[0:00]Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Alhamdulillah wassalatu wassalamu 'ala Rasulullah. Tonight's topic is emotional intelligence.
[0:07]At the core of this topic is the character of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam, through which we take our lessons from.
[0:16]For those who want to learn about it and it is imperative to study the biography of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam and his character.
[0:24]And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala expresses in the Quran, Wa innaka la'ala khuluqin 'azim. Allah addresses the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam saying,
[0:37]And indeed surely you are on a most magnificent character, O Muhammad. There is no one who has better character than the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam.
[0:49]And the Rasul sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam had the best character when it came to emotional intelligence. What is emotional intelligence?
[0:58]Emotional intelligence my dear brothers and sisters is a modern term, it's not an old term. It's a modern term that was coined a few decades ago by psychologists.
[1:07]And what it is is that it describes our ability and skill to recognize and understand as well as perceive and influence our own emotions and other people's emotions.
[1:24]Once again, it is a term in modern psychology that describes our ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions, as well as perceive, understand and influence the emotions of others and work with it.
[1:45]It is not just being nice and friendly. That is not emotional intelligence, it's just being kind and friendly.
[1:54]But about truly being aware of how feelings affect our thoughts, our behaviours and other people around us. My brothers and sisters, this is crucial and important for every Muslim and every individual to learn.
[2:08]Because life is full of emotional ups and downs. People vary in their emotions and their attitudes and mindsets, their experiences and their pasts, their own personalities and the way that they were born and what they went with.
[2:23]You get married and you have to deal with these emotions between you and your spouse, you and your children, you and your parents, you and your in-laws, your family, your colleagues at work at school, whether you're a child in kindergarten, you deal with it.
[2:37]Whether you are in primary school or in high school or university, or you are working with the enemy, against the enemy, or you are you are working with somebody who hates you, or you hate them or you love each other, or you are against the enemy, or you're negotiating, or it's leadership in a country or in a job, or in the mosque or between the mosque, anywhere you in every facade of life, there is the requirement of emotional intelligence.
[3:04]There is a difference however between emotional intelligence and IQ. You know the IQ?
[3:15]IQ and technical intelligence are two different things, they are needed, but they are not the same as emotional intelligence. You can have a high IQ, you know how things work, but you are not able to necessarily have the skills and ability to have interdisciplinary relationships with others.
[3:33]Not easy to resolve problems, it doesn't, it's not enough to make you a leader, for example, not enough to make you um, regulate yourself.
[3:42]For emotional intelligence is the key and more important than all of them. And now when people hire others to work for them, in their companies or or you want to hold a position, one of the first things that they look at is your level of emotional intelligence.
[3:55]Are you aware of your own emotions and strengths and weaknesses? Are you aware what triggers you and what doesn't? Are you aware of how much control you have over yourself?
[4:07]Can you regulate? Can you control and channel the emotions when they come at you heavy or light, and are you able to fix when you when your emotions took the better of you?
[4:22]Then are you aware how much do you know about other people's emotions and mindsets? Do you have much experience in that? Have you engaged with people a lot?
[4:30]Have you made errors and mistakes? Have you allowed yourself to learn about personalities and people's emotion? And then how much can you regulate your response and how you respond to them in their different changing emotional personalities?
[4:46]It is a very complex skill and ability. And each person has different levels of emotional intelligence, so don't beat yourself up on it, but try your best to improve in the different areas which we are going to discuss in-sha-Allah.
[5:03]I highly recommend a book which combines emotional intelligence with purely the sirah of the biography of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam.
[5:16]It brings it together and links each emotional intelligence practice with an example from the life of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam. It is a book called Enjoy Your Life. Some of you may have seen it before.
[5:27]Enjoy your life by Dr Muhammad Al Arifi. And that book is based on even a a book that was written for the West. It's called How to Influence People and Make Friends by Dale Carnegie.
[5:42]And these two books, brothers and sisters, are books that I digested and practiced and learned very well that served me bi-iznillah by the will of Allah tremendously.
[5:49]Of course, learning the Quran and how the Quran speaks. For those of you who understand the Quran, you will see that the Quran addresses the emotional aspects of human beings throughout from beginning to end.
[6:03]From beginning to end and creates the motivation for it. The Quran addresses the ego and the emotion and then it invites you and speaks to you.
[6:15]There is a verse in the Quran where Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us about the way he created us. He said, Wa nafsin wa ma sawwaha. Fa-alhamaha fujuraha wa taqwaha. Qad aflaha man zakkaha. Wa qad khaba man dassaha.
[6:42]Allah says, Look at the nafs, the human being, the person, the inner self and how God has fashioned it.
[6:50]He gave it all the ingredients and tendencies to do acts of piety and magnificence and Taqwa.
[7:01]And he gave it the tendency and the ingredients to also go down the path of evil and loneliness. He who purifies his nafs himself has succeeded and is triumphant.
[7:18]And he who obeys every emotion and desire in themselves has destroyed himself and failed.
[7:30]So this human being you and I need to learn about how to interact and regulate these emotions and be aware of them.
[7:41]Because in each and every one of us there is a wahash. Ever heard of wahash before? Some people write it on their number plate.
[7:51]Wahash. Beast. He's a beast. Savage. We all have a savage characteristic inside of us, every single one of us.
[8:03]We have a monstrous reaction but the thing is you just have to trigger it at the right time, the right place. But of course,
[8:11]learning and in and experimenting and practicing and learning the sirah of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam and this topic will help us lessen that and we can easily fix without causing too much damage.
[8:23]My brothers and sisters, so as we said, EQ or emotional intelligence is considered a modern concept.
[8:31]As I said, the values and behaviours it describes were lived and taught by the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam 1,400 years ago.
[8:39]His life is the ultimate example of emotional wisdom, mercy, patience and kindness, qualities at the core of emotional intelligence.
[8:53]There is a downside to highly emotional intelligent people though.
[9:01]You have to be aware of the downside of being too emotionally intelligent, and that is no. 1, it can make a person avoid dealing with conflicts in order to keep the peace and the harmony.
[9:19]They say, Look, we'll just avoid it, we won't talk about it, even though it needs to be spoken about.
[9:25]But just to keep the peace, make everybody believe they're right, but you cannot maintain that. Chaos happens. So some things have to be addressed, and you have to face saying harsh things sometimes with respect and frank things.
[9:41]Highly intelligent people can get into the problem of an un of of unhealthy boundaries. They may not set the boundaries around them and around others.
[9:54]They may let people cross their boundaries constantly and use them and abuse them, or use and abuse others in the name of keeping the peace and harmony.
[10:02]And also it can create poor decision making. Why? Because a person who's highly emotionally intelligent may be thinking about other people's feelings and they're highly empathetic.
[10:13]They've got high empathy. Oh, you know, look, you got to understand, they're coming from a certain place. That's one thing. But then decision making becomes a problem.
[10:19]Sometimes I have to make really drastic decisions. And that's why when you work in professions like medicine, a doctor, lawyer, and when you're in a position of leadership, you've got to make tough decisions sometimes.
[10:34]And some people may experience some pain or hurt as a result. It may be uncomfortable and inconvenient for you or other people.
[10:43]But sometimes important decisions have to be made. If you have too much reliance on emotional empathy, then it can play a role in making bad decisions.
[10:54]So be aware of that and the idea is to have a balanced emotional intelligence setting in your mind.
[11:01]If you learn martial arts, whether you go to jiu jitsu or you learn um I'm just joking taekwondo, any kind of discipline sport, anything,
[11:15]they're always focusing first and foremost on disciplining your emotions. You can't react. If you react, you lose.
[11:24]So it's all in all areas. My brothers and sisters, I would like to quote to you a beautiful hadith from the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam, which is in Sahih uh which is in Bukhari and Muslim.
[11:38]He said sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam that every person is born in various emotions and character.
[11:46]An nasu ma'adin kama'adin al-fiddati wa al-dhahab. People are like metals, different types of metal.
[11:54]Just like silver and gold for example, which means people are born with personalities and habits, or they acquire habits and emotions as they grow older.
[12:05]And then they start varying like the way metal varies, you got gold and silver, you got other types of metal, you can probably shine it and it'll look nicer than the gold, but at the end of the day it's still metal, still steel for example.
[12:18]But you can get the gold and shine it up and it looks even better. Or the gold can look unattractive but it's still gold for example. So different people are like different metals.
[12:26]Some have a higher character, some middles, some less, some are impure with other bad characteristics. So Rasul sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam told us this so that we know that interacting with people requires flexibility and requires us to learn this aspect in order to get along in life.
[12:46]Another Hadith which is in Tirmidhi and Hadith as-Sahih, the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam said,
[12:53]Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created Adam from uh from a amount of clay from the earth.
[13:04]And so the children of Adam came out from the essence of the earth. And so among human beings there came different colours.
[13:20]And among the human beings came different personalities, attitudes and emotions. Some are prone to more sadness,
[13:30]others are more prone to easy-goingness, others are more prone to toughness and stubbornness and so on, just like the different the different textures of clay and soil in the earth.
[13:43]Hard clay, light clay, soft clay, all of that. But this does not mean that human beings are born unchangeable.
[13:53]Otherwise, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala would not tell us and teach us to increase in our good character. The Prophet peace be upon him would not encourage it, will just say you can't do anything about yourself, you're born that way. No, that's not true.
[14:08]But we are tested with some of the traits that we inherit from our parents sometimes, and sometimes we're tested because of our unfortunate circumstance of who we end up with, the type of school we go to, the family we grow up with,
[14:21]the friends and circles that we have around us, the experiences, traumas, calamities and hardships that we've gone through, they all affect our behaviour.
[14:30]And that is why we need to go back to the Quran, back to the Sunnah of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam, back to our Salah, back to where the environments we remind us of Allah and the hereafter is.
[14:41]All these things help us to regulate our emotions and we can increase in-sha-Allah. My brothers and sisters, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala further describes Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam,
[14:53]Wa ma arsalnaka illa rahmatan lil-'alamin. Surat Al-Anbiya verse 1:07.
[15:03]We have not sent you O Muhammad except as a mercy to the worlds. And this verse, brothers and sisters, highlights that the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam's personality was the ultimate example of mercy and emotional mastery,
[15:22]qualities at the heart of emotional intelligence. And Allah says in the Quran, Laqad kana lakum fi Rasulillahi uswatun hasanah liman kana yarjullaha wal-yawmal-akhir. They has come to you in the Messenger of Allah a very good role model for you to emulate.
[15:40]For whoever for whoever hopes to attain the high position in the hereafter with Allah and Paradise. My brothers and sisters, emotional intelligence can be summed up in five different parts or five different aspects.
[16:04]Each one of these we will discuss now and each one of them is an area that each and every one of us needs to in-sha-Allah improve on, learn about and work on themselves.
[16:17]Of course, Allah does not expect perfection. Nobody's perfect. You can't read minds, you can't read hearts, but with practice in-sha-Allah and lowering our guards and ego, we will get there in-sha-Allahu ta'ala.
[16:30]A Muslim is humble and the verse that we read before, Wa 'ibadur-Rahman alladhina yamshuna 'alal-ardi hawana. And the true worshippers of Allah are the ones who walk on earth with humility and humbleness.
[16:45]Not humility as in degrading their dignity. No. Humility means that they are humble and modest. If they make mistakes, they say, I acknowledge my mistake, how can I improve it?
[16:59]If they know they got weaknesses, they say this is a weakness, how can I improve it? If someone gives them genuine advice, they're able to take that advice even if the person was harsh.
[17:08]It was narrated that Umar ibn Khattab radhiyallahu anhu used to say, rahimallahu imra'an uh rahimallahu imra'an, rahimallahu imra'an ahda ilayya 'uyubi. May Allah bless and have mercy on any person who gifts me my bad traits.
[17:31]Comes and tells me Umar, this is a bad trait and you need to fix it. He used to make du'a for a person and he called it a gift.
[17:38]And that's a very high emotionally intelligent person and regulates it very well. So here are the five main aspects or parts of emotional intelligence.
[17:47]No. 1 self-awareness. To have emotional intelligence, you need to start by being aware of yourself, knowing your own emotions and understanding their impact.
[18:00]No. 2 self-regulation, we said that already and it is controlling your emotions and your impulses. Responding thoughtfully.
[18:12]This is a big one. A lot of us Muslims have knee-jerk reaction, bang. So you need to take you need to learn how to take breaths, think, take time and respond.
[18:25]No. 3 emotional intelligence involves motivation. You need to find an inner drive to act with purpose and sincerity.
[18:36]No. 4, we need to learn empathy. Empathy is understanding and sharing the feelings of others with compassion, trying to put ourselves in other people's shoes.
[18:49]And no. 5, we need to learn about social skills. How to interact with people socially and things around us.
[18:57]And that involves building positive relationships, communicating effectively and resolving conflicts. Otherwise, you're gonna fail as a husband, you're gonna fail as a wife, you'll fail as a father and a mother, you'll fail as a son or a daughter.
[19:13]Because you're dealing with people with all these five aspects.
[19:22]Rasul sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam said, The believer who mixes with people in order to be active and teach and spread goodness in Islam is far more better and more valuable to Allah than a believer who isolates from the people, doesn't do anything except worrying about themselves.
[19:50]Both of them are believers, but one is highly more valued and loved by Allah, the other one is less loved. So there's a big difference.
