An aspect of emotional intelligence is not to overestimate one’s value

An aspect of emotional intelligence is not to overestimate one’s value

By Bagudu Mohammed

I came across a social media post about a Plateau man that read more like fiction than reality, yet it provides a perfect material to understand a neglected dimension of emotional intelligence.

The story goes: a Plateau man lost an election and disconnected electricity for the whole village, claiming he had connected it with his own money. He removed the transformer and packed all the cables, disconnected everybody, and told them to go and ask the person they voted for to do it for them. He disconnected water too, removed his pipes, tank and submersible pump, and terminated scholarship support for sixty students in his constituency which he personally funded, blaming their parents for not supporting him at the polls. Who is to blame?

The question of who is to blame is thought-provoking. Eche Emmanuel, while responding, wrote that the situation could actually be painful, almost siding with the man. And that is understandable. Daniel Goleman, who popularized emotional intelligence, reminds us that pain, provocation and even deliberate mischief are unavoidable, but what defines maturity is not the absence of those triggers but the capacity to regulate the response to them. To use pain as an excuse to test one’s importance or to communicate value in a battle for supremacy is to expose oneself to greater vulnerability.

Emotional intelligence at its core is not about suppressing emotions; it is about reducing vulnerability and serving as self-defense in the face of provocation, anger and challenges that put to test what we can do.

I blame the Plateau man first because he is acting from a supposed position of greater strength, a position where personal choice makes control and alternative judgment possible. Unlike a community where choice, verdict and judgment do not depend on an individual but on a group, with conflicting interests, shifting alliances and complex loyalties, he had the luxury of pause. We cannot expect such harmony from a crowd.

Social psychology calls this the fundamental attribution error; we judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions, and we forget that a community’s rejection is rarely a verdict on one transformer or one borehole.

An aspect of emotional intelligence in politics is that love creates love, patience invites patience, and hate breeds hate. People should make a deliberate effort to disarm the threat of hate or mischief with calculated conduct that first protects them from the harm of wilderness and overreaction. There is a wisdom in the old social exchange theory of Homans and Blau, that relationships thrive on reciprocity, but reciprocity cannot be coerced. You can invest love and not harvest love in return.

While it is true that there are assumptions by which love or positive emotions can be won, for example by spending on a woman, by being of good character, by humility, life is too complex to conclude that such actions will naturally lead to favourable outcomes.

Research on unreciprocated investment shows that sometimes it is the most caring man that a woman despises and whose money she uses to help another man. Politics is even more complex. More favour could come from the political party a candidate flies, the strength of its structure and the popular sentiment of the time.

In many places, those contesting under the platform of a wave party are automatically treated as heroes regardless of whether they once fixed transformers, constructed boreholes or paid school fees, because deeper emotions and collective anxieties shape choice.

It is the same irony that makes a celebrity have millions of male friends and fans yet remain single. It is the same irony that makes an actor whose films are largely patronized remain single at an age when he should be overwhelmed with people to choose from. It is the same irony that makes a celebrity or influencer who is highly popular and influential, who has made impact for years through writing, sports, acting, music and other crafts, not good enough to be elected into office. That is why instead of calling netizens friends or fans, they are better described as followers. People can enjoy your craft without necessarily liking you as a person.

Robert Sternberg’s work on the difference between admiration and intimacy captures this; we can be fascinated by what you do without wanting to live with who you are.

Returning to the Plateau man and the reflection it inspires, the lesson is that an aspect of emotional intelligence forbids overestimating one’s importance. There should be discipline not to threaten even people we help, support or even our own spouse with absolute sanctions like sack, send away or divorce because it could end up exposing our own vulnerability.

If you expose the worst you can do, what is left for people to fear? What if while you are issuing such threats to prove your power, the supposed weak or dependent responds, Oga, you can do your worst, or is that all you can do, just to preserve dignity? What becomes of such utterances long after they are deployed to ridicule, embarrass and insult others? Do they not create greater vulnerability if by any chance you come to need the help of the same people who are your neighbours or town people and they remind you of how you abandoned them at a crucial time?

I also think the world can move on without us, and that is a truth we do not fully appreciate. It is therefore better not to overestimate our importance to the extent that, before our very eyes, those who depend on us become emancipated after we withdraw our contribution. If you are providing someone with food or shelter, you should realise that if you suddenly become unwilling to continue that support, people do not necessarily die because of the resulting hardship. In many cases, they eventually learn to survive on their own. Yes, they may suffer at the beginning, but that suffering does not necessarily continue forever. Have you ever wondered how orphans, widows and even those who have been rejected manage to adapt and survive?

Psychologists call this resilience, the human capacity to rewire and rebuild after loss. That is why even threatening to withdraw support can be excessive talk, especially when trying to prove that people cannot do without us for a day and will come begging. That is not always the case.

Besides, politics is an investment and a risk, and repeating the investment is not always predictable. Humility is to do good because it adds value and could create positivity but never to expect or feel entitled to be paid back as a matter of right. There was no contract that if the Plateau man did those projects he would automatically be elected.

So I blame him first for losing his cool even when he seemed to be in a better position of strength and control. By losing his temper he lost all the goodwill and reputation he had built and subjected himself to mockery and greater vulnerability, because definitely the villagers will learn to live without him, but he can hardly recover from the excesses of that wilderness and from allowing provocation to get the better side of his judgment.

Happy New Month, and Happy 66th Independence Anniversary.

Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com