Bárbara Campos Oliveira September 29th, 2014
Definition Paper
Emotional intelligence (E.I)
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to manage and understand emotions and feelings. This capacity involves to being aware of control, and to express one's emotions, as well as perceive, interpret and respond to other people's feelings and emotions. Having a good Emotional Intelligence helps people to relate better to others, form healthier relationships, achieve greater success at work, manage the stress and emotions when facing problems, and it also helps to lead a more fulfilling life.
This term consists of four attributes. The first one is the 'self-awareness', which involves recognizing one's own emotions, strengths and weaknesses, and realizing how thoughts and behaviors are affected by emotions. It is wrong to think of emotions as either positive or negative but rather as appropriate or inappropriate. Anger is usually associated with being a negative emotion, for example. However, anger can be a completely reasonable and appropriate emotion in certain circumstances, as when someone is using the computer to writing a paper, the electricity goes out, and then when it returns, he/she realizes that all work was lost.
People who lack self-awareness think that living a truly happy and productive life is difficult. They stay in jobs that they find unfulfilling or make them unhappy, or keep relationships that they are not comfortable with. People find ways to mask their emotions rather than listening to them. The dependency of certain behaviors is often linked to emotional masking which may include excessive drinking, over-working, smoking, computer games and gambling.
The second one is the 'self-management", which implicates the skill to control impulsive feelings and behaviors instead of being controlled by them, and the ability to adapt to different circumstances. One of the foundations to self-management is self-control. Self-control is not mask or...