Summary

In this chapter, we covered why emotional intelligence is important for IT professionals, Salovey and Mayor's emotional intelligence model, the main difference between emotions and feelings, the five universal emotions common to all cultures. Therefore, you have learned that tech companies are already using EI skills to build collaborative leaderships that create impact through people, increase global sales, providing managers with a skill set to help them connect to people and lead with success and even develop tools to help social media users be more empathetic in their online communications, and thus combat cyber bullying.

You have learned that according to the Salovey and Mayor's model, emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions. You learned that these four branches of emotional intelligence work together, what they are and how to enhance them.

You learned what emotions and feelings are and the difference between them. Emotions and feelings are two entirely different brain processes, but we need feelings to control emotion.

You have learned that all humans, no matter where or how they are raised, have in common five universal emotions—anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness.

You have learned that each of the five universal emotions has several states depending on the intensity of the emotion and that each state of the emotion is correlated with specific actions that can have a constructive or destructive outcome on your life. You now understand the most common emotional triggers of each emotion and whether they are universal triggers or learned triggers and also learned how secondary and tertiary emotions radiate from the core emotions according to Paul Ekman and Robert Plutchik.

In the next chapter, you will learn the basics of neuroscience behind the most important competencies of emotional intelligence. You will know how the brain processes our emotional data, understands the role of emotions in self-awareness, self-control, change in behavior and defeating thoughts, manages stress, improves decision-making, builds strong and meaningful relationships. You cannot master the emotional intelligence competencies without mastering the basic knowledge behind it.