MISI '10: Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is how you look at an emotion and how you perceive it.

It is the innate potential to feel, use, communicate, recognize, remember, describe, identify, learn from, manage, understand and explain emotions.

Its involves;
MASLOW’s HEIRARCHY OF HUMAN NEEDS

HOWARD GARDNER’s MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCE
1. Spiritual Intelligence
2. Emotional Intelligence
3. Intellectual Intelligence
4. Physical Intelligence


And, Emotional Intelligence is the ability of;
1. Emotional identification, perception and expression
• The ability to perceive and identify emotions in faces, tone of voice, body language
• The capacity for self-awareness: being aware of your own feelings as they are occurring
• The capacity for emotional literacy. Being able to label specific feelings in yourself and others; being able to discuss emotions and communicate clearly and directly.


2. Emotional facilitation of thought
• The ability to incorporate feelings into analysis, reasoning, problem solving and decision making
• The potential of your feelings to guide you to what is important to think about


3. Emotional understanding
• The ability to solve emotional problems
• The ability to identify and understand the inter-relationships beween emotions, thoughts and behavior. For example, to see cause and effect relationships such as how thoughts can affect emotions or how emotions can affect thoughts, and how your emotions can lead to the behavior in yourself and others.
• The ability to understand the value of emotions to the survival of the species


4. Emotional management
• The ability to take responsibility for one's own emotions and happiness
• The ability to turn negative emotions into positive learning and growing opportunities
• The ability to help others identify and benefit from their emotions


In addition to this, to be emotionally intelligent, one must also be emotionally honest, develop his emotional awareness and use his emotional literacy to the fullest.

Emotional awareness means knowing when feelings are present in ourselves and others.

Increasing your awareness of your own feelings is perhaps the first step towards furthering the development of your Emotional Intelligence.


And these are the level of emotional awareness;
1) Knowing the feeling is present
2) Acknowledging the feeling
3) Identifying the feeling
4) Accepting the feeling
5) Reflecting on the feeling
6) Forecasting feelings

To raise awareness of feelings, it helps to ask two questions when someone says something:
1) How is that person feeling?
2) How did they want the other person to feel?

And also, one of the first steps to developing our emotional intelligence is to improve our emotional literacy which means, the ability to express feelings with specific feeling words.

The purpose for developing our emotional literacy is to precisely identify and communicate our feelings. We must know how we feel in order to be able to fill our emotional needs. And we must communicate our feelings in order to get the emotional support and understanding we need from others, as well as to show our emotional support and understanding to them.

Often, it is socially unacceptable to directly express certain emotions, So instead of truthfully expressing our feelings clearly and directly, we express the same emotions indirectly, either through our actions or our body language. Sometimes we actually outright lie about our feelings. When we start to hide our feelings, lie about them, or tell people only what we think they want to hear, we impede communication, distort reality, fight evolutionary intelligence and dishonour nature.

Thus, to do this, we must practice emotional honesty.
It takes emotional awareness, self-confidence, even courage to be emotionally honest. This emotional awareness is related to our emotional intelligence. It is our emotional intelligence, combined with the necessary learning, practice and experience, which gives us the ability to accurately identify our feelings
This is because, in many ways, society teaches us to ignore, repress, deny and lie about our feelings. For example, when asked how we feel, most of us will reply "fine" or "good," even if that is not true. Often, people will also say that they are not angry or not defensive, when it is obvious that they do feel offended.

As a conclusion, being emotionally intelligence is important because “people may not remember what you did for them, or even what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel”. The emotions that you are feeling inside you are the emotion that you allow yourself to feel. Thus, a good ‘daie’ must learn how to control and use his emotions to benefits him. He must be emotionally intelligent in managing his roles as the khalifah of Islam He must be a ‘qudwah hasanah’ to the people around him. And he must also possess good communication skills which involves being emotionally intelligent to attract people surrounding him to Islam.

Delivered by:

Dr Harlina Halizah Hj Siraj

(Vice Presiden of Jemaah Islah Malaysia)

15th of June 2010 in MISI 2010

Reported by:

Nadhirah Abdul Rahman

as at 2nd of July 2010 for Karisma Daerah Gombak