Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you. Recognizing emotions in others (empathy).Emotional IntelligenceĮmotional intelligence encompasses the following skills: This sends our body into panic mode and makes it more difficult for our neocortex to control the actions we take based on our emotional impulses.
We can’t change our emotional reactions to things, but we can learn how to respond to our emotions differently.Įmotional hijackings occur when our limbic system receives the information first and responds with an emergency alert. This means our emotional reactions to things are formed before we have high-level thoughts to make sense of them. Our feeling mind is more fully-formed at birth, while our neocortex can learn, change, and adjust throughout our lives. Our feeling mind is associative, categorical, absolutist, and individual - and it reacts to information before our thinking mind even gets all the information and has an opportunity to weigh out the best action. We essentially have two minds: a thinking one and a feeling one. This gives us the ability to choose how we respond to our emotions, reflect on our actions, and feel empathy for other people.
The full summary goes into much more detail about each of these categories. In this one-page summary, we cover a broad overview of what emotions are, what emotional intelligence is, and how we can use it in a couple different areas of life. But emotional intelligence can be taught and learned - we have the ability to improve upon our emotional intelligence throughout our lives. IQ is fixed: what we’re born with is what remains throughout our lives. And much more research has been done on IQ than on emotions and emotional intelligence, despite the fact that emotions are hard-wired in the human brain and make us the species we are. But data suggests that IQ accounts for only about 20% of success in life, with the remaining 80% being made up by other factors, emotional intelligence included. We’ve even developed tests to measure our intelligence, resulting in a score known as our intelligence quotient, or IQ. Many cultures, particularly Western ones, place a lot of emphasis on intelligence as a barometer of success. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Emotional Intelligence Fast Summary of Shortform's Guide to Emotional Intelligence