Role Of Emotional Intelligence In Nursing

Emotional Intelligence in the Nursing Profession

The nursing profession demands that the nurse, in the process of care, has to interact with the patients, the medical fraternity and the health care workers constantly. Hence, “Nurse-Patient Interaction” is the pulse of nursing practice. This interaction is not just conversation. It is a complex process that involves nurse perception, understanding of the patient’s emotions and utilization of the perceptions to manage patient situations towards the goal of effective patient care. The concept of emotional intelligence has grown in popularity among nurses over the last two decades, generating interest both at a social and a professional level. Today, patient care not only includes quality medical

Emotional competencies are not innate talents, but rather learned capabilities that must be worked on and can be developed to achieve outstanding performance. Goleman posits that individuals are born with a general emotional intelligence that determines their potential for learning emotional competencies. Our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning practical skills that are based on its five elements: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships. Our emotional competence shows how much of that potential we have translated into on-the-job capabilities. For instance, being good at serving serving customers is an emotional competence based on empathy. Likewise, trustworthiness is a competence based on self-regulation, or

Both customer service and trust worthiness are competencies that can make people outstanding in their work. Simply being high in emotional intelligence does not guarantee a person will have learned the emotional competencies that matter for work; it means only that they have excellent potential to learn them. A person might be highly empathic, for example, and yet not have learned the skills based on empathy that translate into superior customer service, top-flight coaching or mentoring, or the ability to bring together a diverse work team. The parallel in music would be someone with perfect pitch, say, who also had lesson in singing, and so became a superb operatic tenor. Emotional competencies cluster into groups, each based on a common underlying emotional intelligence capacity. The underlying emotional intelligence capacities are vital if people are able to successfully learn the competencies necessary to succeed in the workplace. If they are deficient in social skills, for instance, they will be hopeless at persuading or inspiring others, at leading teams or catalyzing change. If they have little self-awareness, they will be oblivious to their own weakness and lack the self-confidence that comes from certainty about their strengths. There are five dimensions of emotional intelligence and the twenty-five emotional competencies. None of us is perfect on this scale; we inevitably have a profit of strengths and limits. But, as we shall see, the