. Without the ability to accurately perceive and identify emotions in physical states (including body expressions) and thoughts, none of the other skills can be developed. However, the ability to tell the difference between real and false emotions is considered an especially sophisticated perceiving ability when we are able to identify emotions in stimuli such as artwork and music using cues such as sound, appearance, and colors.
How can we begin to develop and improve the ability to perceive emotions? You can always begin by identifying your emotions. To identify your emotions, it is helpful to ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I know what am I feeling now?
- Can I label it, correctly?
- Do I know what am I feeling now?
- Do I feel this way often?
- At this time, is it appropriate to feel the way I feel?
- Did I properly express my feelings to others?
In identifying emotions in others, be aware of the following set of cues:
- Look for facial expressions. Does their smile reflect what is going on with their eyes?
- Be aware of tone, pitch, and pace in their voices. Are their voice and words consistent or inconsistent?
- Look at the body language. Please note, that identifying only one cue can be misleading, that is why we strongly advise to always search for a set of three clues: body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.
Using emotions is the ability to harness emotions to facilitate thinking such as deductive reasoning, attention to detail, problem solving, and mood adaptation.
What is the big advantage in using your emotions? Emotionally intelligent people can capitalize fully upon their changing moods in order to best fit the task they have at hand. When you understand which mood is the best for a particular type of thinking, then you can get in the right mood to enhance your thinking and influence others' emotions and the environment around you. For instance, would it be better to complete a task at hand to be in a good mood or in a sad mood? It depends on what you need to complete the task at hand. If you need to look for a solution to a problem and think out of the box, a happy positive mood is the best one. But, if you need to be focused on details to spot errors, a sad mood is your best adviser. Moods are long-lasting effects of a first emotion that trigger in us secondary related emotions, repeatedly, without any clear external trigger. A mood is influenced by your environment (weather, lighting, color, or people around you), by your physiology (what you have been eating, how you have been exercising, if you have a cold or not, how well you slept), by your thinking (where you are focusing your attention), and by your current emotions. A mood can last for minutes, hours, or even days and they are more generalized. They are tied to a collection of inputs not to a specific incident. Ready to learn how different moods affect our thinking?
- A happy mood or a positive vibe are very helpful when you need to do the following:
- Big picture thinking: A happy mood expands your thinking and allows you to think outside the box, because it stimulates creative and innovative thinking. This top-down method of thinking helps with your inductive reasoning.
- Brainstorm: When brainstorming, you need to be energized so that you can be more creative in developing new ideas, generate new solutions, and make better decisions—which, in turn, motivates you and your team. The downside of thinking when in a positive or happy mood is that we tend to make more mistakes in problem-solving. Use it with care.
- A sad mood is very helpful when you need to do the following:
- Stay focused and do detailed thinking: When we are sad or feeling negative we pay more attention, focus on details, and search for and spot more errors. Being in a slightly sad mood helps people conduct careful, methodical work. This bottom up method of thinking helps with your deductive reasoning.
- A fearful mood is very helpful when you need to do the following:
- Be motivated: Fear is a survival mechanism that motivated our ancestors by signalling danger. When we are evaluating possible problems and considering worst-case scenarios, it helps to be in a bit of a fearful mood rather than in a happy mood.
- An angry mood is very helpful when you need to do the following:
- Right a wrong: Someone lacking any skills in emotional intelligence will be immediately emotionally hijacked when feeling angry. However, for the emotionally intelligent person, anger helps focus on fixing the wrongdoing instead of losing your head.
- A guilty, shameful, or embarrassing mood is very helpful when you need to do the following:
- Maintaining appropriate conduct: Shame and guilt make you apologize when you engage in bad behaviors, which helps you to keep on the right track. Shame and embarrassment help avoid fights since it is more difficult for someone to stay angry with you, if they are feeling shame or embarrassment.
Understanding emotions is the ability to comprehend emotional language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions.
Understanding emotions encompasses the ability to be sensitive to slight variations in one emotion only, for instance, know the difference between feeling happy and feeling ecstatic. And to recognize and describe how emotions evolve over time, for instance, how shock can turn into grief. The ability to understand emotions is the most cognitive, or thinking-related of the four branches of emotional intelligence and it is based on four underlying principles. The four principles to understand emotions are:
- Emotions have heir own vocabulary: For example, feeling melancholy is not the same thing as feeling sad, or feeling disappointed is not the same thing as feeling angry. A basic skill in understanding emotions is our ability to accurately label how we are feeling at any given moment as the first step to understand and manage our emotional states. That is why it is so important to enhance your emotional literacy and learn an emotional vocabulary.
- Emotions have underlying causes: Salovey and Mayor, the fathers of the concept of emotional intelligence used a mathematical formula to explain that any given emotion has an underlying cause they are not random events: Event X = Emotion Y
Emotions are complex: Plutchik built the wheel of emotions with the purpose of helping us understand that the six basic emotions when mixed can create a new myriad of emotions that can be similar, opposite emotions, or combined. We often use the term bittersweet to refer to a moment or an event that is simultaneously happy and sad.
Emotions change according to set of rules: You can predict why you or others around you are feeling in a certain way and what will happen next. For example, if a solution architect is feeling content when his development team approved the artifact that he designed to solve a specific problem, it is easy to predict he will feel happy with the results.
Managing emotions is the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others, to attain specific goals.
Managing our emotions does not mean we shut down or try to suppress the way we feel. It is exactly the opposite. We stay open to our feelings, even if they are unpleasant. Since emotions contain information, managing our emotions means that we can assimilate our emotional data into our thinking process. An effective emotional management of our emotions is not a question of whether you should strive to control how you feel but rather of understanding how you can, safely, engage and disengage from your emotional states. It is not enough to be aware of what you are feeling. You also need to consider the following:
- The clarity and strength of the feeling
- How the feeling is affecting your thoughts
- How often do you feel this way
- Is this feeling typical or unusual, in you