What is emotional intelligence?

/ UMACS Media/

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions. Some researchers suggest that emotional intelligence can be learned and strengthened, while others claim it is an inborn characteristic.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. Interest in emotional intelligence has grown significantly since the 1990s, with research suggesting that good emotional understanding can lead to increased social effectiveness.

EI typically includes four types of abilities:  

  • Perceiving emotions – the ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts—including the ability to identify one's own emotions. Perceiving emotions represents a basic aspect of emotional intelligence, as it makes all other processing of emotional information possible.

  • Using emotions – the ability to harness emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem-solving. The emotionally intelligent person can capitalise fully upon his or her changing moods in order to best fit the task at hand.

  • Understanding emotions – the ability to comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. For example, understanding emotions encompass the ability to be sensitive to slight variations between emotions, and the ability to recognise and describe how emotions evolve over time.

  • Managing emotions – the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others. Therefore, the emotionally intelligent person can harness emotions, even negative ones, and manage them to achieve intended goals.

The need for emotional intelligence is necessary if you wish to be successful in selling. As you begin to emotionally believe in higher goal possibilities, and you begin to release achievement drive, the need for healthy emotional intelligence kicks in.

Emotional intelligence produces traits like stability, steadiness, persistence, even-tempered control, and the ability to deal with rejection. As we know selling isn't always easy, we often have to face rejection and we face many unknowns. Fear of rejection and fear of what might happen that we don't want to happen can be formidable enemies.