A Brief look at Emotional Intelligence for Educators

Components of emotional intelligence include self-awareness, emotional-regulation, and self-regulation. These are important qualities for educators to have when working with students, especially trauma affected at-risk youth. When dealing with loss of classroom authority or a resistant student, educators must be fully aware of emotional effect and understand the level of influence feelings are having before a reaction or corrective action is taken. Educators must also understand that suppression of the emotion without proper regulation or commitment to an alternative perspective and reasoning will affect their mental health, wellbeing, and job performance. 

People who have good emotional health are aware of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They’ve learned healthy ways to cope with and address stress and emotional impacts. Nonetheless, when feelings and emotions arise, people don’t always stop and define them, or reflect on their impact. Emotional Intelligence aids in the process of decipher feelings and emotions and distributing favorable and effective actions or reactions.  

Although emotional intelligence is different from general or common intelligence; emotional intelligence and general intelligence work in accordance with each other. Emotional intelligence provides the ability to identify, evaluate, control and express one’s own emotions, as well as, perceive and assess the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence uses emotions to facilitate thinking for the understanding of emotional meanings. General intelligence provides the ability to acquire knowledge and understanding, and apply the information to skills. It also filters irrelevant information for logical reasoning. Reasoning from general intelligence is influenced by the facilitation level of emotional intelligence for reaction to conflicting situations. Emotional intelligence provides a perspective for the emotional meaning of a situation, while general intelligence assesses and chooses from various perspectives and provides the reasons for making the choice. 

So, what does this process look like?

The conscious control of emotions is the foundation for a high level of emotional intelligence ability which will assist in the usage of self-awareness, emotional regulation, and self-regulation components. These components are critical in determining the level of capacity for one’s emotional intelligence state. All three components work with each other. Self-awareness will recognize change in emotional state and bring notice to activate emotional regulation. Emotional-regulation will evaluate and modify the unconscious and conscious activity of mood and feeling to control the arousal of the emotional state and filter out the suppression of the unfavorable emotion in efforts to avoid ego depletion. During self-regulation information available through self-awareness brings attention to self, thus enabling the development of cognitive strategies to control unfavorable emotions. The key to this process is self-awareness. After self awareness is activated the process will take care of itself and provide self with the opportunity to control influencing factors of arousal displeasures. 

An educator’s job performance is related to their emotional intelligence. Not only do emotions exercise an influence over an educator’s work; aspects of their work also influence their emotions. An educator’s emotional intelligence ability will determine the quality of effectiveness, and quantity of conflict, within their working relationship. 

Find your Emotional Intelligence and Level Up!