Emotional Intelligence is a valuable asset for personal growth, but can it be learned?
4 Key Skills To Build Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Emotional Intelligence as a noun (a describing word) is built through improving skills, which can be learned anytime. However, to enjoy the benefits of EQ, knowledge must be applied to daily living, and EQ as a verb (a doing word) means working on these skills and putting them to work.
This is how behavior changes over time, equipping those with EQ skills to remain emotionally aware, which helps improve your ability to manage emotions and connect with others.
You can check out our emotion color wheel here.
EQ Building Skill #1: Self-management
Using emotions to make constructive decisions about your behavior is key to EQ. When stressed, you often lose control of your feelings, hindering your ability to act thoughtfully and appropriately.
Emotions play a key role in our well-being and emotional reactions, especially when stressed, and contain information about us and the times we get overwhelmed and lose control of ourselves.
By managing stress and staying emotionally present, we learn to receive upsetting information without it dominating thoughts and taking over self-control.
Managing emotions healthily allows you to:
- Control impulsive feelings and behaviors
- Adapt to changing circumstances
- Take initiative
- Follow through on commitments
EQ Building Skill #2: Self-Awareness
Your current emotional experience is probably a reflection of your early life experience, which is known as the theory of attachment.
Managing core feelings like anger, joy, sadness, and fear often depends on the quality and consistency of your early life emotional experiences.
When a primary caretaker has understood and valued the emotions of an infant in their care, those emotions usually become valuable assets in adult life.
But, if those emotional experiences were confusing, threatening, or painful, the adult will likely try to distance themselves from their emotions.
Connecting moment-to-moment with emotions is key to understanding how emotions influence your thoughts and actions.
Those who tend to “turn down” or “turn off” emotions because of previous attachments need to reconnect to core emotions, accept them, and become comfortable with them to become emotionally healthy.
Mindfulness, the practice of focusing on the present moment purposefully without judgment, is the most effective way to reconnect with emotions.
With roots in Buddhism, although it does feature in most religions in the form of prayers or meditations, mindfulness helps shift one’s preoccupation with a thought towards awareness at the moment, including emotional and physical sensations, bringing a larger perspective on life.
Practicing mindfulness calms the mind and, by focusing on the moment, helps the person become self-aware.
EQ Building Skill #3: Social Awareness
Social awareness, recognizing and interpreting the mainly nonverbal cues others use to communicate with you, enables you to identify and understand how others are feeling, what matters to them, and what their emotional state is.
In groups, understanding nonverbal cues helps you read and understand the group’s power dynamics and shared emotional experiences.
Mindfulness can be used to build social awareness. Still, while mindfulness focuses inward, social awareness focuses outward, and creating social awareness takes some multitasking.
Social goals are better reached when thoughts are set aside, and you focus on the interaction itself, following the flow of another person’s emotional responses, which is a give-and-take process.
Being empathetic and socially comfortable takes paying attention to others in a way that doesn’t diminish your own self-awareness.
EQ Building Skill #4: Relationship Management
When emotional awareness skills include self-awareness and social awareness, further social/emotional skills can be developed to make relationships more effective, fruitful, and fulfilling.
The to-and-fro of being aware of how effectively you communicate and receive nonverbal signals and the other person’s state of thinking plays a significant role in happy relationships. It’s impossible not to send out nonverbal messages.
The many muscles in the face, especially around the eyes, nose, mouth, and forehead, convey emotions wordlessly on your face and the other person in the relationship and help you gauge other people’s emotional intent.
The emotional part of the brain is always on, and recognizing the nonverbal messages you send to others can play a big part in improving your relationships.
Humor, laughter, and play are natural antidotes to stress; conversely, conflict is an opportunity to grow closer to others. Conflict and disagreements are inevitable in human relationships, but resolving conflict in healthy, constructive ways can strengthen trust between people, strengthening the relationship.
