19TH MODULE: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Coachee, emotional intelligence is seem as the ability of people to identify and handle their own
emotions to understand others’ emotions, to manage pressures and frustrations, to boost social
and empathic skills and to improve their capacity of social development.

Emotional intelligence is a skill that involves three processes:

 Perceive: Consciously recognize our emotions and identify what we feel being capable of
give them an oral tag.
 Understand: Bring together what we feel inside our thoughts and know how to consider
the complexity of emotional changes.
 Regulate: Lead and handle positive and negative emotions effectively.

Emotional Process

Self-consciousness is the basic axis of emotional intelligence, therefore the awareness of our
emotional state is the starting point to other abilities of emotional intelligence like self-control,
empathy and social skills. The expression “self-awareness” is used to talk about the constant
attendance to our inner state; that self-reflective conscience where mind is in charge of watching
and exploring for a specific experience, or even emotions.

Furthermore, it is necessary to highlight that basic emotions start fast and they last few seconds.
There are a lot of emotions, but in general they are known as the following: joy, sadness, anger,
fear, surprise and disgust. These are innate emotions, that is to say, that all of us were born with
them. Some words or different concepts are used to describe a specific emotion, but facial
expression is the same.

On the other hand, emotions are also classified as primary emotions, secondary emotions,
negative emotions, positive emotions, and neutral emotions. They are described in the following
way:

 Primary emotions: They are the one we mentioned before, those that are innate in every
human being since they are born. These emotions are shaped by learning and experience,
and they exist in all people and cultures.
 Secondary emotions: These are a result of the first ones. Secondary emotions are related
to personal development and their responses are expressed in different ways in each
person.
 Negative emotions: They involve unpleasant feelings and an evaluation of a situation as
damaging. For example: fear, anger, sadness and disgust.
 Positive emotions: These emotions imply nice feelings and an evaluation of a situation as
advantageous. They are temporary and last a short time, like happiness and pleasure.
  Neutral Emotions: These are the ones that cause neither pleasant nor unpleasant feelings
and ease the onset of other emotions such as surprise.

One of the most common personal goals is to maintain interpersonal relationships with people
around you and to have high emotional intelligence. This helps you to have the ability to offer
people some appropriate information about your psychological state. First, you need to be able to
handle your emotional state in order to handle the one of others. People emotionally intelligent
are more skilled to perceive, understand and manage their own feelings; they are also capable of
transmitting these skills to other people’s emotions. That’s why emotional intelligence has an
important role to play in quality, establishment, and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.

On the other hand, the ability to handle our own emotions, to plainly experiment our feelings
and to modify our negative mood will definitely have an impact on your mental health, affecting
this way your academic performance. That’s why it is probable that people with less emotional
skills experience stress and other issues during study while the people who do have those skills
successfully face academic life and take advantage of it.

In the same way, when our emotional skills are not enough, we tend to be impulsive and
we harm our relationships with others in any type of environment we are: school, home or work.
However, people with a better capacity to manage their emotions are able to deal with them in a
daily basis, improving this way the psychological well-being of themselves and the atmosphere.

Now, Coachee, you’d wonder: Is it possible to teach emotional intelligence?

Raise emotional intelligence has become an important task on different areas of life
because the control of emotions is considered essential for the evolutionary and social
development. However, there are many ways to do it, and in our view it is really important for you
to learn this ability, and that’s why you rely on practice, training and development. The best thing
is to exercise and practice the emotional skills and turn them into an individual and natural
response.

We will give you some advice in order to practice your emotional abilities and improve
your emotional intelligence:

1. Talk about your emotions to someone you trust and express each one of it openly.
2. When you feel something and it is hard for you to recognize it, ask yourself: what
caused the feeling? Where it is placed? What do I think when feeling this?
3. Respect your space and others’ space.
4. Be tolerant.

Bibliographic References:
Vivas, M. Gallego, D. González, B. “Educar las Emociones” 2nd edition. Caracas, 2007
(Consultation: January 16, 2018) Available on:
http://www.saber.ula.ve/bitstream/123456789/29662/4/libro_educar_emociones.pdf

Fernández, P. Aranda, D. “La Inteligencia Emocional en la Educación”. Education & Psychology and
Editorial EOS. Spain, 2008. (Consultation: January 16, 2018) Available on:
http://www.habilidadesparaadolescentes.com/archivos/2008_Inteligencia_Emocional_Educacion.
pdf

Extremera, N. Fernández, P. “Inteligencia Emocional en Adolescentes”. Universidad de Málaga,

Laboratorio de Emociones. Spain. (Consultation: January 16, 2018) Available on:
http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1607-40412004000200005

García, D. Serrano, M. “Inteligencia Emocional: autocontrol en adolecentes estudiantes del último

año de secundaria” .Universidad del Zulia. Maracaibo, 2010. (Consultation: January 16, 2018)
Available on: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=90416328008