Remember a time when a colleague of yours was angry? You could tell that they were angry because of something you did, but you did not acknowledge your mistake and apologize. Rather, you became defensive because you couldn’t see why they were upset?
If you can relate to the story above, it’s time to have a chat about your Emotional intelligence. Getting a hang of this emotional intelligence thingy is sure to improve key points in your personal life, family and work relationship. This article will help you get started.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Whether you like it or not, the truth is you stand a better chance of winning the employee of the month award if you have a higher EI than your colleagues with high IQ. That is how important this is.
What are the signs of Emotional Intelligence?
If you are a person with great EI, you’ll exhibit the following characteristics:
- The awareness and understanding of your own emotions
- The ability to interpret other people’s emotions
- The ability to motivate yourself
- The ability to have self-control and delayed gratification
- Knowing your strengths and flaws
- The ability to manage conflicts, stress and difficult situations
- Showing empathy and being sensitive to other people’s feelings
- Taking responsibility for your mistakes
Now, take a little trip to introspection county. Do any of these qualities remind you of you? If you are unsure about your emotional intelligence quotient (EQ), you can take a test to measure it. The Emotional Intelligence tests are science-backed, and can help you determine your EQ.
The Components of Emotional Intelligence
- Self-awareness: this entails knowing yourself and being aware of your emotions and thought processes. The author describes self-awareness as ” a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions”. The self-aware person is conscious of their feelings and creates boundaries around their emotions. This allows them to manage and not escalate difficult situations.
- Self-regulation: This involves having a balance between emotions. Your feelings are valid but it’s important that you don’t smash the TV screen or cuss people out in your anger. With self-regulation, you can control your mood and express it rightly.
- Internal motivation: This is the ability to channel your emotions into achieving a goal. For example, instead of quitting school after failing an exam, you become more optimistic and stay motivated to continue and succeed. It also includes delaying gratification to achieve your goals.
- Empathy: can you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand what they’re feeling? Empathy helps you to recognise emotional states in people and respond accordingly.
- Social skills: This is about interacting well with other people, and establishing and maintaining healthy relationships. It entails great communication skills, good conflict management and the spirit of teamwork.
Is Emotional intelligence really important?
If you’ve read until this point, you must already have a rough understanding of the importance of EI. To spell it out clearly, below are 6 reasons why EI is no joke:
1. Personal development: Self-awareness makes you conscious of your abilities and helps you wield them to your advantage. You’ll have a better understanding of how you operate as a human being and improve on your shortcomings to be better.
2. Proper communication skills: Understanding people’s emotions let you have meaningful conversations with them. You’ll choose the right words and speak at the right time. You’ll maintain good eye contact, keep an open body language and exude confidence during communication.
3. Good leadership: Research shows high efficiency, positive attitudes and values in people who have undergone EI training. These traits allow for good leadership.
4. Healthy interpersonal relationships: All the components of EI will come to play with maintaining relationships. You’ll be able to control your emotions and not hurt others, understand people’s feelings, interact well with people and show empathy.
5. Stress management: Awareness of your emotions lets you notice when stress is creeping in. It’ll allow you to take steps to manage stress and void stress triggers.
6. Achieve personal and work goals: A high EQ will allow you to maintain healthy work habits through self-control, self-motion and delayed gratification. By doing so, you’ll achieve your personal and work goals. It also allows you to keep healthy relationships with your colleagues.
How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
So you took that EI test and things aren’t looking as good as you thought and you truly want to sip from the EI cocktail. All hope is not lost, there’s surely a way to spike up your EQ. The following tips will help you improve your EI:
- Observe and acknowledge your emotions: observe and reflect on your feelings often. Don’t ignore or suppress negative feelings, instead, recognise your emotions and try to understand why you feel that way. This will enhance self-awareness.
- Think before acting: this may not be easy to do especially when there’s tension and you itch to react. However, this is a way to practice self-regulation or control and avoid taking regrettable actions.
- Practise empathy: consider and respect other people’s emotions. Try to walk a mile in their shoes. Make them feel seen and cared for.
- Ask for feedback from family and friends on how you handled a situation or from colleagues on your work performance. From this, you’ll learn to take responsibility for your mistakes and improve.
- Learn active listening and proper communication: seek to understand what others are saying rather than listening to just give an opinion or a rebuttal. Note their body language, maintain eye contact and know the right thing to say before speaking.
- Stay optimistic: keeping a positive mindset will help you stay calm and motivated regardless of the situation. Say positive and encouraging words to others.
- Read books and watch movies: movies and books that tell stories about people allow you to examine and analyse human behaviour in different contexts. This is a great way to understand others.
Emotional intelligence defines how you’ll respond to various life situations. Your reaction could attract the right people or deter them, land you great opportunities, or tear down your hard work. It’s therefore important that you improve your EI and make yourself an all-around great guy.
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Cheers 🥂
