Emotional intelligence is something that I highly regard in a person. It’s basically the capability to recognize not only your own feelings but more importantly the feelings of others. Having emotional intelligence gives you the ability to empathize with people, without the need to have experienced what they went through, but knowing how they feel and understanding. This is something that I always strive to include in my daily life. 

 “Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.” It’s an old and cliche quote, but the meaning is still there. The quote is meant to represent empathy and to never judge a person without having the full picture because you never know what someone is going through. Sometimes I find myself being very quick to judge. I make silly assumptions about people all the time         ( admittedly, not the nicest ones) before actually getting to know them. We all have been there, though. It’s in our human nature to make judgments.

The way I see the quote, however, is that it’s not really about shared experiences, it is deeper than that. It is not on the physical level that walking in someone else’s shoes implies. You cannot simply read the news, or volunteer at a soup kitchen in order to “walk in the shoes of another” – those shoes probably do not fit you.

What we can do, though, is walk beside and listen to someone long enough so that our shoes start to feel like theirs. Until our feet start to hurt too. The most important aspect of emotional intelligence is understanding. It’s easy to understand the place where we are coming from and our reasoning behind our behavior. But, it takes a little more effort to stop and think about the perspective of someone else and recognize where they are coming from and what they have gone through. Once you can understand where someone else is coming from, it’ll be easier to empathize with them.

We all tend to live selfish lives, where we are stuck in our own little bubbles. Naturally, we worry so much about what’s going on in our lives, that we forget about other people– and just like us– they are also facing problems. Maybe one of your close friends, for instance, has been distant from you for the past couple of days. Perhaps the reasoning for this has nothing to do with you at all. Maybe, they have something personal going on that has been distressing them. The best thing you could do is not take it personally and try to understand what your friend is going through. Though you may not understand the full extent of what they are going through, you understand how they feel and are there to offer support.