Popular Misconception About Emotional Intelligence

The first time I heard about Emotional Intelligence, I felt it was way too polished. Like, taking a basic thing and giving it a complex name to serve whatever purpose.

Because I believed that being human and making even the littlest attempt to be courteous was all we needed to get by. That it was not an issue of intelligence, but an unwillingness to do the right thing, thereby making Emotional Intelligence a misnomer, or the way I said it, “Everything just get big name for this our woke generation.”

Turns out, I was wrong.

On the last day of camp, we had our bags packed up as early as 4 am. We weren’t to leave them in our rooms because, as they said, things could get missing. Some carried theirs to the lecture hall, but that wasn’t an option for me, seeing as I still had functions as a committee member.

So I followed the new friend that I had just made to the mosque. I didn’t go to the church because there were way too many people there already. It would be easier sorting through the bags if I left them at the mosque, and since yaro said it was okay, we went on.

I gave him my bags to keep. The intention was that he would help me get them out later. But when I returned much later, people were crowded outside the mosque. Turns out many others had come to drop their bags as well. Yaro wasn’t there.

They opened the mosque and said we could go in one after the other. One rule though, was that we had to leave our shoes outside. I went in, got mine, and stepped out.

This one guy tried going in with his jungle boots on. He was called back to remove them. If it were a simple case of ignorance or a mistake, he would have just stepped back, apologized, and done as required. But instead, he said, “See my bag for here, make I just collect am.” Maybe he thought, since he would just go in and come out, it would be okay. Of course, they flipped it on him.

But I thought there was a certain innocence in his voice, the kind that only ignorance avails you. Not ignorant of the practice, but ignorant of how fragile it is. And I remember thinking, how does an educated person not know that this is not a smart thing to do?

You can not answer this question without defining Emotional Intelligence.