In this insightful article published on Huffington Post recently talked about a very important subject that helps all of us with our personal and professional life, which is Emotional Intelligence!
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.
As you may know, the practice of mindfulness meditation helps a lot with regulating our emotions by noticing them at the time of practice, and become familiar with what is going on inside of us. You learn how to observe your thoughts and emotions, and stay calm when the strong emotions arise. You learn to find your balance and act mindfully in any situation that you may encounter at work place or anywhere else, and most importantly you learn how to respond instead of react!
It has been proven that just a few weeks of practicing mindfulness meditation will reduce the activity of the amygdala, the emotional center of our brain. Studies also have shown that we can become better decision makers when we practice mindfulness meditation only for 15 minutes a day, as the prefrontal cortex of our brain become stronger whenever we do this practice!
“There are very many benefits to EI. Just in the business world, for example, Emotional intelligence has at least 3 compelling benefits.
First, it is highly correlated with stellar work performance. Studies show emotional competencies to be twice as important as cognitive competencies for doing outstanding work, even among engineers.
Second, emotionally intelligent leaders and managers are far more effective than leaders or managers low on emotional intelligence.
Finally, emotional intelligence creates the conditions for personal happiness, and happy workers are a great asset because they work better in teams, provide better service to customers (and happy customers return to spend more money), and are generally more creative and productive.”
“Essentially, EI is a collection of mental and emotional skills. Therefore, to train EI, all you have to do is to train your mind to acquire those skills. In Search Inside Yourself, we do that in 3 steps:
Step 1. Attention training. Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Specifically, the idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. That quality of mind forms the foundation for emotional intelligence.
Step 2. Self-Knowledge and Self-Mastery. Use your sharpened attention to create high-resolution perception into your own cognitive and emotive processes. With that, you become able to observe your thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity and to do so objectively from a third-person perspective. Once you can do that, you create the type of deep self-knowledge that eventually enables self-mastery.
Step 3. Creating Pro-social Mental Habits. Qualities such as kindness and compassion can be created as mental habits. Eg, imagine whenever you meet anybody, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, “I wish for this person to be happy.” This is the mental habit of kindness and is highly trainable the same way you train other mental habits.”
Read the full article here:
Published: May 27, 2016
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