The Connection Between Resilience and Emotional Intelligence

Resilience is all about coping in difficult situations, adapting to trying circumstances, and weathering the storms of life. This gives us an inward focus when discussing resilience, but we often forget that this means resilience is connected to our emotions and our emotional intelligence.

Following David Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence, we can quickly and easily draw those connections.

Self-Awareness:
Identifying and understanding your identity, strengths, weaknesses, triggers, values, goals, and current emotional state all contribute to self-awareness.

Self-Regulation:
By being aware of your emotional and behavioural responses when under stress, you can develop effective coping strategies, learn to self-regulate your emotions, and build resilience. Self-regulation aids individuals in remaining calm under duress, making rational decisions, and adapting to difficult situations.

Empathy:
Goleman’s model highlights empathy for oneself and emphasizes that resilience can act as social support. However, providing ‘social resilience’ to others requires empathy. Empathy involves understanding and sharing others’ feelings and recognizing and effectively responding to their needs.

Motivation:
Through your emotional intelligence, you can harness your emotions to drive your motivation. When you have empathy for another person, you have some understanding of what motivates them, how they pursue their goals, what excites them, and what makes them tick, meaning that you can help motivate them, too.

Social Skills:
Emotional resilience is also a social skill – no man is an island, after all. Empathy will give you the ability to provide social resilience to other people, but you do that through your social skills. Interpersonal skills, such as communication, active listening, conflict resolution, and collaboration are necessary skills for navigating interpersonal relationships and building support networks.

Understanding ourselves and our emotions helps us self-regulate. When we understand others’ emotional triggers, we can use our social skills to assist them with their self-regulation. This means that everyone can operate at their best, regardless of how difficult or stressful a situation might be.