People have been fixated on cognitive intelligence, and emotional intelligence has been ignored and undermined when it is far more important. If you are looking for ways to improve your emotional intelligence, this is the right webpage. In this article, we will explore the best way to increase your emotional intelligence.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Before we proceed further, it is important for you to understand what even emotional intelligence is. Simply put, Emotional Intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions, use emotions, understand them, and effectively manage them. It is commonly referred to as EI or EQ in short.
Components of Emotional Intelligence
Self-Awareness
This builds an individual’s ability to understand their emotions and helps them identify their emotional states and how they could potentially affect others. Self-awareness is considered the foundation of emotional intelligence.
Self-Regulation
Following self-awareness comes self-regulation, which focuses on an individual’s ability to manage emotions. Too often, people struggle to handle their feelings. This can be seen in challenges with impulse control and disruptive emotion. The burst of negative emotions can be difficult to manage, but self-regulation is important.
Social Awareness
The third component of emotional intelligence is social awareness. Now that we understand our emotions, we need social awareness to understand the feelings of others. Social awareness is also reflective of empathy and kindness in an individual.
Social Skills
The final component of emotional intelligence includes social skills. These test your ability to manage your emotions and the emotions of others. Social skills require you to build personal relationships that expose your emotional side. This is where you have to manage your social skills.
Best Ways to Increase Emotional Intelligence
Here, we have listed down the best ways to increase emotional intelligence.
Journaling
People have often used journaling to process their thoughts and emotions. It is a great way to develop self-awareness and self-regulation. Through journaling, you can also identify patterns and pinpoint emotional triggers.
Active Listening
This is widely considered the ideal way to increase emotional intelligence. We are often focused on telling others what we want to say instead of listening to them. When we do stop to listen, it is passive listening, where we do not take a moment to understand what the other person is trying to say. People are distracted or lost in their thoughts, but you need to listen actively to others.
Be Attentive
We often go with the flow of our emotions instead of paying attention to what we are feeling and what we are feeling. Part of emotional intelligence is to understand your emotions and what you are feeling.
Power of Positive Attitude
A good way to build your emotional intelligence is by adopting a positive attitude. A pessimistic attitude makes you more critical and moody. A negative attitude could cloud your mood and judgment, making it difficult to manage emotions.
Respond vs. React
There are two ways people handle conflict: they either react to it without thinking things through, or they think things through and respond to the conflict logically. Training yourself to respond rather than react will allow you to improve your emotional intelligence.
Handling Criticism
People often get emotional when they receive criticism. They tend to react poorly by taking offense and/or getting defensive. This could be counterproductive because they do not take the lesson at the heart of the criticism. An individual with high emotional intelligence analyzes the criticism and sees it as an opportunity to improve themselves.
Embrace Your Emotions
Understanding and identifying your emotions is harder than it seems, and it is different from what it means to embrace them. Many people neglect their emotions because they are unwilling to accept their emotional state, whether it is jealousy or anger. Such feelings are full of shame and are harder to embrace. However, part of increasing your emotional intelligence is to embrace your emotions, all your emotions, the good and the bad.
Learning to be Mindful
You may have heard of mindfulness in the past, but did you know how important it is to have emotional intelligence to practice mindfulness? Through mindfulness, you learn to be more aware of your surroundings and learn to live in the present. Through emotional intelligence, you are capable of letting go of past emotions and stop worrying about the future so that you can focus on living in the present and what you feel today, in this moment.
Benefits of Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence
Now, let’s explore the benefits of increasing your emotional intelligence.
- Reduce stress levels
- Helps deal with fear and doubts
- Becoming more sociable
- Learning to deal with change
- Being able to navigate social situations
- Becoming empathetic
- Building healthy personal and professional relationships
- Getting better at taking criticism
- Improved communication and understanding between couples
- You will feel more confident
Conclusion
As we reach the end of this article, it is our hope that you now have a proper understanding of what emotional intelligence is and the four important components that truly define emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and social skills.
By following the best ways to increase emotional intelligence listed in this article, you can live a better personal and professional life. Yes, emotional intelligence aids your career as well. When you understand the needs of another person, you can tackle conversations and situations better, whether it’s with a toxic boss or a misbehaving employee.
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