How You Can Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

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You probably already know the impact emotional intelligence can have on your life beyond your career and the effects EI has on your relationships, self awareness, mood management and empathy for others. Cultivating your emotional intelligence can enhance your sense of personal mastery and competency over your own life.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

EI is not any one thing in and of itself. It includes elements of self awareness, emotional management, empathy, and social skills. It’s understanding how you behave and gaining insight to your feelings.

Emotional management allows you to keep your moods in perspective while your measure of empathy allows recognition for the feelings of others to help create better relationships. This also relates to your social skills and the ability to manage conflict resolution, negotiations and interpersonal skills. EI is the unique intersection between your heart and your head.

Without a healthy, productive emotional IQ, our relationships struggle to grow and mature for positive change. Your career can suffer if your boss thinks your a loose cannon or you don’t really have empathy or care about the individuals you manage. Friendships are few and far between or lack depth and no great sense of connection.

So with that in mind, I’ve come up with a list that may help tweak some areas of your life that have helped me learn and grow.

1.Take ownership for your emotions. Blaming someone else for making you feel a certain way is relinquishing your responsibility to take charge of how you feel. Just because someone made you angry doesn’t mean they forced you to be angry. If your still holding a grudge, it’s because you choose to keep hanging on.

2. Recognize the feelings of other’s. Nothing goes further than genuinely letting someone know that you can understand how they’re feeling and can appreciate they’re point of view.

3. Keep good company. Spend more time with people who are concerned with your feelings. Spend less time with self absorbed, critical, self centered individuals. Find friends who are empathetic to your feelings as well as those you can feel empathy for.

4. Compel yourself to improve. Challenge yourself on what you can do to develop new and productive patterns of behavior. Develop a strategy to channel emotions to help achieve a goal. Regular visits to myselfdevelopment.net is a good start.

5. Listen more, criticize less. Resist the urge to criticize, judge or make negative comments. Listen with understanding of other’s feelings, rather than judging their actions. If you feel the urge to butt in and get your point across… count to ten.

Written by Robert Hunt