How Travel Can Cultivate Your Emotional Intelligence?

How Travel Can Cultivate Your Emotional Intelligence?

What is IQ?

Emotional Intelligence or EQ is the new big. It indicates your “ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups.” (Source: Wikipedia). Your success depends on the people skills: your personality, ability to communicate, negotiate and lead.

Daniel Goleman, a renowned author, and expert on Emotional Intelligence identifies five components of EQ: self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, empathy and social skills.

1. Self-awareness: the ability to recognize and understand personal moods and emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others. Traits of self-awareness include self-confidence, realistic self-assessment, and a self-deprecating sense of humor.
2. Self-regulation: the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods, and the propensity to suspend judgment and to think before acting. Traits include trustworthiness and integrity; comfort with ambiguity; and openness to change.
3. Internal motivation: a passion for working for internal reasons that go beyond external reward.
4. Empathy: the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people. Traits include expertise in building and retaining talent, cross-cultural sensitivity, and service to clients and customers.
5. Social skills: the ability to manage relationships and building networks, and ability to find common ground and build rapport.

(Source: Sonoma University)

Ten years ago, I got a reality check when I first read Goleman book “Emotional Intelligent: Why it can matter more than IQ.” I found that I had low EQ, and at the time I had also lost my ability to apply IQ to do anything useful.

Low EQ and useless IQ, what the heck would I do then?

With whatever remaining EQ I still had, I felt that I should travel. I did exactly that. And I moved away, and my life changed.

How can you develop Emotional Intelligence from Roaming the world?

Self-awareness
Often during your travel, you begin to discover things about yourself that you might not know. As you experience new environments, you meet new beliefs and values that either align or contradict your own causing you to do some self-examination. You become more aware of your emotions, feelings and behaviors and how they play out in unfamiliar places.

Self-regulation
Traveling to new places and exposing to new cultures bring not only positive but also negative emotions. Messiness and rubber-band timing replace efficiency, and punctuality or vice versa. Silence and space turn into noise and crowd. Your brain is habitual by default, and it is challenging for it to get used to the many and different practices in the new society. The change can bring discomfort, stress, or even fear. But you will learn to regulate your emotions and accept the changes.

Social skills
This point is a no brainer. When you go to a place where you don’t know anything or anyone unless you set out to be a hermit, you will be more or less social. Think about it, what does it mean to have social skills if not the skills required to be social and to act in a social situation? You are good at math because you practice and do a lot of math homework not because you were born a mathematical genius. You sit in class learning boring formulas thus acquire the skills to do the math. You run, swim, and paint to get better at running, swimming and painting. Using the same logic, to acquire social skills, the simplest thing to do is to become social.
Being in a foreign place requires you to reach out and interact with people, the very first step to being social. When you do it often enough, you start to lose the self-consciousness often besieging you at home.

Empathy
You come across people who are different from you, sometimes strikingly different. You can not force them to adapt to your familiar ways of thinkings and habits. Since you’re in their territory, you’re more accepting they way they are. Even when your brain resists, you become more or less aware of something new happening and gain new perspectives. You can understand others’ point of views and their perception of the world. Perhaps you can even walk a mile in their shoes. Now this is a good catch because if you can’t experience their thoughts and feelings, at least you will have a FREE pair of shoes and will be already a mile away from them.  Freebie is always cool,  especially if you’re a budget traveler.

Internal Motivation
Unless you’re competing for the Amazing Grace, a TV series where people compete and travel around the world for a prize, or you move to a new country or a new state as required by the job, chances are you travel for the sake of travel. You crave a good adventure. You want to seek new experiences. You want to understand things. It’s cool at first to brag to your friends and family that “I’ve been there” and “I’ve done that.” After a while, you don’t care as much because nobody cares where you have been. You don’t do this to earn a bragging right nor approval from other people. You do it for yourself.

The next time you roll your luggage out of the main door, remember to ask “How can I improve my EQ?”