Next post: Research: How Mindfulness Concentration and emotional intelligence Cooncentration Performance at Emotiknal. You can achieve this through Concentration and emotional intelligence practice of mindfulness. Concentration is needed to maintain intellect, and emotion is clearly different from concentration as when you are very emotional during sex or crying you cannot concentrate. Much of this behavior is automatic.

Concentration and emotional intelligence -

About Mind Tools Content. Handling harsh or personal criticism calmly and professionally. Taking the Positive From Negative Feedback. Boosting Your People Skills. Learn About the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Way You Like to Lead.

Communicating With Grace and Efficiency. Business Operations and Process Management. Strategy Tools. Customer Service. Business Ethics and Values. Handling Information and Data. Project Management. Knowledge Management. Self-Development and Goal Setting. Time Management. Presentation Skills.

Learning Skills. Career Skills. Communication Skills. Negotiation, Persuasion and Influence. Working With Others. Difficult Conversations. Creativity Tools. Work-Life Balance. Stress Management and Wellbeing. Coaching and Mentoring.

Change Management. Team Management. Managing Conflict. Delegation and Empowerment. Performance Management. Leadership Skills. Developing Your Team. Talent Management. Problem Solving. Decision Making. Key Takeaways Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your emotions, understand what they're telling you, and realize how your emotions affect other people.

There are five elements that define Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Social Skills. Emotionally intelligent people are masters at managing their emotions. The ability to stay calm and in control in difficult situations is highly valued Developing and using your emotional intelligence can be a good way to show others the leader inside of you.

Emotional intelligence can be learned and developed. In his book titled "Emotional Intelligence - Why It Can Matter More Than IQ" , Daniel Goleman , an American psychologist, developed a framework of five elements that define emotional intelligence: Self-Awareness — People with high emotional intelligence are usually very self-aware.

They understand their emotions, and because of this, they don't let their feelings rule them. They're confident — because they trust their intuition and don't let their emotions get out of control.

They're also willing to take an honest look at themselves. They know their strengths and weaknesses, and they work on these areas so they can perform better. Many people believe that this self-awareness is the most important part of emotional intelligence.

Self-Regulation — This is the ability to control emotions and impulses. People who self-regulate typically don't allow themselves to become too angry or jealous, and they don't make impulsive, careless decisions.

They think before they act. Characteristics of self-regulation are thoughtfulness, comfort with change, integrity , and the ability to say no. Motivation — People with a high degree of emotional intelligence are usually motivated.

They're willing to defer immediate results for long-term success. They're highly productive, love a challenge, and are very effective in whatever they do. Empathy — This is perhaps the second-most important element of emotional intelligence. Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the wants, needs, and viewpoints of those around you.

People with empathy are good at recognizing the feelings of others, even when those feelings may not be obvious. As a result, empathetic people are usually excellent at managing relationships , listening , and relating to others. They avoid stereotyping and judging too quickly, and they live their lives in a very open, honest way.

Social Skills — It's usually easy to talk to and like people with good social skills, another sign of high emotional intelligence. Those with strong social skills are typically team players.

Rather than focus on their own success first, they help others develop and shine. They can manage disputes, are excellent communicators, and are masters at building and maintaining relationships. How Do You Become Emotionally Intelligent?

As well as working on your skills in the five areas above, use these strategies: Observe how you react to people. Thankfully, the skills needed to manage emotions in ourselves and others are not innate. With time and practice, they can be learned and developed. And this, in turn, opens up the potential for powerful behavioural change in anyone willing to dedicate themselves to their pursuit of advanced EQ skills.

For leaders looking to improve the performance of themselves and their wider teams, there are three key areas on which to focus. Think of these areas as operating like three lenses through which to apply EQ.

This area of Emotional Intelligence involves equipping leaders with the skills that help them master their moods and deliver consistent behaviour. When leaders have taken the time to master this area of EQ, they are better equipped to maintain their levels of positive, focused energy.

In turn, this results in inspiring people to work at their full potential and generates positive morale. These skills, which include self-awareness and self-management, are actually the fundamental platform for building a successful leadership culture. British media giant Sky is one of the leading examples of the impact of developing advanced inner focus skills.

Its commitment to Emotional Intelligence saw it develop an innovative and creative leadership culture that brought out the best in its staff, helped it to attract and retain talent, and fostered a growth mindset among all its employees.

These are clearly important skills for leaders to possess. If a leader can strengthen their relationship skills and straightforwardness, while at the same time becoming increasingly empathetic to the situation of others around them, they are well placed to create trusting relationships, extraordinary levels of teamwork, and exceptional employee morale.

For those leaders looking to ensure the success of diversity and inclusion within their workplace, and to enhance the capacity of multigenerational teams to work together, these skills are absolutely non-negotiable.

The lake behind the intellect however is more limited, so when you have nothing to think about you resort to feelings. Before modern civilization people were hunter-gatherers and they moved around all the time, and probably thought less.

In modern civilization it is more common for people to think all the time, and move around a lot less. That is a significant change.

People might be more emotional and in touch with their feelings in pre-civilization time when they were exposed to more sensory and physical stimulation.

Physical stimulation is a feeling, you get direct feelings from physical stimulation just as you get direct feelings from external sensory stimulation.

That is, either you are interacting with the world or you are thinking, and if you are interacting with the world you are receiving direct sensory stimulation, which leads directly to feelings. Sometimes intellectual topics lead to feelings, but they rarely lead to deep feelings things like extremely intense arguments might generate deep feelings, and no one can handle those arguments all the time.

Intellect leads to fewer feelings than real sensory input because intellect only leads to thought. How many thoughts can you think of that are more intense than doing the actual thought in real life? I cannot think of any. Real feelings in the brain mostly come from sensory stimulation and emotion, or unconscious thought.

So even though there are complicated thought processes unconsciously going on about the female, it was still sensory stimulation which triggered the emotion. That is, the sensory stimulation lead to no conscious thought that would be related to having a higher intellect.

So that same person could feel all those things even if they had a lower intellect or consciousness conscious mind because the thoughts generated from seeing the female in that instance were unconscious.

You can only think of a few conscious thoughts when the female is seen because you can only think so fast consciously, but you can think much faster unconsciously, and if it occurs unconsciously it is going to lead to emotion, because that is what emotion is, unconscious thought.

This emotional nature of emotion separate from higher order thinking or learning ability is best demonstrated during dreaming, where a person is entirely unconscious and therefore one can see how emotions which are unconscious thoughts function.

Dreams are random, chaotic and rarely make sense — that is a reflection of the nature of emotion itself. Emotion can really be defined then just as complicated confusion, such as exists in dreams, which are almost entirely emotional. Dreams are so out of the ordinary in order to generate more feeling and emotion.

The out of the ordinariness in dreams, however, also makes them less logical and make less sense. Dreams still make sense to some degree, since there are events in them which are at least somewhat real.

So while emotions make some sense, they still make less sense than conscious thought. That is, if you are feeling a lot then are you emotional, and if you are emotional then a lot of stuff is going on in your brain.

More unconscious thinking emotion probably also helps to maintain a more emotionally developed mind, as emotionally developed minds would need to think more about their emotions since they have more of them.

This means that as people get older they would get more unconscious, but more intelligent emotionally. Evidence for the idea that adults learn to separate out emotional events from ordinary ones and emphasize the emotional more comes from studies in autobiographical memory retrieval.

In a study done by Dijkstra and Kaup younger and older adults were tested for autobiographical memory retrieval. Older adults were more likely to selectively retain memories with distinctive characteristics, such as being self-relevant and emotionally intense, particularly when remote memories were involved.

In another study by Charles, Mather and Carstensen the forgettable nature of negative images for older adults was tested. Young, middle-aged and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and after given a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones.

The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. That is, as adults get older and their intellect decreases, this lack of intellect enables them to be more in touch with their emotions and be more capable of selecting the more positive images.

Memory tests R. Zacks, G Radvasky, and L. Hasher show that young adults perform better than older adults when told to remember and forget data. The older adults remembered less than the younger adults when told to remember, and when told to forget data they remembered more than the younger adults.

The results show that younger adults have better control over their minds than older adults. A greater emotional makeup of the older adults is likely a consequence of this. A paper by Einstein and Mcdaniel investigated the ability of old versus younger people to remember to carry out some action in a future time known as prospective memory or PM.

They suggested that different patterns might emerge between situations in which the PM target is triggered by some event e.

In my view that would indicate that the event based tasks were more emotional than the time based ones. That is, the event is a trigger for the old adult to remember the task.

That is, it is something unconscious motivation, emotion which helps them to remember the event. The motivation can be triggered better by the event based task because the motivation comes from the task itself, so they attribute a greater amount of emotion to the recipient s of the task.

Events are simply more emotional than non-events. You think of yourself as primarily conscious, therefore anything unconscious would take away from your consciousness because you can only think about so many things at the same time.

That is, your sense of self is a clear and focused one different from emotion, which is not clear. So since your sense of self is what you think about consciously, you are not going to think of yourself as emotional, you are going to think of yourself as more logical than emotional and if you do call yourself emotional that just means emotional relative to other people.

That shows that emotion is clearly different in nature from higher order logical processes. And that therefore as intellect goes down as people age as adults it is possible and easy for emotion to go up, because it is clearly separate from intellect.

Emotions are chaotic; they permeate all your thoughts and have an affect on them, like a cloud. When someone is emotional it certainly seems like your entire mind is affected.

Some emotions even have physical effects. Concentration is needed to maintain intellect, and emotion is clearly different from concentration as when you are very emotional during sex or crying you cannot concentrate. Emotional intelligence is therefore a sophisticated way of being emotional that animals other than humans might or might not have.

That is, younger adults are wild and they are smart. They would still be considered to be less emotional though since a greater portion of their brain is intellect. Animals other than humans would be considered to be even more emotional than humans because they have almost no intellect.

Emotional is acting instead of thinking, and all animals do is act, not think. They are based off of their higher emotions and their lower emotions.

Sometimes it appears as if they have no emotion, but they are still thinking about things, they still have a memory and they are still using it, processing data and sensory inputs. Those things all cause thought and therefore emotion. How then could someone be called non-emotional?

Many older adults complain about being too occupied, both emotionally and physically. That is better seen in very old people whose brains are decaying, for whom even tiny mental tasks can wear out their mind. That is what animals are like, the experience you get from animals is an emotional one, not an intellectual one.

Therefore animals spend more time being emotional. That is good evidence that as intellect, learning ability and memory decrease it is replaced with emotion. People were already thinking about enough things consciously and unconsciously.

Evidence for the connection between higher amounts of emotion and a lower intellect can be found in test studies done on people with a depressed mood. In a meta-analysis done by Vreeswijk and De Wilde a confirmation of the connection between overgenerality and depression was done.

The depressed patients were less specific in recalling their memory than the non-depressed. Since being emotional is rated by how much proportionally larger the emotional part of your mind is than the intellectual part, older people do get more emotional since intelligence decreases over age.

The lowering of the intellect, however, would make them more in touch with their emotions and capable of greater emotional regulation as evidenced by the study where successively older age groups remembered more and more of the positive images. The only thing that would go down is internal stimulation or thinking which goes down from a lowering of intellect.

As adults age from their IQ Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale declines steadily Kaufman, Reynolds and Mclean The verbal IQ actually stays about the same but it is performance IQ that decreases.

From the postulates in this paper the conclusion would therefore be that verbal IQ is somehow related to emotions. Performance IQ is clearly not related to emotions because it tests mostly visual abilities. You cannot control how effective you are doing visual stuff, however because it requires concentration to visualize objects because there is less motivation to visualize then there is to just think.

Thinking is easier than visualizing because people are used to thinking about anything, however they usually only visualize things they want to visualize, not things that are going to be tested on the IQ exam.

That is, you can use emotion to control thought but you cannot use emotion to control your basic intelligence as would be reflected in visual ability tests performance IQ.

Kendra Cherry, MS, is Organic green tea inteligence rehabilitation Preventing digestive diseases, psychology educator, and anx of the "Everything Psychology Book. Emohional Lehman, MS, Concentratioh a healthcare journalist and intelligenve checker. She intelligwnce Concentration and emotional intelligence two books for Effective antibacterial agents popular Dummies Series as Shereen Jegtvig. Emotional intelligence AKA EI or EQ for "emotional quotient" is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively. This ability to express and control emotions is essential, but so is the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others. Some experts suggest that emotional intelligence is more important than IQ for success in life.