There’s more than one kind of intelligence. Being able to manage your own emotions and understand the feelings of others is emotional intelligence, a critical soft skill to hone if you want to improve your ability to relate to other people. Developing emotional intelligence will serve you well both personally and professionally. All it takes is some reflection, self-awareness, and the willingness to be more sensitive and attentive to how what you say and do affects other people. You may never be a rocket scientist or a poet laureate, but with some discipline, effort, and patience you could become a true genius of emotional intelligence.
Understand the 5 Elements
Emotional intelligence is multifaceted like a jewel. To be more emotionally intelligent, you have to consider these five elements:
- Self-awareness: the ability to honestly perceive how your words and actions impact yourself and those around you.
- Self-regulation: controlling your emotions and expressing them in a healthy way.
- Empathy: understanding the emotions, needs, and experiences of others.
- Motivation: the desire to self-improve, to get better at relating to others.
- Social skills: mastering social cues, understanding what is appropriate to say and do in a given situation.
Consider these five elements. Do any of them stick out as something you excel at? Or the inverse: where do you fall short? Knowing what you need to work on to get better is very important part of developing a keen sense of emotional intelligence.
Put Yourself in Their Shoes
If you can distill the concept of emotional intelligence down to a single sentence, the Golden Rule is as good a summation as any. Treat other people the way you would want to be treated.
“Genuine kindness is necessary when being empathetic,” said Dr. Melanie Abts, Rio Salado College's Counseling Faculty Co-Chair.
To be a more empathetic and emotionally intelligent person, you have to think about how other people feel and how your words and actions impact them. A good thought exercise to practice is to imagine yourself as the other person. If they said to you what you were about to say to them, how would that make you feel? Think about the struggles in their life that you know about: how would you feel if you had to deal with their obligations, their health problems, their stressors? Think about how they would move through this world and how things that could be easy for you may be difficult for them.
Take a Beat
An effective way to be more emotionally intelligent at work and at home is to not rush to judgment.
“I love the quote ‘No judgment, just love,’” said Abts. “What would that look like if we stopped judging others and just supported everyone?”
When it comes to dealing with emotionally complex situations, speed often does more harm than good. Don’t speak without considering how the other person might take it first. Pause for a moment, maybe even do an internal “1-2-3-4-5” count in your head, give yourself a moment to calm yourself before saying something you may regret. Give other people a chance to explain themselves or correct your misconceptions before you charge in and speak your peace. You’ll often find that patience and restraint are better tools for navigating out of choppy social waters than “going with your gut” and “tellin’ it like it is.”
This also applies to how you socialize online. You can save yourself a LOT of grief later by asking yourself before you post on social media if you NEED to say this. The things you write and post online can come back to haunt you years later, and could very well alienate friends and employers right now if you say something too controversial. One trick you can do is write down the thing you want to post and then delete it or save it as an email draft (with your own address as the sole recipient). That way you can experience the satisfaction of venting without the potential consequences of other people reading it.
“Don’t throw out unnecessary hate on social media,” said Abts. “Don’t cause unneeded drama.”
Know Yourself Better
One of the biggest benefits to cultivating emotional intelligence is that it can give you a better sense of who you are as a person and how you react to things. Our emotions can overwhelm us and steer us into doing or saying things we don’t understand at the moment. By taking the time to contemplate and understand what you are feeling, not just identifying the emotions themselves but figuring out what triggered those feelings, you can better understand how you carry yourself in stressful situations.
A simple practice to get you in a more reflective state of mind is to take up journaling. They don’t have to be long entries. When something interesting or unusual happens, write it down in your journal. If something emotionally significant happens- maybe you got into an intense argument, or cried for a moment, or experienced profound joy- make a note of it. Why did you feel those strong feelings? How did you behave in those moments?
It can also be helpful to talk to family and close friends about how you emote in public. It can be hard for us to perceive ourselves objectively. Sometimes we may think we come across in a neutral way but others may read us very differently. Ask the people who know you well if they can remember moments where you seemed unaware of how you were being perceived by them or others. Find out from them how you handle conflict and stress to see if there’s disconnect between how you feel in those moments and what you’re putting out into the world.
Article by Austin Brietta
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