Emotional Intelligence, First Step to Realizing Your Full Potential

                                                           ARTISROTLE, The Nichomachean Ethics

As of lately the study of Emotional Intelligence has become more widely known all over the world. It is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. John Mayor and Peter Salovey offered the first formulation of a concept they called Emotional Intelligence. (E.I)

Those were the days when the pre-eminence of IQ as the standard of excellence in life was unquestioned; a debate raged over whether it was set in our genes or due to experience. But, suddenly there was a new way of thinking about the ingredients of life success.

Emotional Intelligence allows us to more understand our emotions, and even manage them to benefit us, instead of allowing our emotions to get the best of us. With the control of our emotions we are able to self-motivate instead of self-sabotage which is something we are all guilty of. E.I is a useful skill in order to prevent making decisions based on emotional biases. This skill is truly the first step to realizing your full potential.

Since reading up on emotional intelligence I have become a more grounded person in all aspects of my life, I am able to control emotions and use them to my advantage in situations. This is a book that helped a lot with teaching me all the basics of Emotional Intelligence. It has many examples of how people have used this skill to their advantage:

Impulses to action

All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb “to move,” plus the prefix “e-” to connote “move away,” suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion. That emotions lead to actions is most obvious in watching animals or children; it is only in “civilized” adults we so often find the great anomaly in the animal kingdom, emotions—root impulses to act—divorced from obvious reaction.

In our emotional repertoire each emotion plays a unique roll, as revealed by their distinctive biological signatures. With new methods to peer into the body and brain, researchers are discovering more physiological details of how each emotion prepares the body for a very different kind of response:

• With anger blood flows to the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or strike at a foe; heart rate increases, and a rush of hormones such as adrenaline generates a pulse of energy strong enough for vigorous action.
• With fear blood goes to the large skeletal muscles, such as the legs, making it easier to flee—and making the face blanch as blood is shunted away from it (creating the feeling that the blood "runs cold"). At the same time, the body freezes, if only for a moment, perhaps allowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better reaction. Circuits in the brain's emotional centers trigger a flood of hormones that put the body on general alert, making it edgy and ready for action, and attention fixates on the threat at hand, the better to evaluate what response to make. 
• Among the main biological changes in happiness is an increased activity in a brain center that inhibits negative feelings and foster an increase in available energy, and a quieting of those that generate worrisome thought. But there is no particular shift in physiology save a quiescence, which makes the body recover more quickly from the biological arousal of upsetting emotions. This configuration offers the body a general rest, as well as readiness and enthusiasm for whatever task is at hand and for striving toward a great variety of goals. 
• Love, tender feelings, and sexual satisfaction entail parasympathetic arousal—the physiological opposite of the "flight-or-fight" mobilization shared by fear and anger. The parasympathetic pattern, dubbed the "relaxation response," is a body wide set of reactions that generates a general state of calm and contentment, facilitating cooperation.
• The lifting of the eyebrows in surprise allows the taking in of larger visual sweep and also permits more light to strike the retina. This offers more information about the unexpected event, making it easier to figure out exactly what is going on and concoct the best plan for action.
• Around the world an expression of disgust looks the same, and sends the identical message: something is offensive in taste or smell, or metaphorically so. The facial expression of disgust—the upper lip curled to the side as the nose wrinkles slightly—suggests a primordial attempt, as Darwin observed to close the nostrils against a noxious odor or spit out a poisonous food.
• A main function for sadness is to help adjust to a significant loss, such as the death of someone close or a major disappointment. Sadness brings a drop in energy and enthusiasm for life's activities, particularly diversions and pleasures, ad , as it deepens ad approaches depression, sows the body's metabolism. The introspective withdrawal creates the opportunity to mourn a loss or frustrated hope, grasp its consequences for one's life, and, as energy returns, plan new beginnings. This loss f energy may well have kept saddened—and vulnerable—early humans close to home, where they were safer.

These biological propensities to act are shaped further by our life experiences and our culture. For instance, universally the loss of a loved one elicits sadness and grief. But how we show our grieving—how emotions are displayed are held back for private moments—is molded by culture, as are which particular people in our lives fall not the category of “loved ones” to be mourned.
The protracted period of evolution when these emotional responses were hammered into shape was certainly a harsher reality than most humans endured as a species after the dawn of recorded history. It was a time when few infants survived to childhood and few adults to thirty years, when predators could strike at any moment, when the vagaries of droughts and floods meant the difference between starvation and survival. But with the coming of agriculture and even the most rudimentary human societies, the odds for survival began to change dramatically. In the last ten thousand years, when these advances took hold throughout the world, the ferocious pressures that held the human population in check eased steadily.
Those same pressures had made our emotional responses so valuable for survival; as they waned, so did the goodness of fit of parts of our emotional repertoire. While in the ancient past a hair-trigger anger may have offered a crucial edge for survival, the availability of automatic weaponry to thirteen-year-old has made it too often a disastrous reaction.

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