What is Emotional Intelligence and How Does it Affect Our Wealth Creation Ability?
We are human beings and emotions play a big part in how we react to the events occurring in our lives. Unfortunately, we cannot control everything that is happening in the world but we can control our reactions to the events that affect us.
Money can be a very emotional thing. If you don’t believe me, just visit a stock exchange market and dispassionately observe people and their behavior. How fear and greed take over our rational thinking, how jealous and angry we can get when it comes to money!
Lack of an emotional intelligence causes internal friction in our minds, which saps our energy to do more productive work. There is an internal dialogue which takes place within our minds continuously. There is strife and irritation in our heads if our internal value system is in conflict with our conscious mind. It is only when both are in tune that there is peace within, and our energy levels explode.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Our emotions emerge from the subconscious. Emotional intelligence accounts for our ability to change unconscious reactions to a conscious response. It means: to perceive and understand emotion, integrate emotion to facilitate thought, and to regulate emotions to promote personal and financial growth.
There is a verse in the Upanishads (sacred Indian text) that states, “If you know a lump of clay then you will know about all the clay in the universe.” This means that if you know and understand your own mind, then you will understand all the minds in the universe. All minds function in a similar manner. All our basic human and emotional needs are the same.
To improve our emotional intelligence, we have to bring more and more of our subconscious into conscious examination. Knowledge of the self is the most important step towards improving our emotional intelligence.
Wealth Creation is 90% psychology and only 10% strategy. We have to make internal changes and adjustments to our thinking process that is governed to a very large extent through our emotions, before we can go out and start making money. Changing our psychological foundations is the difficult part, once that is done, creating wealth is a cakewalk.
When it comes to money our emotions of ‘greed’ and ‘fear’ take over. Either we take irrational actions due to our greed of making quick money or freeze into taking action due fear of losing it all. To create wealth one has to keep emotions in check and take decisions with a detached mind. It takes time, effort and knowledge to develop that mind state.
