Emotional intelligence is quite an essential factor in every individual development as it involves being able to assimilate, use and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively empathize with others, also to overcome certain challenges. This fuels your performance both in the workplace as well as in your personal life.
Emotional Intelligence sees to how well individuals identify and manage their own emotions and react to the emotions of others. It’s the process of understanding how those emotions shape your thoughts and actions so you can have greater control over your behaviour and develop the skills to manage yourself more effectively.
Becoming more emotionally intelligent allows us to grow and gain a deeper understanding of who we are, enabling us to communicate better with others and build healthy, stronger relationships.
Being in touch with your feelings allows you to manage stress levels and communicate effectively with other people. Even if it's not something you are very stable at or even good at, at the moment, emotional intelligence can be developed and honed over time.
Listed below are several tips, which are a good starting point for improving your emotional intelligence
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1. Practice Empathy
This is one of the numerous ways to improve emotional intelligence. Empathy is the process of understanding other people’s emotions and this is a very important factor to improve one's emotional intelligence. It is essential to understand that everyone has their own set of feelings, triggers and fears.
You showing empathy displays that you’re allowing their experiences to resonate with your own to respond in an emotionally appropriate way. It’s a lifelong skill and the most important one for navigating relationships.
this feeling creates an impression to the person that you feel their pain even if it doesn't hurt you physically, it also makes them to be more open to you. being emotionally independent gives you an edge over others, in the sense that, people will always want to communicate and seek advice from you due to the reaction you show to them when they where hurt.
2. Self-awareness: How To Improve Emotional Intelligence
For you to improve your emotional intelligence, you have to increase your sense of self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize your own emotions for what they are and understand where they originate from. It means knowing your strengths and limitations and this is another key factor to improving your level of emotional intelligence.
Self-awareness recognises your character, moods and emotions and their effect on others. It can help highlight areas for self-improvement, make you better at adapting and can limit wrong reactions as well as decisions.
when you don't recognise your self-awareness energy you are bound to talk down on others, not having empathy for them, and this has a way of limiting your emotional intelligence towards people. it is best to develop self-awareness because it helps to compose yourself and give a dignified attitude towards others.
3. Observe How You Behave In Improving Emotional Intelligence
While you’re practising your self-awareness, pay attention to your behaviour as well. Observe how you act when you’re experiencing certain emotions. Managing our emotions becomes easier once we become more conscious of how we react to them.
Take note of your emotional reactions to events that occur throughout the day. If you ignore your feelings, you're ignoring important information that has a big effect on your mindset and the way you behave. So it's important to start paying more attention to your feelings and connecting them to experiences, this way you will improve your emotional intelligence.
Take, for instance, you're in a presentation and you get interrupted. What emotions arise when this happens? You can't certainly help what emotions you'd feel, but you can for a certainty decide how you want to react to them. If you have an issue with lashing out in anger or shutting down when you're hurt, think about how you'd rather react.
Instead of letting your emotions overwhelm you, decide how you’re going to behave next time your feelings grow strong. This also applies to when something negative happens in your life, take a moment to feel your emotions. Decide to communicate your feelings instead of repressing them, or get up and try again instead of backing out completely.
4. Be Optimistic
When you're optimistic, it's easier to see the beauty in life and in doing that, you spread that feeling to those around you. People want to be around an optimistic person and if you are optimistic, this attribute will draw them to you, with all the possibilities that more connections will bring to you.
An optimistic attitude comes with a positive mindset, when you are optimistic your emotional intelligence becomes high because you are always ready for what is coming, and most of the time emotionally intelligent people are always positive, they see the positivity of things happening around them. while negativity encourages people to focus only on what can go wrong rather than building resilience.
People with high emotional intelligence tend to know how to use fun and humour to make themselves and others feel safer and happier, use laughter to get through tough times and are always grateful for whatever comes, and this attribute is one of the best ways to improve emotional intelligence.
5. Lower Your Stress Level
Lowing your stress level is very vital for improving emotional intelligence. As humans, all around us is filled with difficult situations from relationship breakdowns to stress at work. In between, there are myriad stress triggers that can make any daily issue seem much more challenging than it probably is and if you’re stressed a lot, it’s difficult to behave in the way you want to. Thus having a good plan for relieving stress improves all aspects of your emotional intelligence.
Find out what factors trigger your stress, and what helps relieve it. Make a list of effective forms of stress relief, like hanging out with a friend or taking a walk, and put it to good use. If your stress level feels too overwhelming to deal with alone, seek the help of a therapist or psychologist who can give you tools to cope.
6. Self Management
Self-management means being able to cope with change and stay committed. Once you’ve gotten to grips with self-awareness and how your emotions work, you can get a handle on self-management which sees to taking responsibility for your behaviour and well-being as well as controlling emotional outbursts.
7. Practice Emotional Honesty
In improving your emotional intelligence, one needs to know that honesty will always come into play. For instance, If you say you’re “fine” and have a scowl on your face, you’re not communicating honesty. if you are in a state of dilemma, and your reaction reflects confusion when you are asked what the problem might be, learn to be honest.
Be more physically honest with your emotions, so people can read you better and not get on your nerves. Tell people when you’re upset, and share happiness as well. This helps other people get to know you, and they'll trust you more if they see where you're coming from.
when you practice emotional honesty, together with emotional intelligence it gives more confidence and boldness to confront and feel for others, this always makes others give you your deserved respect and respect your decision in any cases
8. Acknowledge Your Emotional Triggers
Self-aware individuals can recognise their emotions as they occur and also what triggers them. It’s important to be flexible with your emotions and adapt them to your situation. Don’t deny your emotions stage time but don’t be rigid with them either.
Observe how your emotions and behaviour are connected. When you feel strong emotions, how do you react? Tune into your gut responses to situations you face every day, instead of just reacting without any reflection. The more you understand what spurs your behavioural impulses,
the higher your emotional intelligence will be, and you'll be able to use what you know to change your behaviour in the future. like, feeling insecure might cause you to withdraw from conversation and disconnect or feeling overwhelmed might cause you to panic and lose track of what you were doing or even cry.
9. Social Awareness
Being socially aware means being able to see the power dynamics at play within any group or in an organizational context. The ultimate method to building your social skills is to get out there and be sociable. It sounds simple, but you can’t strengthen your social skills without being social. Join a group or network outside of your usual circle that is very engaging.
In doing this you'd adopt social skills which refer to the skills needed to handle and influence other people’s emotions effectively.
It covers a wide range of abilities, from communication and conflict management to dealing with change, meeting new people and building relationships and plays a part in almost every part of our lives, from work life to our romantic life.
10. Practice Relationship Management
This is the ability to get along well with others, manage conflict, inspire and influence people and communicate clearly. Do well to see that every relationship you're in is lively and healthy. In doing this, you'd stay conscious of your every reaction, behaviour and attitude to those around you.
11. Take Responsibility For Your Feelings
In the process of improving your emotional intelligence, you need to start accepting responsibility for how you feel and how you behave this will have a positive impact on all areas of your life.
when you start taking responsibility for your feelings and actions, you will be able to do the same for others, which will automatically boost your emotional intelligence. when you take responsibility for your feelings, you will be able to feel for others.
12. Go Easy And Do Not Get Angry Often
Often we experience emotional outbursts because we don’t take the time to slow down and process how we’re feeling. for you to improve your emotional intelligence, you have to learn how to go easy on yourself and control your anger.
Give yourself a break and make a conscious effort to meditate. Try to pause before you react, don't try to overdo things, and Channel your emotional energy into something productive.
It’s quite okay to keep overwhelming emotions inside, especially if it’s not an appropriate time to let them out. You can choose how you react to a situation - you can either overreact or remain calm.
13. Listen And See From Others Perspective
This is another key factor in improving your emotional intelligence. Being a more active listener and paying attention to what people are saying can help you get a better sense of how they're feeling, by trying to put yourself in other people's shoes.
Think about how you would feel if you were in their situation. Actively imagine how it must be to go through the experiences they're having and what might alleviate some of their hardship in terms of support and care. Switch places with the other person and think about what’s happening from their point of view.
Sometimes there’s no right or wrong but at least you’ll understand enough to come to a resolution or offer some useful advice.
Before you’re able to empathise with someone you first need to understand what it is they’re saying, which means listening is at the very epicentre of empathy and improving one's emotional intelligence, letting them talk without interruption, preconceptions, assumptions, scepticism and putting your issues on pause to allow yourself to absorb their situation and consider how they are feeling before you react.
14. Be Approachable
To improve emotional intelligence you have to learn to be approachable. A lot of people aren't very approachable and they tend to have outbursts a lot of times. Whether you’re the leader of a team or working on a project with others, try to remain accessible and approachable. Don’t be afraid to open yourself up, it might just be the start of a great and lasting friendship.
15. Be Open-minded And Agreeable
When your mind is open through understanding and internal reflection, it becomes easier to deal with conflicts in a calm and self-assured manner. You will find yourself socially aware and new possibilities will be open to you.
When someone does not react emotionally the same way you should consider why this is, and try to see it from their point of view, this is one of the many ways to improve emotional intelligence, when you are open-minded, and try to see reason to what others are saying, you will be able to read people through their actions.
16. Read People's Body Language
To improve emotional intelligence, you have to learn to read between the lines and pick up on people’s true feelings by observing their facial expressions and other body language. Often people say one thing when the look on their face reveals that there's a deeper truth.
Practice being more observant and picking up on the less obvious ways that people communicate their emotions. For instance, a higher tone of voice indicates that someone's stressed, when someone lies to you they often feel guilty, so it's important to read people's feelings for you to improve your emotional intelligence.
Conclusion
To Improve emotional intelligence you have to be observant and put yourself in other people's shoes. Emotional intelligence comes with a mindset of being enlightened to know more of yourself and others.
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