Emotional Intelligence and personal success: how are they related?

A concept that has become popular in recent decades —not only in the academic field, but also in society in general— is that of emotional intelligence.. By such we understand the ability to recognize and understand emotions, both our own and others, in order to regulate the responses that we could give in our interpersonal relationships.

In this sense, we could argue that emotional intelligence has a double dimension. On the one hand, it is oriented towards the intrapersonal plane, since it alludes to our abilities to supervise our own feelings and emotions to later be able to act in line with what we think and sorry. However, emotional intelligence emphasizes the ability to notice these states in others with the aim of relating in a more adaptive way with respect to the environment.

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Does Emotional Intelligence lead to success?

Although the concept is increasingly accepted by society, in the academic field it has not been free of criticism. (The same thing that happens with a large part of the theoretical constructs that are elaborated to infer what happens inside the mind human); but this does not mean that even so there is evidence in favor of

emotional intelligence could be predictive of certain extremely important variables to live a full life, which make up what we consider personal success, the theme that we will develop in this article.

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The different forms of intelligence

To understand this issue in greater detail, it is important to note that the furor around emotional intelligence is due to the fact that it allowed a departure from the traditional conception of intelligence. Broadly speaking, the latter argues that intelligence implies the score obtained in certain psychometric tests capable of evaluating high-order psychological functions such as problem solving issues. For its part, emotional intelligence conceives that an intelligent person would be able to identify and regulate their own emotional states as well also compare them with those of others, adding a new dimension of analysis regarding this topic (although it is true that previously other authors already they had pointed out the limits of intelligence understood only as reasoning, as Gardner maintained in his development regarding intelligences multiple).

Yes indeed, This does not mean that certain tests or traditional psychometric tests such as intelligence quotient (IQ) have become obsolete.. In fact, they are often used even today since they are standardized tests that allow predicting factors such as professional performance and academic performance. However, as we anticipated at the beginning, in this task emotional intelligence has also found evidence in favor.

david goleman, the author who popularized this construct, noted that "emotional skills are more important for job success than intellect and technical knowledge," and that a person with an average IQ could be successful if he had emotional intelligence above average. half. Next, we will present the findings of some investigations that studied whether there really is a relationship between emotional intelligence and success, as Goleman supposed.

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Is there a relationship between emotional intelligence and personal success?

In order to answer this question, it would first be necessary to determine what we understand by personal success. As it is a term whose meaning falls on the subjectivity of each person, it is difficult for we can find research that studies the direct relationship between this concept and intelligence emotional. However, we can dissect it. Success can involve many things: cultivating a purpose, reaching professional achievements, having high satisfaction and quality of life, taking care of physical and mental health... are just some of the many dimensions that success could encompass staff.

Take, for example, professional achievements as one of the factors of personal success. The literature on this is extensive. Some research has found that there is a statistically significant relationship between high emotional intelligence scores and greater odds of performing a job better. In fact, this hypothesis was widely corroborated. Other hypotheses that were partially supported by empirical evidence were that emotional intelligence could contribute to predicting the leadership of a person, and that, in addition, its contribution as a predictive factor of leadership would be greater than that of competencies of the type intellectual. In other words, we could argue that developing emotional intelligence skills—such as the ability to bond with others understanding their emotional states, being empathetic, communicating assertively, among others—would be of great importance to achieve success labor.

For many other people, however, success does not mean reaching significant goals in the workplace or achieving great things. academic (regarding the latter, by the way, many studies have been carried out with secondary and university students that found Significant relationships between deficiencies related to emotional intelligence and low academic performance, drug use and behaviors disruptive). Contrary to our entrenched notion of "success," many people tend to associate success with high life satisfaction. Well, the results indicate that people with higher levels of emotional intelligence tend to consider themselves more satisfied with their own lives, as well as present greater self-esteem. As if this were not enough, the fact that a person scores high on the emotional intelligence variable is related to lower levels of anxiety and depression.

In light of the exposed findings, we could support the idea that the development of emotional intelligence abilities is related not only to the notion of success in terms of achieving achievements at work or having a good academic performance, but also with success linked to variables of psychological well-being in general.