Emotional Intelligence

By Olaide Taiwo

Emotional intelligence is recognised as a person’s ability to understand and manage their emotions positively. This means that an emotionally intelligent person is usually more able to communicate effectively, be empathetic with others, remain mindful of how their actions may affect others and defuse conflicts. Emotional intelligence is key to building strong relationships, achieving goals and staying in tune with our feelings and intentions.

According to Daniel Goleman, there are five components of emotional intelligence, and it is possible to improve our emotional intelligence if each element is worked on.

Self-Awareness

Being able to understand your own emotions and how your actions or mood may affect other people is a key part of self-awareness. A self-aware person can monitor their own emotions, recognise the ways they react to different things and how this affects their behaviour. Such person is aware of both their own strengths and their weaknesses. They are open-minded and ready to learn from new experiences and their interactions with other people. Self-awareness affects our confidence and understanding of how we are perceived by others.

You may improve your self-awareness by asking other people for feedback, this allows you to look at things from a broader perspective. Keeping a journal is also a very effective way to become more self-aware. Journaling provides an avenue to reflect and keep track of thoughts at different times. This allows us to pay attention to our emotions and the way we think, which is germane to self-awareness. Meditation and mindfulness can also improve our ability to focus on ourselves, and deal with distractions which are essential to becoming more self-aware.

Other ways to improve self-awareness includes SMART goal-setting, the use of ‘positive self-talk’ and cultivating a growth mindset. A growth mindset helps us push out of our comfort-zones for personal development.

Self-Regulation

Beyond being aware of our emotions and how they affect others, it is important to be able to manage our emotions, which is what self-regulation is all about. This does not mean hiding one’s true feelings, instead, it means that we are able to express ourselves appropriately in the right place at the right time. A self-regulated person is able to adapt to change, manage conflict and relax tense situations. They are aware of their influence on others and would take responsibility for their own actions.

Self-regulation can be improved by accepting our emotions in the first-place. It is necessary to be mindful of how we think and feel, and to understand that we have a choice in how we react to situations. It may be helpful to work on our communication skills and the way we manage difficult situations, including our emotions.

We could also work on our distress tolerance skills; distress tolerance is the way we deal with emotional distress. This includes being able to handle an emotional incident without worsening it. A person who has a low distress tolerance may easily become overwhelmed when they experience stressful situations and would often resort to unhealthy coping strategies. However, learning better coping strategies such as finding healthy distractions to take one’s focus away from the distressful feeling could improve distress tolerance. This could include taking a mental or even physical break to do something we enjoy or other relaxation techniques. Self-soothing using various sensory experiences and behavioural therapy may also be effective in facilitating better distress tolerance.  These all come together to form ways through which we can improve our self-regulation abilities.

Social Skills

Good social skills allow us to build strong and meaningful relationships in addition to developing a deeper understanding of ourselves and others. This understanding forms the way we interact with others in our daily lives. Social skills include active listening, recognition of non-verbal cues, empathy and persuasiveness. 

To develop stronger social skills, it may be helpful to practice active listening, be empathetic and show interest when having discussions. Taking note of our own body language as well as that of others could be useful in picking up non-verbal cues that may be missed otherwise. Practicing eye contact aids effective communication whilst asking open-ended questions could provide avenue for exploring a topic or getting to know the other person better.

Empathy

Similarly, to the components discussed above, empathy is a person’s ability to understand other people’s emotions and respond appropriately. Being empathetic is said to facilitate a recognition of the ‘power-dynamics’ of a relationship, which then determines how we interact with different people. Empathy also involves how behaviours are influenced and the interpretation of different situations.

To build empathy, we have to be willing to share our own feelings as this may encourage others to speak up about theirs too. However, there should be no pressure on either party, so as to allow honesty and true understanding of what may be happening. Active listening and genuine concentration are also helpful in bolstering our understanding of the other person’s feelings. This equips us with what we need to give appropriate responses. Whilst this may be uncomfortable for some people, if you think it’s okay, talking to new people is a great way to get to know others and their perspective on situations.

Imagining ourselves in another person’s circumstance may help us discern how we would feel and the kind of responses or reaction we would desire or expect from others. This can come in handy when we are unsure of how to respond, especially on sensitive topics.

Motivation

An emotionally intelligent person has a passion to fulfil their own goals and inner needs. They are able to set goals and desire achievement, which makes them more action oriented. They are usually committed and do not mind taking initiative. Because of their desire for internal reward, they enjoy being in-tune with their activities and are not hesitant to act towards their goals.

We can increase our motivation levels by celebrating our results, however small. It has also been found that having a trusted accountability partner, perhaps a friend or co-worker, could enhance the likelihood of staying on track with our goals.

You may find it helpful to think about what makes us feel fulfilled and set goals around those things. This is because, we are more likely to be continually motivated when our rewards are intrinsic such as fulfilment and purposefulness rather than extrinsic. We should note that this does not negate the importance of extrinsic rewards, however, intrinsic motivation can encourage us to ‘pace onwards’ more since we are in tune with our passions and inner goals.

In conclusion, emotional intelligence has been shown to be just as important as our IQ, which highlights and empathizes the need to be aware of it and work towards improving steadily. Finally, it is good to remember that no one is perfect, therefore, we should be kind to ourselves and others when a more emotionally intelligent reaction or behaviour could have been displayed in any given situation. Nonetheless, if we focus on the above emotionally intelligent components we can perhaps all progress to become a more emotionally intelligent world by making personal improvements at our own pace, if we put our minds to it.