Improve your Emotional Intelligence

You’ve probably heard the term Emotional Intelligence, but do you know what that means? Emotional Intelligence, or EI, is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.

Emotional Intelligence Skills

Generally there are 3 skills which those with a high level of EI demonstrate:

1. Emotional awareness, including the ability to identify your own emotions and those of others

2. The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks such as thinking and problems solving

3. The ability to manage emotions, including the ability to regulate your own emotions, and the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.

According to Talent Smart says that 90% of high performers in the work place possess high levels of EI, while 80% of low performers have low levels of EI. EI is plays a big part in forming, developing, maintaining, and then enhancing close personal relationships. Our EI can evolve and build with our desire to learn and grow, unlike our IQ, which doesn’t change significantly over our lifetime.

So how do we work on improving our Emotional Intelligence?

As we’ve already mentioned, we can build and evolve our EI but how do we do it? Here are some ways you can improve your emotional intelligence.

How do you feel today?

Ask yourself this question each day. Try rating your overall sense of well-being on a scale of 0 and 10 and note the scores each day. Take a minute or two to think about how you’re feeling and why that might be, if you’re feeling anxious has something happened today, or are you worrying about something that might never happen? Tuning into your own feelings helps you to recognise those of others around you.

Take your time

Try not to dismiss your feelings before you have a chance to think them through. Healthy emotions often rise and fall in a wave, rising, peaking, and fading naturally. Your aim should be not to cut off the wave before it peaks.

Are there connections

See if you can find connections between the way you are feeling and other times you have felt the same way. Doing this can help you to discover whether your current emotional state is simply reflective of the current situation, or part of a pattern from of another time in your past.

Take notice of your body

Listening to the sensations that your body experiences and linking them to the way you’re feeling will allow you to recognise and process them more quickly in time.

Strengths