Are You Emotionally Successful?

Recent days, every time i meet with friends my age or older, the topics tend to revolve around frustrations. Whether it's in the office or out and about, lots of people confess to being more stressed, mainly due to poor service, poor management and unprofessional attitudes. Yet, most service providers employ graduates who are highly educated everyday.

Is something missing or are we just subject nostalgia? And if truly something is really amiss, who is to blame? Is it parents, teachers or the government? When you look at the education system today, something is not right. They teach children how to pass exams but take no time equipping them for life, decisions-making and creativity. Who said we all have to go to university to become successful? Take a look around you, funny, most of the successful people didn't even graduate and some went back to school after they achieved their life goals.

When teachers fail, are parents doing their part? Increasingly, our modern lifestyle demands that busy mums and dads work from eight to eight. They delegate the role of mentoring their children to the teachers. Who will determine the future of this children?

That is the missing thing, training in emotional intelligence, how to handle situations, make decisions and relate to other people, how to grasp things beyond the spoken words, to take initiatives, to persist, to be consistent, to try until they get it right. This are the things no school has on their curriculum, but are all vital skills, particularly later in life.

Youngsters today are missing emotional intelligence to a larger extent. And as society is changing and evolving, technology age means there is less social interaction. With the increase of gadgets, the younger generation will soon need a special subject called introduction to 'human relations'. Everything today is online and instant.

Could you imagine your life before the mobile phone? We wonder how we used to communicate yet we communicated with penpals in USA, our siblings in other schools and family in the village. Today, if the net is down, you feel lost since you cannot access your mails. You forget your mobile, you have to fetch it and if the battery is down, you are left distraught. Can we blame the kids of today? They don't need to do things face to face and their emotional quotient is suffering as a result.

With everything we do, we can choose how to feel about it. The outcome is dependent on your decision. It can make the difference between a good day and a bad day, and whether a disagreement turns into a huge row or not.This is why i think we need to take full responsibility for the quality of the young generation, by teaching them what matters most: Emotional Intelligence -ability to manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups and less of how academic you are.