“Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that’s not a sideshow. That’s the cutting edge of human intelligence” Ray Kurzweil

 Before starting with today’s blog, try to answer the following questions:        

1. Are you able to handle your emotions?
2. Do you feel nervous while expressing your emotions?
3. How do you react when it comes to the emotions of others?
4. Need of emotional intelligence and its importance

Done answering the above questions? If you answered yes, congratulations you are into the basics of emotional intelligence. If not, then don’t worry you’ll for sure develop it after reading this blog as we will be discussing emotional intelligence from a student’s perspective and understand the need to implement it as a subject in schools and other educational institutes.

First of all, make yourself clear about the definition of emotional intelligence. It is nothing but the strength of a person to process and modulate his/her as well as others’ emotions. This form of intelligence is very crucial to manage your life efficiently because everything is governed by emotions only be it happiness, sadness or anger etc.

Emotional intelligence can be further divided into 5 categories:

1. Knowing oneself
2. Motivation
3. Empathy
4. Social skills
5. Self-regulation

Emotional intelligence is present in varying quantities in every person. All we need to do is to polish it and this can be very well done in schools. But why? Let us understand. Emotional intelligence as a subject:

1. Develops relationship: An emotionally intelligent student will always try to maintain relationships at any cost. Not only relationships but he/she will also relate to others problems and try to solve them. Such students can handle peer pressure of academics as well as bond with their classmates.
2. Alters personal resilience: Not only relationships, but emotional intelligence also helps in self-resilience i.e., the ability to recover quickly from any kind of difficulties or situation. You can convince and guide others as well and hence, your leadership skills increase because of this intelligence. A leader is required to show matureness in terms of emotional intelligence as he/she is responsible for motivating his/her team members without getting influenced by any sort of negativity and depression.
3. Helps in bias-free decisions: Many of you have faced this at least once in your life. Facing biased decisions because of your gender, caste, race etc. But this is not the case with emotionally stable decisions as such decisions are bias-free and based only on required skills or abilities. Potential people, irrespective of their gender, caste etc. are given opportunities when the decision-maker is emotionally intelligent as such a person will know that talent is free from boundaries of any race, gender etc.
4. Provides a source of happiness: Yes, you are right! The meaning of happiness is different for every person. Some find it in relationships while for others, it means financial stability. But emotional intelligence brings universal happiness and satisfaction as well. Let us understand this with an example, let us assume there is a person X and he is a billionaire but despite so much money, he is always under stress of losing his accounts and never happy. This is because of a lack of emotional intelligence because an emotionally stable person knows that nothing is permanent and the same goes with stress and that’s why his/her stress does not last for longer periods.
5. Helps in communication: Communication does not require any medium. It can be through verbal ways or gestures as well. Emotional Intelligence helps us to understand the emotions of others even if they are unknown to us. Most importantly, this communication prevents any kind of conflicts when it comes to the professional workplace. Effective collaboration with other people is a character trait of emotionally intelligent people.
6. Brings success: You can read about any successful person. Such people are high on emotional grounds and they very well understand how to influence others as well. IQ is important but what is the use of that IQ if a person does not know how to manage the ups and downs of life. No one is successful from birth, smart work along with emotional intelligence is required to succeed in life.

Now we have discussed why emotional intelligence is vital as a subject but can we teach it? The answer is yes. It is possible to learn and teach emotional intelligence with the help of certain AI-enabled games like Eye contact/No eye contact etc. and by taking various assessments for the same.

Key Takeaways

With this, we’ve reached the end of this blog and to conclude with, it is very important to have emotional intelligence as a subject during study days so that students can develop professionalism, self-realisation and stress-free throughout. Moreover, emotional intelligence also contributes to ensuring success as well.

Also published on Medium.