What is Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand your emotions and other emotions. Getting to know your feelings' source and understanding how to deal with them is the highest level of emotional intelligence. Leaders use this intelligence to listen to their employees and understand their feelings each one alone. Reaching this ability requires five core pillars.

The 4 Fundamental Pillars of Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness: Being self-aware is being wide conscious about how you feel, why you are feeling this way, what they feel, why they are feeling this way, and trying to customize a certain reaction to every person. Self-awareness makes it easier to showcase the effect of your and other emotions on the surrounding. A self-aware leader manages to acknowledge his strengths and weaknesses and work upon them with humility. The main point behind this pillar is putting yourself in one's shoes but not letting it affect you.

Self-regulation: A leader with high self-regulation has more control over his actions and behaviors. He controls his temper and anger, tries not to attack employees verbally, and never takes on haphazard decisions. They are committed to their job, can be relied on, and hold accountability. Leaders practice staying calm daily to make employees less stressed and more efficient. They also blame themselves before blaming others when an ambiguous event occurs.

Self-motivation: Leaders are self-motivated and work on validating themselves before getting validation from others. They know what weaknesses they have so they work upon them. Self-motivated leaders work hard to reach consistency in their daily tasks.

Empathy: Empathy is a major pillar in being a successful leader. Imagine having many departments under your supervision with hundreds of employees and not being able to have their backs when needed. Empathizing with your employees makes them more confident, more productive, more reliable, and trust in you.

Put yourself in their position, know how they feel in this exact moment. Appreciate what they are doing and adding to this job of potential and skills. Master paying attention to body language as well makes you define what this employee is thinking and feeling.

Social Skills: Leaders with good social skills and strong interpersonal skills are good communicators. They receive good news as bad news and have high resistance to conflicts. Leaders that have good social skills are diplomatic and manage conflicts and change better than others.