EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Shreya Kabir
Have reasonable emotions!
Ever heard of something like this?
In the contemporary times of cut-throat competition and unparalleled ambitions, your chances of success are higher not because of your quotient of intelligence, but because of something called quotient of EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE.
What use is of the intellect, the hard work if, you do not know how to encash the efforts you are putting in. Your efforts do not get wasted when you miss your target, but they surely go down in the dumps when you fail to be resilient enough to start again! Your emotions might not sound reasonable, but lest they don’t, you’ll be driven by your whirlpool of emotions which are enough to throw you away from your goals!
So, what are these ‘characteristics’ of emotional intelligence? Some of these that can be listed are:
- Abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations.
- To control impulse and delay gratification.
- To regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think.
- To empathize.
- To hope.
Various psychologists across the globe have strongly affirmed and asserted the importance of these characteristics which are not presented by academic intelligence but rather by the vicissitudes of life. How skilful a person is in handling his emotions is crucial to understanding why one person fares better in life than the other even though with equivalent intellects. Thus, the concept of emotional intelligence holds utmost value in the ongoing preparation phase of the aspirants.
An aspirant who finds it difficult to motivate oneself when the looming burden of syllabus gets overwhelming, an aspirant who deceives himself in believing that there is plenty of time and thus ends blowing it up, an aspirant who is not able to cope with his emotional baggages especially when times are meant for concentration and performance, unfortunately falls short of effective emotion-management skills that can tremendously increase the probabilities of his success.
Without emotional intelligence, the smart is dumb!
So, if you think you are an average aspirant, who studies for average number of hours with an average approach, you still have fairer chances of getting successful! This is when provided, you have the ability to pacify your mind and feed in positive self-talk even when you completely underperformed in that mock paper! Or, you have the ability to delay gratification and hence have breaks after a long period of study rather than studying in breaks! Or, when you are absolutely distressed and overthrown by some personal situation, still you somehow manage to complete 80% of your daily target because you know how to reconcile emotion with reason!
The mental calmness, resilience, patience, consistency, perseverance are not merely fancy sounding esteemed virtues that only some saintly aspirants possess. These are the basic qualities you’d undoubtedly find in most of the successful aspirants. So, if you think that you have no reason to invest in developing these characteristics of emotional intelligence, then you might as well get prepared for learning it anyway! Because, this examination is such that without inculcating emotional intelligence, your dream of cracking it will become bleak.
In the next article, we’ll go a notch higher into understanding how to develop emotional intelligence. Till then, keep assessing what are your characteristics of emotional intelligence you possess (which bring you closer to cracking this exam) and which ones you lack (which take you farther from acing it).
