As I've talked about many, many times in these pages over the past nearly 15 years, emotional intelligence is one of the most important skills in society.
Emotional intelligence is one of the most important things you can introduce to your children, or if you're lucky enough to work with a team, your team members and colleagues, or in many other aspects of your life.
And perhaps one of the most stark examples of developed emotional intelligence (at least in my world) is the ability to end the conversation well.
I am staggered as I watch people in conversation, both at work and in social settings, be unable to finish a conversation and walk away in the opposite direction.
I encountered a situation recently when we were out walking the dog, and we met another family. I watched my own family members struggle to finish a conversation with people that they didn't know whose dog was terrorising our dog and in a situation that we wanted to walk away from.
There is some polite ruling that says no one can stop the conversation, and therefore, it almost continues indefinitely: "You hang up. No, you hang up. No, you hang up".
In my world of dentistry, it's an absolutely critical skill because failure to be able to do this means that the appointment will last for an indefinite period of time.
I love to enter into personal conversations with my patients and to share personal information because I absolutely believe that it builds trust in the most extraordinary way, but it's also essential to get to the end of the conversation and to be able to say in "Okay, I'll let you go now" or any other of the thousands of ways, you have to close things down in a polite and reasonable way which says to someone, "I'm really sorry, but I'm out of time and we'll have to pick this up later".
It's part of self-awareness, it's part of empathy, which are two of the greatest parts of emotional intelligence.
The ability to see the world through someone else's eyes and to speak to them in a way which will mean they will not be offended but will completely understand the social context is one of the most important things we're able to do to maintain relationships and also to be able to get on with the things that we have to do.
As I've always said here, we should be scrapping one or two of the national curriculum subjects and introducing emotional intelligence.
Blog Post Number - 3889