Last update: October 02, 2016
Emotional competence describes the ability a person has to express their emotions, with total freedom, and derives from emotional intelligence, or the ability to identify the emotions themselves. Emotional competence is a learned trait that determines a person's ability to interact constructively with others.
This personal emotional competence is based on self-knowledge and also encompasses the recognition of individual emotions and how they affect others. It also relies on the ability to maintain emotional control and handle approval. For this purpose, we cannot forget that we must be able to understand our personal emotions, before evaluating the emotions of others.
Social competence
Another individual aspect of emotional competence is social competence - the empathy we are able to feel for others. In this context, we can emphasize social skills, which are important in a work environment and for having successful relationships, such as, for example, the importance of knowing how to manage effective communication and knowing how to manage conflicts.
Thanks to emotional competence, human beings are able to react to personal emotions and those that manifest themselves in others. This ability, in fact, makes us able to react in the right way when someone close to us feels emotions such as anger, fear or pain.
Recognizing personal emotions gives us the ability to respond in the right way to the emotions of others. Nevertheless, without knowing one's emotions, it is difficult to empathize or help another person with hers.
Health problems related to emotional competence
Many experts think that the lack of emotional competence is the cause of various problems such as, for example, a repression of one's emotions. It was demonstrated that internalizing emotions can trigger a deterioration in physical and mental health, as stress levels increase and this can be the cause of dangerous conditions, such as high blood pressure, sudden weight gain or loss, and fatigue.
Suppressing emotions can lead us to suffer from depression and can affect the relationships we have with others, due to an emotional incompetence that triggers a lack of emotional exchange. While there are many emotional problems that can represent a difficulty in emotional competence, emotional intelligence plays an important role in the ability to learn that competence.
For those with mental illnesses or problems that interfere with emotional competence, it is important to foster the development of emotional intelligence as a first step. When a person with this type of problem is able to distinguish one emotion from another, they can also begin to learn how to use those emotions in everyday life..
Cover image courtesy of RubioBuitrago
