Emotional Intelligence in the Digital Age

The digital age is defined as: the time period starting in the 1970s with the introduction of the personal computer with subsequent technology introduced providing the ability to transfer information freely and quickly.

The emotional nature of the information that constantly comes at us, whether we are accessing it ourselves or it is fed to us directly, travels the spectrum of emotional wellness. News is seemingly focused on so many ‘bad’ things, individuals can easily hide behind their social activity amplifying cruelty, cyberbullying is rampant for our children. The need for emotional intelligence has never been greater, especially the foundation of EI –

Self-Perception

Self-Perception determines how in touch you are with your feelings, how good you feel about yourself (self-assuredness), and what you’re doing in life. Success means you are aware of your feelings, feel strong, and have confidence in pursuing your life goals.

Self-Perception consists of 3 skills:

1. Self-regard
2. Self-actualization
3. Emotional Self-awareness

Self-Regard

• Respecting and accepting oneself, knowing your strengths and weaknesses and appreciating them
• General feelings of self-assuredness, self-confidence, self-adequacy, inner strength and security
• Able to openly and appropriately acknowledge mistakes

Self-Actualization

• Realizing your potential by becoming involved in pursuits that lead to a meaningful, purpose-driven, and full life
• Lifelong pursuit toward mastery and excellence of your talents and abilities; general improvement of yourself
• Self-satisfaction and pleasure toward all life goals; personal, work, community, education, financial

Emotional Self-Awareness

• Recognition of your feelings
• Able to differentiate between your emotions
• Know why you are experiencing an emotion and its impact on you and others around you

A developed and balanced emotional quotient, beginning with understanding myself, allows me to better express myself to the outside world. This leads to healthier interactions with other people, allowing for better decision making. When good decisions are made, my stress is managed more effectively which leads to understanding my emotions better…and so on the circle of the EQi-2.0 model.

The digital age has the power to derail us quickly and easily. We can see the unhealthy epidemic with our children (however not just children), whose exposure and accessibility to social media and information has resulted in a rise in cyber-bullying before their emotional intelligence is developed enough to (1) know how to handle this and (2) decide to not be part of it.

Developing your emotional quotient in the Self-perception realm will arm you with the foundation to handle what is usually experienced in the information age – information!

Whether we seek it out or it comes to us without our efforts, whether it is healthy and good in its intention or cruel and damaging. A developed self-perception realm arms us with the emotional skill set to take care of ourselves so that we can then properly take care of others.

When one maintains a well-developed self-awareness, under all 3 skills mentioned here, one is not just able to handle the conflict that can come from negative information, one behaves in a way that avoids contributing to that. When I am confident, self-assured, respectful of myself, I am then able to behave that way to the outside world.