EQ and soft skills

Have you ever had an experience where you were in a trouble and someone, let's say a friend, listened to you and talked to you sympathetically? And you thought "wow, she really gets me!" You are not alone! That person that you met has a high EQ and definitely good people skills.

In this blog post I will step away from linguistics and jobs and talk about a thing that has been of my interest in the last few years, and I have been reading about. It is helpful for you in your personal and business lives. It is the EQ or the emotional quotient. Then I will relate it to soft skills.
  Emotional quotient can help you to be a better communicator, that is why I decided to write about them in this thread.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

The emotional quotient shows your ability to understand your emotions and how you deal with them, and the ability to understand others emotions. In other words, just like how the IQ (intelligence quotient) indicates your intelligence level, the EQ indicates your ability to understand emotions.

There are five categories to the emotional intelligence, and they are: 

1) Self -awareness: the ability to recognize your own emotions.

2) Self-regulation: the ability to control and work with your emotions effectively.

3)Motivation: the ability to motivate yourself to work on your goals.

4)Empathy: the ability to recognize and understand the feelings of the people.

Why is EQ important?

Now you might be asking why EQ is important. And how does it help the personal and business life of people? Well, firs of all, the emotional quotient is helpful because it helps get in touch with your feelings and be honest with them. This is important because if you are able to identify your feelings then you know when to take control over them. Let me give you an example, you are at a discussion with someone, and she said to you that what you said is "wrong." Normally people would evoked and will try to defend themselves and their opinion even if they have to yell. But if your emotional intelligence level is high, then in this situation you will recognize that you got evoked and you will know why. Thus, you will be able to know how to control this feeling and reply back to the person you are talking to effectively. You might say something like "I might have not made my opinion clear, let me clarify it...." This response will not provoke the other person and make him or her angry but will let him or her know your opinion without any trouble. 

This is just one example of how the emotional quotient can help you be a better communicator. And this situation happens to everyone in their personal and business lives.

From: www.quayappointments.com 

How is EQ related to soft skills?

Before I begin to talk about the relation between EQ and soft skills, let me tell explain soft skills briefly to you. To put it simply soft skills are positive traits that make up a good employee. For example, having a positive attitude and being a good listener are examples of soft skills. The importance of these skills is, they help you know how to engage in a conversation with someone. And

You might have noticed that my explanation of soft skills is quite similar to what I said about the emotional quotient. That is because there is a similarity between them. Both of soft skills and the emotional intelligence help you engage in conversations effectively. However, they are not the same! emotional intelligence makes you know how you to engage with your feelings and understand them. But soft skills are personal traits that help you be a better communicator. The relation between the two is that if you have a higher emotional intelligence level then you are likely to have a well developed soft skills, because both are in a way dependent on each other. For example, one of the soft skills that we need to have is good listening. And normally people with high levels of EQ are considered good listeners, because they care. To clarify, EQ makes people more empathetic towards others, and because of that they tend to be a good listeners. And as a result, they developed a soft skill.
The bottom line is, having a high emotional quotient level will help you develop soft skills. 

The emotional intelligence is very important to help us become better humans and better communicators. It teaches us a lot about our feelings and the feelings of others, which help us take control over our emotions and dealing with people and troubles. 

Before I close this post I would like to suggest going to the two links bellow for more information about EQ. 

"What is emotional intelligence" gives you more information about the 5 categories of EQ that I mentioned above. And "Emotional intelligence and soft skills" tells you more about EQ and its relation to soft skills.