Students' readiness

When somebody wants to talk about emotional intelligence, then you have to mention Daniel Goleman. Some people call him "the guru of emotional intelligence". His views on this topic are most applicable to today's western societies. For him, emotional intelligence has 5 main areas:

• Self-Awareness
  
• Self-Management / Management of Emotions
  
• Self-Motivation
  
• Empathy
  
• Handling Relationships

All 5 areas have a significant amount of sub-categories. Since a lot of people have researched and further developed this topic, it became quite comprehensive and complex. Those people wrote entire books about this. Therefore, it is quite unlikely for us to explain this entire topic as part of this online course.

But have a look at the following video. It shows Goleman himself and his perspective on the emotional intelligence.

Regardless of the complexity of emotional intelligence, we would like to explain one of the areas in our own words. Self-Awareness. We are of the opinion that this area is probably most relevant for you at the moment and for this course.

"Self-Awareness is a combination of emotional awareness, accurate self-assessment and self-confidence."

That is a quote that you should print and hang next to your desk as a constant reminder. Basically, this statement means that you have to know yourself, your emotions, your strengths and weaknesses. 

For example, you want to improve your learning habits. That's probably why you are taking this course. In order to know which skills to improve, you have to know which of your skills are actually bad. Or let's say you want to use specific learning techniques. In order to do that efficiently, you have to know where your strengths are and which learning techniques are combinable with your strengths.

The keyword to this whole topic is "reflection". When you can reflect yourself, it makes it much easier to identify weaknesses and work on them. You become more open towards critical feedback.