What is Emotional Intelligence or EQ?
Emotional intelligence (or emotional quotient, “EQ”) is the tendency to identify and properly manage your emotions and the emotions of others.
How emotionally intelligent you are, often describes your relationships’ quality, how stressful you are in everyday life, how well you can interact with others, and how efficient you are at work.
What does it mean to be Emotionally Intelligent?
An emotionally intelligent person is not someone who can be “happy” all the time. Instead, emotionally intelligent individuals do not only easily recognize feelings — both in themselves and in others — they also react appropriately and effectively to various emotions.
The core meaning of being an emotionally intelligent person is being able to determine when the emotion deserves a reaction, and when the emotion simply needs to be recognized, experienced, and then let go.
Why is Emotional Intelligence so important?
Your mental health. At any particular time, your mental health is a reflection of, or lack of, emotional balance in your life. How you cope with stress — from daily minor pressures to major life-changing stress — defines a vast portion of your mental health in both the short and long term.
Your relationship. Your ability to effectively handle all sorts of relationships is about the same as the ability to handle the world of emotions. Addressing the emotional needs of a friend, family member, or romantic partner, and then reacting in a manner that helps them meet that need is the cornerstone for any healthy, fulfilling relationship.
Your job. If you have a leadership role in your job, one of the finest management strategies you get to use is listening to what your employees need to perform their work adequately. When they feel they are heard and respected, they are much more productive and less likely to resign or complain.
5 Skills to improve your Emotional Intelligence
- PRACTICE SELF-AWARENESS
Self-awareness means knowing yourself and your actions on three levels: 1) what you do, 2) how you feel about it, and 3) the toughest thing, finding out what you don’t know about yourself.
- CHANNEL YOUR EMOTIONS EFFECTIVELY
Emotions are just the signs that command us to pay attention to something. We can then consider whether or not “something” is essential and choose the best course of action to address it — or not.
It’s all about being able to turn your feelings into what counselors call “goal-driven behavior”—or what I like to call “get your self together.”
- LEARN HOW TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF
Many people first seek to find hope so that they can take momentous steps to change something about themselves and their situation. We try to fill themselves up with some kind of emotional gratification we have in their style that week so that they can actually take action. Yet by the next week, they’ve run out of steam, so they’re back at it again, sucking off to another “form” of inspiration.
So when we need inspiration, we only need to do something that’s loosely related to what we’d like to do, and then action begets motivation begets action, etc.
- RECOGNIZE EMOTIONS IN OTHERS TO CREATE HEALTHIER RELATIONSHIPS
Healthy partnerships — romantic relationships, family relationships, and marriages begin with the acknowledgment and appreciation of each other’s emotional needs.
That is what you do by communicating and empathizing with others. And by listening to others and by being frank with others — that is, by being open.
- INFUSE YOUR EMOTIONS WITH VALUES
A lot of this kind of reasoning, though, loses the mark. And that’s because moral maturity doesn’t matter without driving your beliefs.
So, to live a life that you really want to live, you must first be clear about what you really value, since that’s where your emotional energy is going to be directed.
Reference: https://markmanson.net/emotions/emotional-intelligence-skills
Photo de Dennis Leinarts provenant de Pexels
