Emotional Intelligence is an awareness of who you are in the world.

More and more companies recognize that encouraging emotional intelligence competencies is a vital component of the organization’s philosophy and how well it contends in today’s market. Being aware of yourself, how you feel, think and behave, is critically important and often makes the difference between an average worker and a star. Companies are always in search of a star, either at the point of hire or over time as the employee matures. Self awareness is a hallmark of a star, and it is something that can be learned. It can be taught or enhanced through various exercises. As a beginning, you can simply identify the range of feelings you have throughout a day or over an hour. Then recognize how your actions are impacted by these feelings, both immediately and over the long run. For most of us, our behavior is altered, even if only slightly, by our feelings. The more aware you become of your feelings, the more conscious you are of your actions. Feelings and behaviors both impact productivity but more importantly, they impact interactions and relationships with others.

Emotional Intelligence is a measure of how you react and respond to others.

If you see yourself as calm and easy-going, for instance, and others see you as calculating and driven, this discrepancy warrants attention. Are you seeing yourself accurately? What specifically lends itself to your ‘calm and easy-going’ assessment? What are others using in their understanding of you as driven? All of these questions are important to ask and answer. The questions themselves help fine tune your interior experience and match it to how the world around you views what you say and do—and how you say and do it. This leads to better regulation of your emotions—a greater range of expression and how you choose to show your feelings.

Choosing how to respond to a feeling is a sign of Emotional Intelligence.

All mammals have the gift of being able to experience feelings. How to express, react, or respond to a feeling is a capacity only afforded to human mammals, but it takes practice to do it well. The sensation of being overtaken by a feeling is a common experience for most of us. Our brains are literally hard-wired to emotionally react with hair-trigger speed, and if we witnessed this kind of emotional response when we were young, for example, we are likely to have copied it more than a few times. The more we repeat a behavior or way of responding, the more engrained—almost natural—this response becomes. Then, without even thinking about it, we jump to a response or reaction again and again and again. We become known for it. Developing a new level of emotional intelligence in which old patterns are surrendered and new ones are formed is do-able—it just takes practice. Over time, you can reach of point where you are making choices about how you respond to a given feeling.

There are over 20 competencies to Emotional Intelligence.

The Harvard Business Review (Nov/Dec 1998) did an interview with Daniel Goleman, entitled What Makes a Leader. In it Goleman has this to say about how to bring emotional intelligence into business:

"Organizations must refocus their training to include the emotional systems. They must help people break old behavioral habits and establish new ones... It’s important to emphasize that building one’s emotional intelligence cannot—will not—happen without sincere desire and concerted effort. A brief seminar won't help. It is much harder to learn to empathize than it is to become adept at regression analysis. But it can be done."

A Model of Change: Shaping Flexible, Adaptable Workers and Engaging a New Model of Intelligence and Developing Self-Aware Leaders.