"Emotional Intelligence is the ability to make your emotions work for you instead of against you". Do you…

Question

"Emotional Intelligence is the ability to make your emotions work for you instead of against you". Do you agree with this view? Discuss.

Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Emotional intelligence largely does make emotions work for a person, turning anger into resolve, empathy into service and fear into composure, but the view ignores others' emotions and the risk of manipulation. Gandhi converted his 1893 Pietermaritzburg humiliation into decades of non-violent struggle.

**Introduction**

When the SLV-3 failed in 1979, ISRO chairman Satish Dhawan faced the press himself and later let Kalam take credit for the 1980 success: emotion turned into trust. Goleman (1995) defined emotional intelligence (EI) as perceiving, understanding and regulating one's own and others' emotions.

**How EI Makes Emotions Work for You**

SKETCH: flow | Turning Emotion into Action
- Feel the trigger
- Name the emotion
- Pause before reacting
- Reappraise the situation
- Choose the response

1. **Early warning**: Self-awareness catches rising anger or fear before it acts, preventing an **Emotional Hijack**, where impulse overrides reason.
2. **Anger as resolve**: Gandhi channelled the humiliation of being thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg in 1893 into decades of non-violent struggle.
3. **Empathy as drive**: Armstrong Pame turned villagers' hardship into the 100 km "People's Road" in Manipur in 2012.
4. **Calm in crisis**: Odisha's officials evacuated over a million people before Cyclone Fani in 2019 and kept deaths low.

**Where the View Falls Short**

1. **Others, not only self**: Empathy and social skill concern other people's emotions, which the definition leaves out.
2. **Risk of manipulation**: Hitler's oratory read Germany's post-1918 humiliation and turned it into hatred, so EI without values becomes manipulation.
3. **Moral signals**: Guilt and outrage at injustice are conscience speaking, and EI should heed them rather than suppress them for convenience.

**Conclusion**

I agree with the view at its core: EI turns emotion from master into servant. Yet it is incomplete, because EI also means reading others and serving ethical ends; that discernment, anchored in integrity and empathy, is what a civil servant needs.

"Emotional Intelligence is the ability to make your emotions work for you instead of against you". Do you agree with this view? Discuss.

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