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I didn’t know I was severely lacking emotional intelligence until the moment that I fell down into the emotional intelligence rabbit hole. And man, did I hit the bottom pretty hard when I learned all of these crucial life skills that I was lacking completely. Not by any fault of my own, just a lack of realizing what these skills were and how they would change my life once I started focusing on them.
Emotional Intelligence is a topic that’s not talked about enough in the general population if you ask me. It’s one of those traits, or maybe it can even be considered a skill, that a lot of people don’t realize they either have a high aptitude for or lack to some degree. You don’t know what you don’t know, right?
When I began this journey into deepening my understanding of emotional intelligence, not only was I learning A LOT, but also UNLEARNING just as much. If not even more.
What is emotional intelligence?
In the simplest of terms, emotional intelligence is harnessing the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions, as well as the emotions of those around you that you interact with or have relationships with. Want a deeper, more technical definition of emotional intelligence? Check out Psychology Today’s take on the subject.
Emotional intelligence is made up of 5 crucial components: self awareness, self regulation, self management, social awareness, and relationship management. Daniel Goleman is therein behind this breakdown of emotional intelligence. He believes that the value of someone’s IQ (intelligence quotent) is an overrated concept when compared to the value of someone’s emotional intelligence level.
You may already be honed in on one or more of these emotional intelligence skills, but still have some work to do on the others. The same could be said about a lot of people. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, of course. Just that you may now be discovering areas in your life that you want to work on growing in as a person.
How Does Emotional intelligence Help Me?
In becoming more emotionally intelligent, you can work to see changes and improvement in potentially all areas of your life. In your relationship with your self, intimate relationships you have such as a partner or spouse, family relationships, friends, and even your workplace interactions. Yes, increased emotional intelligence can have an impact on all of these aspects of your life when applied intentionally.
Increased Self-Awareness and Regulation
The most important relationship you have in life is the one you have with your self. When you learn to harness the power of self-awareness and self regulation you will feel like you’ve stumbled upon some kind of super power. You will learn so many new things about yourself, what makes you tick, where your emotions come from, and how to reign in distracting/disruptive emotions.
Enhance Your Ability to Empathize with Others
This one might be something you might think you already do well, or maybe you don’t even think about whether you do empathize with others in conversation or not. This is the part of emotional intelligence where you learn to recognize the emotions of others around you. In doing that, you then have a better idea of how to navigate a conversation with them in. way that is balanced and beneficial for both parties (you and the person you are speaking with.
Using empathy in a conversation to “benefit” each person may sound manipulative in nature, but that’s the work of pop culture serial killers and sociopaths. In a non-murderous or sociopathic person’s life, your daily interactions are beneficial to you in the fact that they “fill up” your metaphorical “cup”. Meaning, having good, meaningful interactions with those around us are a necessity of human nature.
A little genuine empathy can really go a long way in a conversation with a person. Regardless of their place in your life: friend, spouse, sibling, co worker, etc. Being able to communicate with empathy allows you to validate that other person’s experience, helping them to feel heard and understood. Even if you have not personally experienced the thing they are going through, first hand. This, in turn, will elevate your social skills over all and give you the confidence to continue working on your new emotional intelligence super powers.
How to Develop Emotional Intelligence
No matter how much work you think you have to do on your Emotional Intelligence, it’s not an impossible task. You may even surprise yourself with certain emotionally intelligence traits that you do in fact already have and didn’t realize it, as you continue to dive deeper into the subject.
There are a few things you can easily do on a daily basis that will help you become a more emotionally intelligence individual over time. It’ll take some work, just like any other area of personal development might. At the core of it, you are breaking habits as well as learning new levels of personal and social awareness.
It won’t happen over night, but once you see and feel the differences that will set in, you will begin to understand why Daniel said that EI (emotional intelligence) is more important that IQ.
Below is a list of some of the practical ways you can begin to develop your emotional intelligence, starting today. A few of these strategies are straight from my own arsenal of personal development, so I can say from my own experience that they made a huge impact.
Keeping a Journal
I wish I had started journaling years ago. Writing is definitely an under rated form of self therapy. Initially I was worried (just like you might be) that someone might come across my inner most thoughts and read them. There are a few ways around that that I’ve thought up. One, you can literally keep your journal under lock and key with a safe of some sort. Two, you could always destroy your journals as you fill them up fi you don’t have a personal tie to it or desire to re-read them after some time.
There are infinite amounts of emotional intelligence journal prompts available on the Internet. Pinterest is an especially rich gold mine for these kinds of journal prompts. Just go to your Pinterest search bar and type in “emotional intelligence journal prompts” and take your pick! Consistency is key here. Not to say you have to journal every single day, but on a consistent scheduled that works for you and your life.
Put Yourself in the Shoes of Others
This is how you can harness your ability to show empathy toward others in conversation. Sometimes our first instinctive reaction, when someone is sharing a difficult experience with us, is to flood them with positivity. “You’ll figure it out!”, “Everything will workout in the end, don’t worry!”, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal. Don’t let it get to you.” Etc.
Think about a time someone has said something like that to you after you’ve shared a difficult experience with someone. Do you feel better after hearing them say something “positive”? Or would you have felt better if they responded to you with something more along the lines of “Wow, that must have been difficulty to deal with.”, “I would have felt the same way if that happened to me”, or “I don’t blame you for feeling that way, that sounds like a lot to take on.”
I don’t know about you, but I feel little more comforted or even motivated, when someone responds to me with empathy rather than automatically going with a generic positive response. It feels more like that other person is meeting you where you’re at in your human experience, than just watching you from the outside and simply rooting for you.
Take Responsibility
Sometimes it’s hard not to become defensive when met with someone’s negative emotions that are aimed at us. It’s natural to want to defend yourself when you feel under attack. However, the emotionally intelligent thing to do is to take inventory of the feelings you experience when someone comes at you with negative emotions, and not allow yourself to react with your first reflex. Which is likely that you become defensive an find an outside force or person to blame for your actions that led to this interaction.
You don’t have to agree with someones emotional experience, but to be able to slow down and respond with empathy in almost any given situation is an emotionally intelligent skill.
Here’s an example that has occurred between my husband and I, and probably millions of other married couples in the world. He will leave a dirty dish on the counter, and it will remain there until I take care of it. I will bring this to his attention and express that I feel under appreciated for all of the house work I do when he leaves a dirty dish out that I always end up taking care of.
The knee jerk reaction that has come from him before has been along the lines of “well I wouldn’t leave it there if there if I didn’t have to work all the time and had time to do other things.” or “Well you leave your clothes all over the floor, so you shouldn’t be complaining about my mess.” These aren’t our conversations verbatim, but you get the point.
In the time we’ve been together (over a decade now) we’ve learned how to respond to each other with empathy rather than defensiveness, and take responsibility in the moment. We’ve learned that we don’t have to agree with the others feelings, but would rather defuse the discussion before it turns into a battle. So that it can be talked about rationally and a have resolution created.
Now, when an instance like a dirty dish comes up and I point it out to my husband, instead of immediate defensiveness, I receive a response more along the lines of “Oh, I’m sorry I left that there, I totally forgot. I can see why you’d think I was being unappreciative of all the work you do around here when I leave stuff on the counters.” When empathy is utilized and responsibility it taken, both sides win. I feel heard and understood, and my husband doesn’t have the stress of us arguing about this matter. The discussion is over just as fast as it began.
This can be applied to any conversation, not just ones between married couples or in an intimate relationship.
Slow Down and Think Before You React
This one is super important, and really hard to do sometimes. Especially in the heat of the moment when someone has really made you angry or upset. This one goes well with the previous point about taking responsibility. Being able to slow down when emotionally triggered, and take a moment to think before reacting is a big step in the direction of self regulation. A key point in emotional intelligence.
This one hasn’t always been a strong suit of mine. Not that I’ve ever been a hot head or anything. I’m actually not one to get angry often actually, mostly toward the sad, hysteric, and/or shut down end of the emotional spectrum when triggered.
I began to focus on this fact about my self, and recognize what would trigger it and what my initial reaction would be in these moments. Then whenever something would happen to bring these emotions out of me, I would start by taking a breath and taking inventory of my own emotions. “What am I feeling right now?” “What is making me feel this way?“, then I would move on to what I need to do about it.
“Will reacting in that way right now help this situation or just add fuel to the fire?” and then I would challenge myself “I always react XYZ way, and it leads to a negative result. What if I did ABC instead this time?” Knowing in my rational mind that ABC would be the more self regulated option that would allow things to settle and a rational discussion to be had.
In the end, I always remind myself that “Yes, I absolutely have a right to feel how ever I feel, just as anyone else does. But will acting upon it in this moment get me any closer to my desired outcome of this situation?”
“Probably not” was always the answer, so from then on I’ve been working on mastering the art of self-regualriohn by asking myself these questions. Instead of allowing my emotions to run the show, and ultimately fuel the fire and prevent resolutions from occurring.
Conclusion
No matter what path you are on in life. On track to becoming CEO of a company, manager of a local business with 10 employees, or a freelancer who does their own thing while having more time to focus on more non-work related social activities. Emotional Intelligence plays a major role in your life in one way or another.
Harnessing self awareness, self regulation, self management, social awareness, and relationship management as emotional intelligence will change the way you view your interactions with yourself as well as with those around you on a daily basis.
If you want to learn more about mastering the different aspects of emotional intelligence from the master himself, Daniel Goleman, check out his online course here on his website.
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