Why Emotional Intelligence Is Important For Success

There is a concept that I touch upon in my book, The Life Champion In You, called emotional intelligence that I consider very important for achieving success. Emotional intelligence is about how we manage our actions with both others and ourselves as a result of the emotions we feel. The whole premise is that we all feel an emotion as a result of an event or circumstance before we think about it. That is, we feel before we think.

Unfortunately, once we experience a feeling, we also tend to react in the form of an action before we actually think about them. This is basically doing without thinking as an automatic reaction. This can cause all sorts of sudden actions as a result of bad judgments because we haven’t allowed enough time to put in adequate thought first. These overreactions are often actions that we later regret. Many personal conflicts and wars have been started because of this type of overreaction, which is basically a lack of emotional intelligence.

This whole area of emotional intelligence has been a real exciting one in certain corporate circles because of the potential positive impact on company performance. Education on emotional intelligence is now part of many programs on training corporate leaders to become more effective. Because of the way emotional intelligence can play such a significant role in the way people work with one another and therefore affecting corporate profits, the business world jumped into this concept.

An individual with high emotional intelligence reacts after both feeling an emotion and thinking about an event. Others with less developed emotional intelligence would often react only after feeling the emotion without much thinking. Interestingly enough, emotional intelligence doesn’t always come hand in hand with standard intelligence and vice versa. That is, extremely smart people can have low emotional intelligence while others who are not so gifted in standard IQ can exhibit relatively high emotional intelligence.

I was watching the Larry King show on TV one night when former President Bill Clinton was interviewed. President Clinton said that one of the best things we can teach our youth is that sometimes bad things can happen to us and we have no control over them. However, what we do have control over is how we react or respond to these bad things. This is basically emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence affects how one behaves with oneself as well as with other people, especially during conflicts. This is why emotional intelligence has become especially important in leadership training. It is generally thought that although standard intelligence or IQ is a given that can’t really be altered, emotional intelligence is something that can be developed through training. This is why corporate seminars on emotional intelligence were developed for company executives.

But the implications of emotional intelligence in personal life are equally significant as in the business world. Improvements in emotional intelligence can result in better personal relationships between people. One can only imagine just how many marriages and other family relationships as well as broken friendships can be saved if people had more training in emotional intelligence. So as long as we are all dealing with others in our everyday lives, emotional intelligence is a very important concept in order to be successful in life.