Intelligence has always been linked with communication. Communication is the medium of expression necessary for qualifying or quantifying intelligence. Interestingly, various forms of intelligence have emanated over the years, including interpersonal, intrapersonal, emotional, existential, naturalistic, spatial, logical, and even linguistic intelligence. This article is aimed at helping you find a suitable balance between your intelligence and how it can be properly expressed.
To begin, your intrapersonal intelligence should be of prime importance to you. Often sidetracked is the ability to accurately depict one’s feelings and to understand their influence in communicating with others. Self-awareness is the cornerstone and regulation for personal growth in this regard. Pay attention to your feelings, thoughts, anxiety, and even motives before communicating with others; this helps you to identify and narrow your discussion to your subject matter in the best way possible. Perceive stressful situations and prepare adequately to manage your responses to them.
It’s one thing to intelligently understand your state of mind and being, but it is another to have interpersonal intelligence. Of course, you might be mentally prepared to communicate your ideas or subject matter, but harnessing the insight of interpersonal intelligence would require you to observe and adjust to the state of others. To a good extent, to achieve effective communication, your audience must be in a similar frame of mind as you; notice the mood, tension, or other possible factors before interactions. You must excel at intelligently managing situations with others to foster a productive or harmonious result.
Additionally, emotional intelligence is vital in everyday life and must be handled with due diligence. From experience, it is often easier for people to have a firm grasp of other types of intelligence than emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a necessity for earning and maintaining relationships in a complex social society. To understand and effectively improve on this aspect of intelligence, you must be willing to seek loopholes in your relations with others and to breach them with supportive and empathetic communication. Strive to understand people’s emotions or the impact words have on them, acknowledge their feelings are distinct from yours, and effectively pass information that is subject to those emotional states; show your emotional intelligence from your communication to reactions distinct from your expectations.
Explore existential intelligence in your interactions. There is often a pressing need to be seen as intelligent; for this reason, you must first understand that this determines your ability to ponder over questions or concepts of deep meaning about life. For instance, if you deliberated over your purpose or man’s purpose in life, you would find yourself able to articulate or expatiate the nature of human existence confidently. Be interested in examining your existential intelligence and seeking for an avenue to improve it through thought-provoking communication and questions.
A neglected aspect of intelligence for many is their naturalistic intelligence. For some, whatever involves nature is termed a waste of time. To possess a childlike mind is to have the ability to show naturalistic creativity. See the opportunity to understand and connect to nature as a sustainable practice that indicates a free mental space; use that opportunity to articulate what comes to your mind when you’re presented with nature and then prolong those thoughts by freely communicating what comes to your mind about a subject matter. Do not be critical of them. Simply express thoughts and ideas that naturally come to mind.
Furthermore, incorporating spatial intelligence and communication is often useful for creative and technical fields. It is that intelligence that allows you to visualise and manipulate objects or scenarios in your mind. Spatial intelligence is often difficult to quantify because the output is the perceived result, which is many times, not the case: Your audience cannot visualise your mind alongside you and hence only buy into the vision you express. A gap between spatial intelligence and communication has led many to unplanned doom. Do not make the regular error of concluding concepts before their documentation; put into words and drawings each idea or puzzle without any exceptions. As you document and express each idea that you arrive at with clarity, you will find your spatial intelligence closely connected to your communication.
Unlike the belief of many, logical intelligence is not restricted by statistics and numbers. It is the ability to analyse a problem and reach a definite conclusion. As a logical individual, you must be able to analytically and rationally perform tasks in an orderly and practical manner. In logical thinking, one is not fully concentrated on results – the concentration lies in the steps and finite processes that show the validity of your argument or the logic applied to it, and this is where communication comes in. Concision, clarity, and brevity are what you should seek to achieve with logical intelligence; illustrate your points in a short, impactful, but clear way that shows the level of analysis that has been conducted to come to a logical conclusion.
Ultimately, linguistic or verbal intelligence is the ability to understand and reason with concepts framed with words. This means that you must be sensitive to your language nuances, structure, and phonology. This aspect of intelligence is what aids you in understanding the problem, abstractly reasoning through it, and demonstrating a working memory afterward. For instance, with good verbal intelligence, poets, journalists, and orators in turn craft verses, paragraphs, or stories, giving depth to the words and their meaning.
In conclusion, intelligence is rightly linked with communication because it is the medium of expression necessary for quantifying or qualifying intelligence. As humans, you possess multiple intelligences that must be balanced to enhance holistic development. Combining interpersonal, intrapersonal, emotional, existential, naturalistic, spatial, logical, and verbal intelligence in application to various everyday scenarios can improve your problem-solving abilities, decision-making, personal relationships, and professional relationships. To live a more well-rounded and fulfilling life, identify your areas of intelligence and consciousness and strive to improve them through your communication.