March 2025 #MedEdPearls: Elevating Emotional Intelligence of Health Professions Learners

Engagement with people at work, school, and at home occurs daily requiring a myriad of skills to navigate situations where diverging goals, interests, and opinions are exchanged. Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to manage and influence your emotions and people’s emotions around you to yield successful outcomes. Emotional intelligence consists of two domains composed of four components:

1. Knowledge of self: Developing from self-awareness and self-management, and;
2. Knowledge of others: Arising from social awareness and social management

Emotional intelligence is a key factor in effectively managing high-pressure environments, including school, residency, or hospitals. When a learner begins to show signs of stress, educators can apply the four components of emotional intelligence to foster learner resilience:

1. Elevate self-awareness: Encourage struggling learners to specifically identify their emotion and connect to it. This can be done through self-reflection, feedback from others, and the application of an emotional wheel, which helps transform the sense of a vague emotion into a specific emotion. Also, help struggling learners find meaning in what they are doing and encourage self-gratitude.
2. Elevate self-management: Inform struggling learners to practice mindfulness (a state of active and open attention to the present), self-acceptance (the ability to understand our objective reality and choosing to like ourselves anyway), and reward oneself for small accomplishments. Also, advise them to accept mistakes, setbacks, and failures as we are human. Inform them that failure is a possibility in most endeavors and that failure should not bruise their ego – it was Henry Ford that famously stated that “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently!” Additionally, encourage them to advance their inner monologue toward self-empathy - A good question to ask themselves is, “Would I repeat what I just said to myself to someone whom I like and respect?” Collectively, these strategies help prevent emotional hijacking (a state where emotions take over and lead to impulsive and often regrettable reactions) and build learner resilience. 
3. Elevate social awareness: Inform struggling learners about mindblindness - the inability to understand the intentions and behaviors of others - and how to avoid it.  Concerning conflicts, teach learners that open and calm readiness for resolution is must and can be estimated by taking the reactivity quotient test.
4. Elevate social management: Encourage struggling learners to tune out negativity, express themselves openly without judgement, celebrate creativity among group members, and build healthier relationships by spending time together outside of work, school, or home. 

Developing these four components of EI in struggling learners can deepen their levels of human understanding, interactions, positivity, functionality, empathy, resiliency, wellness, and resourcefulness.  Elevating EI in learners can boost the quality of interpersonal relationships, help with persistent pressures in caring for patients, reduce medical errors and legal claims, and improve patient outcomes and patient-provider relationships. What components of emotional intelligence have you used? Share your ideas via LinkedIn at #MedEdPearls!

#MedEdPearls are developed monthly by the health professions educator developers on educational affairs. Previous #MedEdPearls explored designing transforming transitions, providing effective feedback, and fostering learner flourishment.

Mark Terrell, EdD is the assistant dean of Medical Education, director of Institutional Professional Development, and director of the PhD and MS programs in Medical Education at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. HMI has made an impact on Mark’s career by providing a myriad of succinct and highly usable faculty development suggestions to improve educational practice at his institution. Mark’s areas of professional interests include faculty development, educational scholarship, and cognition and emotional intelligence. Mark can be contacted via email. 

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