"Importance Of Emotional Intelligence"

Emotional Intelligence

We usually believe that intelligent people succeed in life. However, according to psychologists, the intelligence, in its place, is undoubtedly important, but the success does not depend solely on intelligence. In fact the success depends on a hidden talent which guides us to lead a successful life and makes us capable of achieving better prospects in life. The social psychologists believe that for an individual, to be intelligent only, is not sufficient, but it is also necessary that his own personality should be such that it may be helpful for best utilization of the intellect.

Also, it is a fact that these two capabilities are present together in very few individuals. Individuals who are capable of controlling their emotions and intellect at the same time, in fact, know the art of remaining happy and successful for long periods of time and simultaneously they execute their virtues on the social attitudes.

Those who possess the capability of controlling their emotions, act according to the circumstances, become famous for their hard work and confidence and gain the trust of others. On the other hand, those who are very enthusiastic, impatient, emotional and unstable regarding their temperament, are usually not only successful, but, due to their obstinacy in their practical life and by implementing their own ideas and desires, soon fall prey to a feeling of deprivation and accept the failure quickly.

Those, who, instead of making haste in achieving their needs, practise patience, as a matter of fact, conquer their emotions by their wisdom. This act is the manifestation of emotional intelligence, by virtue of which, an individual compromizes with even worst circumstances.

Emotional intelligence, in fact, comprizes of qualities such as good attitude, better behaviour with others, civilized habits and decency, patience and sobriety. Therefore it may be accepted that we can make our conduct better and mature, by virtue of the above-mentioned qualities. Besides, these qualities also prove helpful for achieving better relations with others, better performance, successful married life, and higher goals regarding social and economic aspects of life.

Out of us, those who are capable of understanding that what may be the reaction of others in response to any matter, can lead their lives in a better way. Many of us, in states of anger, anxiety, frustration and hardship, do not care that such frank expression of emotions may cast what type of impressions on others who are associated with them. But those who possess the emotional intelligence can exercise self-control in such situations and if there is a need of emotional expression, they do adopt a suitable way for expressing their emotions To express anger, is an easy job, but Aristotle says
‘’ On the right person, at right time and for a right purpose, it is not easy to express anger in a right manner.’’

If we observe ourselves collectively , we would find that we are such a nation which is least capable of expressing emotional intelligence. We do not have the moral courage for accepting realities. Our tendency to fulfil our needs and wishes, over night,, leads us to the indecent and dishonest acts. And we must appreciate that by adopting such undesireable actions, the success and happiness which is achieved is not long lasting. Nothing is achieved except bad reputation and repentance .

We have many shortcomings regarding moral and conduct, because we want our will to be implemented in all matters and do not allow others to have their due rights. We do not attach any importance to the likings or dislikings of others. We do not respect others and do not pay regards to them. We are gradually running short of many virtues as conduct, decency and gentleness.

To find out the faults of others and dig out the secrets about their short comings, has become our favorite past time. We are deceitful, accuse others and are negligent in routine responsibilities. Inspite of doing all this, we, instead of feeling ashamed, about our wrong, indecent and illegal acts, we think that we are on the right path. All this , is a definite proof of our inferior emotional intelligence. Nevertheless , we should remain hopeful, because, according to psychologists, by making firm decisions and practising perseverance , we can improve the emotional intelligence.

Who I Am Makes a Difference

WHO AM I?

A teacher in New York decided to honor each of her seniors in High School by telling them the difference each of them had made. She called each student to the front of the class, one at a time.First, she told each of them how they had made a difference to her, and the class. Then she presented each of them with a blue ribbon, imprinted with gold letters, which read, "Who I Am Makes a Difference."Afterwards, the teacher decided to do a class project, to see what kind of impact recognition would have on a Community.

She gave each of the students three more blue ribbons, and instructed them to go out and spread this acknowledgment ceremony. Then they were to follow up on the results, see who honored whom, and report back to the class in about a week.One of the boys in the class went to a junior executive in a nearby Company, and honored him for helping him with his career planning. He gave him a blue ribbon, and put it on his shirt.

Then he gave him two extra ribbons and said, "We're doing a class project on recognition, and we'd like for you to go out, find somebody to honor, give them a blue ribbon, then give them the extra blue ribbon so they can acknowledge a third person, to keep this acknowledgmentceremony going.

Then please report back to me and tell me what happened."Later that day, the junior executive went in to see his boss,who had been noted, by the way, as being kind of a grouchy fellow.

He sat his boss down, and he told him that he deeply admired him for being a creative genius. The boss seemed very surprised. The junior executive asked him if he would accept the gift of the blue ribbon, and would he give him permission to put it on him. His surprised boss said, "Well, sure." The junior executive took the blue ribbon and placed it right on his boss's jacket, above his heart.As he gave him the last extra ribbon, he said, "Would you take this extra ribbon, and pass it on by honoring somebody else.

The young boy who first gave me the ribbons is doing a project in school, and we want to keep this recognition ceremony going and find out how it affects people."That night, the boss came home to his 14-year-old son, and sat him down. He said, "The most incredible thing happened to me today. I was in my office, and one of the junior executives came in and told me he admired me, and gave me a blue ribbon for being a creative genius. Imagine! He thinks I'm a creative genius! Then he put this blue ribbon that says, "Who I Am Makes a Difference", on my jacket above my heart.

He g ave me an extra ribbon and asked me to findsomebody else to honor. As I was driving home tonight, I started thinking about whom I would honor with this ribbon, and I thought about you. I want to honor you. My days are really hectic and when I come home, I don't pay a lot of attention to you. Sometimes I scream at you for not getting good enough grades in school, and for your bedroom being a mess. But somehow tonight, I just wanted to sit here and, well, just let you know that you do make a difference to me.Besides your mother, you are the most important person in my life. You're a great kid, and I love you!

"The startled boy started to sob and sob, and he couldn't stop crying. His whole body shook. He looked up at his father and said through his tears, "Dad, earlier tonight I sat in my room and wrote a letter to you and Mom, explaining why I had killed myself, and I asked you to forgive me. I was going to commit suicide tonight after you were asleep. I just didn't think that you cared at all. The letter is upstairs. I don't think I need it after all." His father walked upstairs and found a heartfelt letter full of anguish and pain.

The boss went back to work a changed man. He was no longer a grouch, but made sure to let all of his employees know that they made a difference. The junior executive helped several other young people with career planning, and never forgot to let them know that they made a difference in his life......one being the boss' son. And the young boy and his classmates learned a valuable lesson, "Who you are DOES make a difference".

"Fuel Your Emotions"

YOUR CAR TYRE : AFFECTION

Your car rides on tires and is going nowhere without them. Your relationship with your woman rides on affection. You don't leave the tires off your car and just put them on when you want to go somewhere. They are always on and ready to roll. Similarly, affection should always be a part of time spent with the lady in your life. Hugs, gentle pats on the back, an arm around her shoulder, a little kiss on her forehead, holding hands, and saying "I love you" are signs of affection which should be sprinkled liberally throughout the week, using at least one a day. (You may think telling her you love her once, at the beginning of the relationship or marriage, settles that issue from then on. But you can't fill your car's tires just once, and count on them to never go flat, and a smart man knows to tell his woman often that he loves her, before their relationship goes flat.)

As with the necessity to rotate and balance your car's tires, it is also necessary sometimes to vary the routine with your woman. Before the usual goodbye peck on the cheek one morning, try holding her shoulders, looking into her eyes, pausing dramatically and telling her you love her! And any time the ride seems bumpy in your relationship, remember to air up the affection.

ATTENTION IS HER FUEL!Just like a car,NO GAS, NO GO!

"Ways to Affair-Proof Your Marriage"

9 Ways to Affair-Proof Your Marriage

According to Peggy Vaugn, the author of “The Monogamy Myth” and the website “Dear Peggy.com,” 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair at some point in their marriage. In other words, the person who stays monogamous within her marriage is among a growing minority.

Twelve years into my marriage, I can appreciate that statistic. Eric and I are getting to the hard part, where the pressing responsibilities of raising kids and growing two careers could easily blow apart the vows we recited on our wedding day. We look around and recognize the dark circles caused by sleep deprivation on many friends’ faces, the overwhelmed expressions that we wear much of the time.

It’s that time when any escape or relief from a messy house and loud kids sounds all too enticing, when others flock to the arms of another man or woman to experience a sense of excitement and mystery again, an attempt to go back to the days of perfume and lingerie. This is the season of marriage in which both sets of our parents called it quits.

Because I want my marriage to stay on the happy side of the percentage—and knowing my susceptibility toward addiction and all things mood altering—I’ve been reading up on affairs: why they happen, and what you can to do prevent one in your own marriage.

Here are the suggestions I arrived at, both from research and from asking a lot of nosy questions to friends, friends of friends, and the cousins and nephews of those friends.

1. Nurture safe friendships.

This is the most important affair-preventer in my life. No marriage can give you everything. A husband is going to have interests that his wife will never care about like fishing, hunting, golfing. So he’s less likely to stray if he can find some good guy buddies with whom to fish, hunt, and golf.

Early on in our relationship, I realized that Eric was never going to be able to recite the "Hail Mary" or the "Our Father," or be able to tell them apart. He’ll never get excited about faith or depend on it like I do. So I feed my spiritual hunger by having coffee with my religious women friends, and with my safe male friends, the balding fellows over the age of 60: Deacon More, Fr. Joe, and ex-priest Mike Leach (you notice a pattern?).

2. Recognize the drug.

Depressives and addicts are especially prone to affairs because of the head rush that happens with infatuation. The spike in dopamine and norepinephrine we experience upon connecting with someone fools us into thinking that the sexy man or attractive woman at the bar holds the key to our nirvana and the end to our problems. Just like, say, the high from cocaine. Explains Neely Tucker of the "Washington Post":

These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love, a growing amount of research shows, and these chemicals and their cousins start pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain, hopping around the limbic system, setting off craving, obsessive thoughts, focused attention, the desire to commit possibly immoral acts with your beloved while at a stoplight in the 2100 block of K Street during lunch hour, and so on.

Tucker then quotes Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." Says Fisher:

Love is a drug. The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions [when one is in love]. …It's the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine.

3. Keep dating.

You're thinking: "Puh…lese. How many Good Housekeeping articles have you read lately? Next you'll tell us the key to a happy marriage is found in de-cluttering the home together, expounding on a joyful memory from the past each time you empty a drawer." No I won't. But visiting with your spouse with some regularity—just the two of you and no one else--my therapist regularly tells me, reaps some very definite rewards in a marriage. Because by doing so you learn how to TALK to each other. And when the kids are studying for exams at Harvard (hey, I can dream), you will have to TALK a lot, with no teenager with attitude in the middle of the kitchen distracting the two of you.

In her book, “Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic,” Esther Perel argues that there has to be enough “otherness” or separateness in a marriage to keep both partners interested and passionate. Too much merging together, and there is nothing to discover, she says. Perel urges a client to imagine her spouse as if she has just met him, to put him into that mysterious category again. This is really bloody hard when you got a little one screaming, “Wipe me!” from the bathroom. However, when you can pull it off, I find her theory very effective. One way I let Eric become sexy again in my own mind is to walk by the houses he has designed and observe them not as the wife of the architect she wanted home three hours ago, but as a woman fascinated by this man’s skill.

Here are a few rules for date night:

* No kid talk * No eavesdropping * No fighting * No flirting (with other people) * No whining or crying * No flatulence or incontinence * No technology (cellphones, BlackBerries, iPhones, or iPods) * No interrupting * No belching, spitting, or vomiting * No heavy boozing or pot-smoking * No blogging about it * No Christmas sweaters, polyester dresses, or ratty underwear

4. Pray together.

I know how those two words sound, especially together: just like the instructions of a couple leading a Pre-Cana marriage preparation program who told the engaged couples to “hold hands while they fight.” Yeah right. Thanks for the advice.

And, as I said in suggestion number one, Eric isn’t all that jazzed up by religion. So where am I going here?

I’ve had this conversation over and over again in our house: we need to go to church as a family. But last September it stuck because David is now in Kindergarten at St. Mary’s, and the teachers STRONGLY ENCOURAGE families to attend Mass together. As they should. I want to set a good example for our son. I also want him to see his dad sitting with me on the pew. And I do think going to church together gives me extra insurance that all of us are sticking together, even if I’m outside half the time with Katherine screaming “Jesus is poopy!”

I can’t help but think there is some truth to what my high school teacher said about the braid of a marriage: you need God as that third strand to create the beautiful bond between a man and a woman. And that Fr. Peyton really knew what he was talking about when he coined the phrase, “a family that prays together stays together.”

5. Find a creative outlet.

People get lured into emotional and physical affairs because the infatuation provides an exciting, stimulating place where they are energized. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than a lasting marriage. I remember the marriage advice of an ex-priest friend to me awhile back: “There’s a lot to be said for a one-night stand.” He was trying to tell me that when the real relationship gets rough, don’t be fooled into thinking a night of savage sex with a guy you hardly know is what you need.

So you have to find other sources of stimulation and excitement, like writing a blog! I can’t wait to log onto the Internet each day to see what all of my dear Beyond Blue readers have to say. When I get overwhelmed by the domestic chaos of our lives right now, Beyond Blue provides me that outlet where I can create something new, where I can run away, however temporarily, from the stress.

“The desire to give oneself completely and purposefully pursues us always, and has its part in pushing us into more and more distractions, illusory love affairs, or the haven of hospitals and doctors’ offices,” writes Anne Morrow Lindbergh in “Gift From the Sea.” In order to not be torn into pieces by all of life’s distraction—and affairs fit into this category—Lindbergh urges women (and I add men) to seek a creative outlet, something of her own, in which to pour that energy that could so quickly shatter her integrity.

6. Hang out with happy couples.

According to the newest study on obesity, the risk for obesity increased 171 percent among persons with obese friends. The risk only increased 37 percent for persons with an obese spouse, and 40 percent for folks with obese siblings.

That says to me that peer pressure never really goes away, and that your friends influence you more than you think. So if you’re hanging with a bunch of guys (or girls) that see nothing wrong with sleeping around, you are much more likely to do it yourself.

The good news is that the opposite is also true. If you have a set of friends committed to their marriages, you will be less likely to cheat on your spouse. This also means going to happy couples—not cheating couples--for advice. Whenever I need an insight or two regarding my marriage, I go to Mike Leach, my foster dad, who has the happiest marriage of any man I’ve seen (remember, he is an ex-priest).

7. Learn how to fight.

I’m not going to tell you to hold hands, like that woman at the Pre-Cana session. But this good advice did actually come from the couple who facilitated Eric’s and my Pre-Cana (marriage preparation) obligation. They told us to wait before saying something really ugly, and make sure you weren’t tired or hungry, or in a stressful situation.

I’m not saying that you can’t confront your spouse if you’re tired, hungry, or stressed, because then we’d live in a silent world. BUT it’s a good idea to recognize situations that tend to accelerate arguments. For Eric and I that’s two places: in the car (because I’m a nervous passenger, and so is he), and on a sailboat (where we argue about which one of us is a more capable skipper and can better read the wind). Thus, we have given up sailing. Since, you know, we do need to drive places.

8. Be nice and listen.

“Duh,” you’re saying to yourself. But think about it. This is the hardest part about marriage. Listening. Keeping your mouth closed when the other guy is talking. And then, at the appropriate time, saying something like “I’m so sorry you’re feeling that way” as you rub his back, instead of “If you would have done it this way, then you could have prevented that, Butthead.”

In my unofficial study—the feedback I received from the men and women I interrogated about their affairs—the number one reason for pursuing it was this: “She listened to me. I mattered to him.”

9. Remember these tools.

Here are some tools offered to me by those healing from extramarital affairs, insight to keep in mind when you feel that familiar head rush and are tempted to abandon logic for the thrill:

• Don’t go there: meaning don’t put yourself in a threatening situation. Skip the conference in Hawaii with the colleague that flirts with you. If you absolutely have to go, avoid all opportunities to be alone with him.

• You’ve got mail: when you don’t know if your e-mail crosses the line into appropriate language, send it to yourself first. Read it again, and ask yourself: would I feel comfortable showing this to my husband?

• Dress with intentions: one woman told me that she saved her lingerie for her husband, and wore the ratty old underwear to the high-school reunion where she’d see a flame from the past. Remember that scene from "Bridge Jones Diary," where she wears the ugly underwear on purpose to keep her from doing something stupid?

• Talk about your spouse: a guy friend told me that whenever he is alone with a woman he finds attractive and things are getting uncomfortable, he’ll start talking about his wife—what her hobbies are, and how much he loves her. It immediately kills the mood. Along this line, take pictures of your spouse and family. If there is an awkward silence, get the photos out.