"Emotional intelligence isn't about sitting around holding hands and singing Kumbaya. These are not soft skills in that they are easy to learn and execute. It is often the opposite. These skills challenge the most intellectual because they require shifting mindset, perspective, and creating standard deviation to our tendencies. These human skills assist us in the most difficult and challenging of situations, to soften the emotional experience, that left unattended, drives us to disruptive behaviours and interferes with the quality of our IQ. Emotional intelligence skills enable us to keep our IQ turned on so that we can navigate the situation at hand without being driven by any emotion. After all, you cannot solve emotion-based problems without emotion-based solutions. And within today's workplaces, leaders and individual contributors struggle to adequately and proficiently handle change, the entrance of AI, performance under stress, toxic team dynamics, and conflict. As these demands of the workplace continue to rise, so does the necessity of a higher degree of emotional intelligence."