How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

Photo Credit: Łukasz Strachanowski via Compfight cc

When I was much younger, I had major emotional problems. Apart from dealing with low self esteem, I had to live with my hot temper. It wasn’t difficult to get me angry, and this hampered my relationships with people. Each time I got angry with someone, I would start to ignore them (I still do it sometimes). But luckily for me, I had a desire to change all that, I just didn’t know how.

In my second year in the university, I began serving in leadership positions, I knew that I had to deal with my temper or it would get the better of me. Books have always been my best teachers so I started looking for books to help me deal with my emotional problems. I came across a book by Dr. Rob Yeung, The New Rules: Emotional Intelligence. I studied it, took notes and practiced the exercises, but I didn’t finish it. Even with that, I started seeing improvements in my behavior. I also read two chapters of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Of course, I read other books, but those two were the beginning of a journey for me. The journey to improving my emotional intelligence. I wanted a change in my character, and I got it. If you feel this way too, you feel like your behaviour isn’t as good as you would like it to be, you feel you have deep emotional problems that you need to get rid of, then this article is for you. I am about to share with you valuable knowledge that helped me deal with my low self esteem and anger problems.

To begin, let’s find out what emotional intelligence is all about, shall we?

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (often referred to as EQ) is your ability to recognize and label emotions in yourself and other people, understand the emotions, and use that understanding to guide your behaviour and influence people. For example, the emotionally intelligent person knows when she’s angry, understand why she’s angry, and knows how best to act with her anger.

Emotional intelligence doesn’t mean you won’t get angry. Neither does it mean you won’t feel depressed. What it means, rather, is that you will be able to quickly identify what you are feeling at the time (anger or depression) and use it to improve your performance. It allows you use your anger to drive yourself when you need to be passionate and allows you use your depression to switch off from the world around you, at the right time.

Why is Emotional Intelligence Important?

Usually, when people answer this question, they do so in relation to work, business and the likes. But I don’t care much for that. I believe that if you can understand its importance to your life (everyday activities), you will be better for it.

The first reason why emotional intelligence is that it helps you understand yourself better. The first step in emotional intelligence (as we will see later) is self awareness. As much as we like to think we’re thinking beings before we’re feeling beings, science tells us otherwise. We are first feelers before we are thinkers. When we understand this and parallel it with the idea of self awareness, we quickly see how important the topic of emotional intelligence is.

Next, emotional intelligence is important because it helps you understand other people better. It helps increase your level of empathy as you are more equipped to identify and understand why other people are acting the way they are acting, and you know what to do about it for the best possible outcome.

Emotional intelligence also improves your relationships with others (family, friends and colleagues). It helps you build a better attitude to life. When you are working to improve your emotional intelligence, you find that you become more tolerant towards people, because you start to consider people’s behaviour beyond the present, you now understand that what they are displaying at the time is simply a result of what must have been building up overtime. Understanding this will also help you take charge of the way you respond to people and situations.

In their book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves stated that emotional intelligence is a more important qualifier for success than a high IQ is. Daniel Goleman also suggested the same thing in his 1996 book, Emotional Intelligence. So now, let’s look at the why and the how of this subject matter.

Emotional Intelligence is More Important than IQ

According to an article on About Health, “Some psychologists believe that standard measures of intelligence (i.e. IQ scores) are too narrow and do not encompass the full range of human intelligence. Instead, they suggest, the ability to understand and express emotions can play an equal if not even more important role in how people fare in life.”

Keld Jensen, in a 2012 article on Forbes’ website, wrote that “it is certainly good to be an intelligent, rational thinker and have a high IQ; this is an important asset. But you must realize that it is not enough. Your IQ will help you personally, but EQ (emotional intelligence), MQ (moral intelligence), and BQ (body intelligence) will benefit everyone around you as well. If you can master the complexities of these unique and often underrated forms of intelligence, research tells us you will achieve greater success and be regarded as more professionally competent and capable.”

So while it is good to have a high IQ, without good EQ (emotional intelligence), it almost counts for nothing. Jensen added that “people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price."

The Four Aspects of Emotional Intelligence

Now that we know what Emotional Intelligence is and why it is important, let’s look at its four aspects and how to work on each one of them.

Source: Character Therapist

Self awareness

Self awareness is the ability to identify emotions in yourself. That is, self awareness is your ability to observe and accurately describe how you feel, how you think and behave, your strengths and weaknesses, and how all these affect your body.

For example, when someone annoys you, how do you know you are angry? Does your body start to vibrate (like me)? Do you palms get sweaty? And does your voice become croaky? Also, all manner of wicked thoughts start to cross your mind. Some of those thoughts must not be uttered from the mouth, you would go to jail if you acted them out. So take note, it’s not that you won’t feel like killing someone, it’s just that you will know when you feel like killing someone and how what best to do in such a situation.

Another example: when you are happy, how do you know? Your pupils become dilated and your heart beats faster. And sometimes, you become restless because you can’t contain your happiness.

Self awareness is that ability that helps you label your emotions and know how your body and mind react when you feel that way.

Self management

Self management is your ability to manage, or direct, your emotions for the best course of action. It answers questions like: what do I do with my anger? what will be the outcome of my action or inaction? is this the best time to show that I’m angry? how to do I quell the anger?

Self management helps you ‘channel’ your emotions the right way. Instead of beating someone up when you are angry or shouting at them, self management helps you analyze the situation and decide what the wisest thing to do is.

This ability, as with the first, takes time to develop. But once you have developed it, you will see how much your behavior will have improved.

Social awareness

Social awareness is your ability to observe and identify the emotional state and needs of other people. It’s what we call empathy. Social awareness is the ability you have to identify the ‘energy’ of people after spending some time the room with them. You see someone whose smile is upside down and you can tell that it’s sadness, depression, worry or something else.

Relationship management

This is the ability to build and maintain good relationships with people, communicate with them clearly, influence and inspire them, and manage conflict. It is the peak of emotional intelligence. Anyone with the ability to deal with people's behaviour effectively and bring out the best in them has attained this level of emotional intelligence.

How Do I Improve My Emotional Intelligence

We've taken all this time to get to this point because the background knowledge is important in helping us build up our emotional intelligence.

After three years of studying the subject of emotional intelligence, from books and articles, I have noted down action steps that have worked for me and many other people who have practiced them.

The road to high emotional intelligence is a long one that requires great dedication. It's not for the half-hearted and it is not easy. If it were, everyone would be highly emotionally intelligent. But everyone is not. So I believe that your decision to have read the article this far means you are ready to start or further that journey.

1. Write down a list of all the emotions you can think of.

Source: Wikipedia

Once that is done, take time out each day to clearly describe the physical signs of each of those emotions. This is the first step to self awareness. Here's an example: When I'm frustrated, I get hungry, my mouth becomes dry, I stop talking to people and I start mumbling to myself, the smallest touch from another person buys them a 'killing' look from me, and I become less efficient with work.

Once you have done this, describe the situations/scenarios where you feel those emotions; who/what triggers these emotions? Answer questions like: who/what frustrates you? what event(s) led to your feeling of frustration?

2. Now that you can identify the physical signs of your emotions, focus on cancelling them out. So, like I said, I get hungry and my mouth becomes dry when I'm frustrated, so I either drink water, juice or get some food (thankfully, I don't get frustrated all the time). I also separate myself from people so that I won't have to deal with them at the time.

If you're angry and your palms get sweaty, turn on a cold water tap and let the water run over your palms for as long as possible. Or simply use the 10-count principle, count from one to ten before doing or saying anything.

What works for me may not work for you, so it's your responsibility to find out how best to manage the physical signs of your emotions. Also, you'll find that as time goes on, the way you manage and react to different emotions will evolve. Your body won't always react the same way forever.

The first two steps will help you become more self aware and better able to manage your emotions.

3. Observe the physical signs in people. As you continue to populate your list of emotions and their physical signs, you will begin to notice them more in other people. It's the way life works. Just as you begin to notice red cars everywhere you go when you are planning to buy one.

So the more you study your list, the more you recognize these things in yourself and other people. This is the first step o social awareness. because now you know how people react when they are feeling a certain way.

4. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I'd say this is the hardest but more important step of all. Understand that people are different and that everyone has a story that you do not know about. Remember, our experiences and environment form our personality and behaviour. If someone acts in a way you don't like, your first line of action shouldn't be criticism or blame, it should be doubt. Tell yourself "this person has a good reason for acting like this" so that even if they don't, your conscience will be clear at the end.

5. Realize the fact that some people are just badly behaved. They probably don't even know it themselves. When faced with such people, remember what you have learned from the first two steps and put them to practice. Because such people will get on your nerves and there are many of them walking around the planet (a lot of them are on social media). watch your reactions and manage them.

6. Spend a lot of time observing people; the more you observe people (and yourself), the better you'll be able to predict behaviour. What you may find is that there are things about yourself that you didn't know before but now know because you saw it in someone else.

These are only six steps but I promise you, they are effective. Adopting these steps has helped me (and countless other people) become better versions of ourselves. I'm sure that if you consciously follow these steps for the next six months, you will begin to see great results. Remember, increasing your emotional intelligence is a long game. It's not something you work on for three weeks and forget about it afterwards. You must keep at it for the rest of your life.

If you do keep at it, your world and our world will be a far better place, because of you.

Start now: As soon as you are done reading this, go make that list of emotions, attaching accurate descriptions to all of them. You can write two per day or one per day, it's up to you. But make sure you are taking one step everyday.

Here are some books you can read to help you understand this better:

The New Rules: Emotional Intelligence by Dr. Rob Yeung

Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves