Emotional Intelligence Essay

How would you explain the concept of Emotional intelligence to another person?

Emotional Intelligence (EI) was a tentative proposal that ‘some individuals possess the ability to validly reason about emotions and use them to enhance thought more effectively than others.’ (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso, 2008 p. 153) when it was introduced in 1990. It was for two books by Goleman: Emotional Intelligence (1995) and Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998) to draw public's enormous attention to EI. Since then, EI has become phenomenal in wider disciplines with various approaches including profit-oriented business, resulting in forming an industry targeting at personal development, group management etc. In particular, EI armed with measurable device known as EQ has established as a sensational alternative against traditional General Intelligence IQ. The public seemed to be fascinated by some hypotheses or unidentified myths that people in higher management have better EQ, so as to it will bring people a successful future by developing EQ, which could not be done with IQ (Strickland, 2000). This dramatic debut of EI attracts much attention from healthcare sector including nursing in terms of emotional work dealing with patients with drastic emotional changes.

Many researchers in Nursing have paid great attention to explore the implication of EI and relation between EI and Nursing (Freshwater & Stickley 2004, McQueen 2004, Bulmer, Profetto-McGrath & Cummings 2009, Bailey, Murphy & Porock 2011). Like many other concepts, the concept of EI is being changed and constantly challenged by researcher. While many followers of EI suggest that EI may be included within nursing education, some researchers are quite negative against the original ...

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...s, and be able to address all possible emotional reactions. (3) Motivation is to pursue goals despite obstacles and setbacks and strive to improve or meet a standard of excellence. (4) Empathy is to correctly recognize emotions of patients and their possible effects and take an active interest in their concerns. 5) Handling relationship is to wield effective tactics for persuasion and sense what patients need in order to develop and bolster their abilities and also understand a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.

As we discussed in a very basic comparative way, EI is an important and useful concept and tool for many aspects of nursing process and performance. It is also important to remember that in order to adopt EI concept to nursing, we have to understand the limit of EI intervention and develop concepts and models of EI for nursing profession.