What do I know about Emotional Intelligence but you dont

The human Mind is the most complex and mysterious machinery found in the World. It handles and is capable of handling much more than we can imagine. We think our mind is used only in thinking, logical reasoning, taking decisions, recognising and remembering and in all those things we do consciously. But this little but the most complex thing in the world, does much more than this.

Actually, we have two minds. In simpler terms, we have two natures of same mind. First one is the “Logical Mind” which we all are familiar with and the other one is “Emotional Mind”. While Logical Mind is responsible for more rational and toughtful decisions, Emotional Mind governs sudden reflexes in response of something it captures. Emotional Mind is more volatile and it easily reflects whatever it feels into our actions. It tricks us into showing sudden irrational behaviour or some actions which were not really neccessary at the the moment.

But surprisingly, during the course of evolution of today’s modern age human beings from its early-age marine life, the Emotional Brian developed much before than the logical brain started developing. Daniel Goleman talks about this evolution of logical brain from the emotional one into detail in his book, “Emotional Intelligence. Why it can Matter more than IQ”. Infact this whole post is inspired from his book which talks about the relevance of emotional intelligence in our lives and how we should take care of it.

“Life is comedy for those who think and a tragedy who for those who feel”
-Horace Walpole

Emotional Brain is responsible for more-of reflex types of reactions. It has its roots in the early stage, i.e. much simpler forms of minds, which developed into species which showed on earth much before Human Beings. It forces us to react totally on the basis of how we feel without letting us to evalutate the situations correctly. Emotional brain works on a simple technique. It would simply ask,”What is this, I don’t like it. oh! I am not feeling good. I am hurt. Am I hurt?” and somehow it will jump to a conclusion that yes this is somthing which should be avoided, and would immediately give us instruction to act without giving it much tought or weighing the situation correctly.

Well, this simply DOES NOT mean that we should ignore our emotional intelligence(or brain) completely as it can be faulty sometime. Take an example of a person who has a very good IQ score. He can be very smart at maths or could solve very difficult puzzles in seconds but this does not imply that one would be as successful in one’s life as in academic field. Life involves many other factors and some of them have emotional aspect too. Infact, IQ contributes to 20% to the factors that determine life success, hence this means 80% involvement is of other forces.

So the questions arises here is: Can Emotion be Intelligence? and the answer is YES. A person with average IQ score can be more sucessful than a person really smart at logical thinking. All that is required is a Little Self-Awareness.

“KNOW THYSELF”
-Socrates

Life is a boon for someone who knows Self-Awareness and a total tragedy for one who doesn’t. Frued has desribed it as “evenly hovering attention”. Daniel Goleman has talked about it in his book as, an interested yet unreactive witness. Some psycho-analysts call it the “observing ego”.

As Daniel Goleman describes, Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions or overreaction. Rather, it is neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness amidst turbulent emotions. It is just keeping a check on your emotions so that thay do not get ahead of us and do not overshadow our logical mind. We should always listen to our emotional mind but with a neutral sense without getting a biased approach. Sometime it can give us the faulty perception, but it also gives us the required empathy and neccessary emotions required to interect with others, undersatnd someone or some situation, and make others feel the warmth we have for them in our heart.

It is just that we should always check our emotions and correctly evaluate whatever we are feeling at the the moment. Sometime, we can feel the anger boiling in our mind, we can handle that situation with a little self-awareness. We can calm down our self, just by giving instruction to our emotional mind, “this is the anger I am feeling may be I should think about this after some time.” or we can simply say, “This is anger and this is not good let it pass first then I will think”.

Just Remember, “Down as well as Ups spice life, but need to be in balance.” Similarly, We need logical as well as Emotional brain, but in perfect balance.

The above blog is completely inspired from Daniel Goleman’s book, “Emotional Intelligence. Why it can matter more than IQ”. All these techniques and examples are based on the book. You should read the book for detailed coverage of each aspect discussed in the blog above.

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