What is Emotional Intelligence and why is it important?

Emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to reduce stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome difficulties, and settle a conflict. Emotional intelligence helps you build stronger relationships, succeed at school and work, and achieve your career and personal goals. It can also help you connect with your emotions, turn intention into action, and make informed decisions about the things that matter most to you.

You probably know people who are academically brilliant but socially inept and failing at work or in personal relationships. Your intellectual ability or intelligence quotient (IQ) alone is not enough to be successful in life. Yes, your IQ may help you get into college, but it's your EQ that will help you manage stress and emotions as you face your final exams. IQ and EQ co-exist and are most effective when they form each other.

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
The 5 components of emotional intelligence that an effective leader should have are as follows;

            Self-awareness                  Self-adjustment
Motivation              Empathy
Social skills

Self-awareness: A deep understanding of one's own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and motives. People with high self-awareness do not succumb to excessive criticism or unrealistic despair. On the contrary, they are honest with themselves and others.

Motivation: To act with the desire to succeed. People who are motivated by a drive to achieve are passionate. They try to pass creative tests, enjoy learning and take pride in getting the job done well.

Self-adjustment: Putting onesself-talk into a calm mode of thinking, can be much more helpful than anxiety and bad moods. It is an inner speech that calmly thinks, analyzes, and produces solutions about why the current situation may have happened.

Easily observable signs of self-adjustment;

• Predisposition to reflection and understanding.
• Comfort in the face of uncertainty and change.
• The ability to resist impulsive impulses and honesty.

Empathy for leaders: It means understanding the feelings of employees, among other factors, in the decision-making process. Today, increased teamwork is particularly important because of globalization and the need to retain talent.

Social skill: The ability to manage one's relationships with others. People who can understand and control their own emotions and empathize with the emotions of others are often also effective in managing relationships.

Self-control: It is called keeping one's attention on the subject by directing one's attention to the desired place and resisting distractions. It is popularly known as the will.

Self-controlled people are healthier, more successful, law-abiding, and financially better off.

Think of it like Traffic Lights;

• Red light, ‘Stop, calm down, think before you act.’
• The yellow light says, 'Slow down, think about possible solutions.'
• Greenlight, ‘Execute the plan, see if it works?’ means.

Empathy is of 3 types:
Cognitive empathy: Understanding another's views and thoughts.
Emotional empathy: Understanding another's feelings.
Empathic attention: The ability to sense what someone else needs you for.

Leaders who are confident, democratic, approachable, and adept at direction achieve the best climate and job performance. It always makes a difference if they show the style that meets the needs of the situation, instead of choosing a style that suits the temperament. The best leaders master many styles and have the flexibility to switch to different styles as circumstances change.

Relationship between Success and Emotional Intelligence

You may think that to be successful in your career, you need to have more professional knowledge and experience than your competitors. However, in order to make a difference and be successful in your career, emotional intelligence is necessary apart from professional knowledge. Research supports that the success of individuals increases as the emotional intelligence (EQ) level, which supports the logical intelligence level (IQ), increases. Although this prediction is not valid for all professions, it becomes a factor affecting success in jobs where one-to-one interaction with people is required. We can say that the effect of emotional intelligence has become evident in work areas such as the service, health, and education sector, teaching, leadership, advertising, and marketing.

People with proven success with Emotional Intelligence

To be successful in your career, you must also have the 'personal competence' and 'social competence' skills that individuals with emotional intelligence have. Individuals with personal competence know how to manage their positive or negative emotions and turn their emotions into benefits. Thanks to this aspect, a person with a high level of emotional intelligence can act logically and calmly and produce constructive solutions when faced with failure. It can stand unprejudiced in the face of physical, economic, technological, or managerial changes and can adapt itself to the new situation in a short time. These are therefore on the way to success and emotional intelligence, which is effective in human relations; it enables people to take place more effectively in areas such as leadership and management.

As a result, since individuals with high emotional intelligence improve their communication skills and self-awareness with people, they can be more aware of the mistakes they make and the mistakes made by others and they can face them more easily. Especially by understanding people in the business environment and communicating well with them, they can easily move to the position of a real leader by correcting mistakes as a team. One of the biggest differences between being a leader and being a boss is emotional intelligence. No matter how competent individuals are, they cannot help themselves and their environment adequately without their emotional intelligence. It is highly aware leaders who keep societies and companies afloat.