Your Guide To Emotional Intelligence

If you feel like you have a firm grasp on your emotions, you might have high emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a range of psychological skills that you acquire that can help guide your feelings and how you handle them. Many people believe that having high emotional intelligence results in you being a better person, friend, parent, sibling, coworker, and partner. Check on the information below to learn about emotional intelligence and to see how you can gain some essential emotional knowledge.

Components of Emotional Intelligence

There are five main components to having a high, well developed emotional intelligence. These five components include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Having these emotional intelligence components can help you increase your emotional intelligence and work on being a better person.

Required Skills

While you may have all of the components of emotional intelligence, it is also essential that you have the required skills to put your emotional intelligence to work. This means that you need to be able to identify your emotions and the emotions of others, harness your feelings to apply them to your situations productively, and healthily manage your emotions.

Harnessing, applying, and managing your emotions are skills that can sometimes be the hardest to acquire and put into action. Often, these skills will require more attention to master.

Introspection in Emotional Intelligence

One of the critical aspects of emotional intelligence that often gets ignored is introspection. Introspection is thought by many to be at the root of emotional intelligence. Being introspective means being aware of your actions and observing or examining your own mental or emotional health objectively. When you are introspective, you can make healthy observations of your words, emotions, thoughts, and actions. These healthy observations can lead to a productive outcome, like solving a problem or changing unhealthy behaviors. In many ways, introspection seems to be emotional intelligence. Instead, introspection often brings about emotional intelligence.

Ways to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

If you want to enhance your emotional intelligence, there are several things that you can do. The first is to be more self-aware. This seems simple enough as it is one of the main components of having emotional intelligence. However, being self-aware can be very difficult. It requires you to take into account your actions and how they directly or indirectly affect you and those around you. One way to help you become more self-aware is to do self-evaluations or reflections. After each day, take a moment to reflect on the day and evaluate what your words and actions. This type of evaluation will help you be more conscious of your words and actions and how they affect those around you.

You can also improve your emotional intelligence by keeping a journal. Whenever you feel an emotion, particularly when you feel a change of emotion, make a note. Be sure to include what or who triggered that emotion and how you reacted. After keeping an emotion journal for a few days or a week, you might notice a pattern in your emotions and reactions. These patterns will help you harness and apply them in better or more productive ways.

A final way to improve your emotional intelligence to respond rather than react. This can be hard to do, especially when you are first starting. Responding rather than reacting means that you take time to digest and think about the information before responding instead of reacting to news or information. You can respond by actively listening, taking time before you answer, or even walking away from a situation to clear your head before making a decision.