The nature of a person or his innate qualities could be understood through his emotions. If you try to hurt a person, he may burst out in anger, and we can say that he is expressing his emotions through anger. It may also be that when you try to hurt a girl or a woman she may start crying instead of getting angry. So, how a person reacts will depend on his state of emotions. With the two examples above, it is quite clear that two different people may show their emotions in two different ways for the same situation. But if a person is emotionally intelligent he may not react in both ways, as mentioned above, and may keep his calm even when someone hurts him, unless it goes too far.

To give you another example, someone may not even react for winning a lottery while others may just go and announce the whole world about it. So, we can say, different people, exhibit different emotions for the same achievement. But when you start looking at your own emotions for self-improvement then you are using your emotional intelligence. Basically, it boils down to be self-aware. Many people react instantly, in a negative way, without being self-aware of what they are doing or saying, and such people are given the tag of not being emotionally intelligent.

There are many ways a person could be harmful to himself or others if he is not emotionally intelligent. Many a time, the employees are unnecessarily losing their job positions due to lack of emotional intelligence in them or their bosses. First, you do wrong, then you argue that you haven’t done it though all the evidence is against you, it’s a sign that you lack emotional intelligence. You are letting your ego to overpower your emotional intelligence. Or, your ego is covering your self-awareness as self-awareness is our true self-soul and it’s different from ego. An emotionally intelligent person would, instead, apologize for his mistakes in such a situation. Similarly, a boss lacks emotional intelligence if he is asking for a resignation from his employee without being properly investigating into the matter for which the employee was declared the culprit without any proper reason.

According to a report published by World Economic Forum, emotional intelligence will be among the top 10 job skills by 2020. This is due to the fact that self- awareness is so important that without it, it would be hard for people to survive in this competitive world. The companies would prefer only those workers who have that higher levels of emotional intelligence in them. Emotionally intelligent people understand or know how to manage their own emotions. And they also know to read emotions in others. Employers, nowadays, are getting smarter enough to test through job interview questions if the candidates are equipped with emotional intelligence or not. Infect emotional intelligence will be a necessity for literally everything you will want to achieve in life.

Now the question is how to develop emotional intelligence?

Meditation could be one of the best ways to develop emotional intelligence as meditation is all about going within oneself to enhance our true self. I talked about true self earlier in this article. Your soul is actually your true self which is detached from all the bad you can think of, for example, greed, lust, ego, sex, dominance, depression, anger, etc. Different people adopt different methods of meditation to go deeper into their true self. Some people even introspect, to find out ‘what is wrong with them? That is also a kind of meditation.

Another good way of meditation is to look at your thoughts and emotions by closing your eyes. The gap between two successive thoughts is your present or true self. It doesn’t matter what method of meditation you are adopting, but this gap between two successive thoughts should widen, by practicing meditation, for you to ascend in emotional intelligence. When your emotions take you to the past you become left-sided. On the other hand, you become a right-sided personality when you become emotionally over-active and futuristic. Going to the left will make you depressive while going to the right will make you aggressive. If you are doing the meditation properly it should bring you to the center which is the present, your true self. So that is how meditation helps in developing your emotional intelligence by bringing you in the balanced state where you live in present.