Emotional Intelligence Makes Me Smart

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, interpret, evaluate, and control emotions to communicate and relate to others effectively. It is a means of social connection that in a world of business moguls, book smarts, and AI is slowly being lost. However, it is a concept that is direly needed in order for a society to function. We cannot connect with others in our social circle without some level of emotional intelligence. While some people are naturally gifted with it, it is something that can be trained through practice. Although, even in our modern world, there is little time put into that practice. In olden days, you were saw as weak or yellow-bellied for being empathetic, but nowadays there are even worse “nice” words to describe the sensitive souls of the world. To prove just how important it is to have emotional intelligence let’s say you go to a therapist and they have the demeanor of R. Lee Ermey from that Geico commercial. It would be difficult to spill your inner thoughts to a drill sergeant like that. What if every time you were pulled over by an officer, the response was always, “I don’t care, here is your ticket, go away.” The defunding of the police would be immediate and unanimous. Teachers are another great example. If all teachers did was barf up facts for your child to remember and then regurgitate back, we could literally replace them with a robot or TV monitor. Finally, parents are the most important people to have emotional intelligence. Many times, your child is hurting emotionally and you have no idea why. Someone with honed emotional intelligence can easily figure it out. For those parents who lack emotional intelligence; don’t panic. With a little practice and enough Bluey episodes, you too can be an emotionally intelligent parent. My final thought on all this is we as an entire population should be working toward more empathetic interactions. We need to help people learn social skills as well as why the universe works. Because the truth is, it doesn’t if we cannot connect with people on some sort of deeper level at least once in a while. Moreover, when a child helps the opponent in a sports game up from a fall and claps a high five for effort, maybe instead of wondering why they are helping the enemy, we reward them for having the emotional intelligence to realize it’s just a game and hating the opponents only makes the game toxic for everyone. But that is just one man’s opinion. Thanks for listening to me ramble. I appreciate it. See you next time.