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Empathy and Understanding with Emotional Intelligence

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Imagine a close associate whose pet has just passed away. You console the grief-stricken associate and you try to make him forget about the pain and stop him lamenting over their loss. In the process you too start to feel their loss, and you feel a sense of sadness both for the pet, and for your friend. It is this understanding and management of emotions that is the basis for Emotional Intelligence, or simply “EI”. In its simplest terms, EI is “the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking” (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, lines 47-48). Emotional Intelligence helps us understand and empathize with a tribulation or problem that other people are facing. Though many psychologists believed that the IQ was more important, new research suggests that EI is more critical for daily life because it allows us to understand and manage other’s emotions as well as ours. One major component of EI is managing emotions. At any given time, we have to control our emotions to best fit our environment. In the workplace, we have to maintain a sense of professional, often not showing whether we are distraught or sad. Though many employers do not want their workers to seem distraught, they often try to do anything to improve the morale, and thus productivity, of their workers. Many employers know how emotions affect the productivity of their workers, so they try their best so that the workers feel as happy and safe as they can at work. Psychologists Steven Stein and Howard
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