Emotional intelligence is one of the very famous topics people are talking about these days. It is not just about having these hard skills; to be good at work, to be skillful in management but it is also about developing soft skills and how to have better relationships with people, these social skills that actually makes us more effective than just having knowledge.

When it comes to emotional intelligence, one of the most important factors is empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings. The moment we understand other people better, we can interact with them better and that is the foundation for a better relationship because we wouldn’t want to be friends with somebody who always takes advantage of us, and never cares about how we feel.

We would want to be friends with somebody who makes us feel comfortable to be around and empathy creates that. The question would be how can I be more empathetic in life? The moment that we are selfish is the moment that we are lacking this empathy, the moment that we are thinking only about me such as why don’t I get this, why can’t I have that, why everything is so bad around me, the moment we take ourselves as the center of the world, we don’t care about what is going on around us, we only think ourselves as the absolute. That is the moment we don’t have any empathy at all.

On the other hand, when we become more selfless, care about other people’s feelings, want to give, want to help, that is the moment we become empathic, so to develop empathy, it will take self realization. To understand ourselves first, to acknowledge how I feel about the way I am being treated so I can understand the way others feel being treated by me in that particular way, this is actually the ground rule to develop empathy; To start from self-exploration until we come to self-realization. Understanding ourselves better and we understand others better and that is why meditation is one of the most important keys to bring our mind to stay still within, so we can make self-reflection and understand ourselves better. In that way, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes and that is actually the foundation of good relationships.