Emotional intelligence

• Posted on Dec 16, 2018

Emotional intelligence is a critical key to success in any business, relationship, and life in general. When it comes to finding success in everything that you do, many people mistakenly believe that your IQ places a significant role in your success. We’ve all spent a ton of time in school and throughout our lives, diligently cramming, writing exams, and studying in order to become more intelligent human beings. However, over the last several years, researchers have determined that emotional intelligence has more of an impact on success than IQ.

According to researchers, there are 19 different ways that a person’s emotional intelligence will contribute to the bottom line in any organization. Emotional intelligence guides our ability to deal with others effectively. Not only does high emotional intelligence help you to understand your own emotions, but the feelings of other people as well. Emotional intelligence skills are incredibly essential in industries like marketing, where the emotional reaction to an ad could mean the difference between the customer making a purchase or walking away. However, emotional intelligence affects all aspects of your professional and personal life, from your ability to sell to your ability to form healthy relationships.

Emotional intelligence continues to be an increasingly popular skill to have, especially when it comes to finding professional success. Many people might wonder why emotional intelligence continues to increase an evolving workplace. Simply put, emotional intelligence isn’t a trend. Many companies have determined that employees with a high level of emotional intelligence have a significant impact

on the company’s bottom line. In fact, companies that have employees with high levels of emotional intelligence have seen significant increases in both the total sales and productivity of their company as a whole. If you are looking for a way to boost your emotional intelligence to allow you to find success in both your personal and professional life, here are five easy ways to increase your EQ and five reasons why you should work to develop your emotional intelligence.

1. Learn to Stay Cool

Italian researchers recently discovered that changes in body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate are good indicators of stress. Stress can dramatically affect how you deal with problematic situations and can lower your emotional intelligence. If you feel yourself getting stressed, take a walk outside and get some fresh air before you lose your cool. While stress is a normal part of life, negative stress will significantly weaken your emotions and distract you from rational thinking.

Stress is especially problematic at work. Bad and broken communication lines with colleagues lead to poor relationships. This makes it imperative to identify when stress levels start to get too high, and to learn how to manage stressful situations before it can damage relationships. If you want to boost your emotional intelligence, then you need to learn how to avoid succumbing easily to stressors in your personal and professional life.

Develop Empathy

Other people can be a huge source of stress for just about anyone. The opinions, judgments, demands, and requests of others are often the cause of stress that drives our adverse emotional reactions. When a colleague, supervisor, or investor, or even a family member, get under your skin, you need to take a step back and try to see the situation from the other person’s perspective. Try and examine it from all angles. It could be entirely possible that you are reading into the situation, or that their intent is altogether different from how you’re understanding the situation. Learn to take a step back from frustrating situations with others and consider the possible motivations of the other person before you react.

Have a Plan B

As stated before, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage not only your own emotions but the emotions of others as well. However, how well can you actually manage your feelings when you aren’t prepared for what’s coming next? Being reactionary to life’s challenges and situations is a sure-fire recipe for inappropriate emotional reactions. To avoid this from happening, you can prepare yourself well before you have to make a decision.

Start by projecting potential outcomes every time that you have to make a decision, even if that outcome seems like a bit of a stretch. Take the time to imagine how you will react to each outcome so that you aren’t completely caught off guard while making the decision. With enough practice, you will eventually find that even if the outcome isn’t one that you predicted, you will still be able to handle each outcome and begin to be able to think on the move.

Be Definitive

Challenging the bad habits that you cling to is crucial if you want to develop your emotional intelligence. Many people will use passive language to protect themselves and hedge their bets. Unfortunately, using passive language is inherently weak, whether it is used in writing or verbally. In fact, passive voice literally means telling the story of what has happened to you. Are you someone who has things happen to them, or are you the person who makes things happen? To boost your emotional intelligence, you need to focus on highlighting the actions that have already been taken. Learn how to take ownership of your own life and emotions, and show those around you, from customers to stakeholders, how high your emotional intelligence really is.

Practice Emotional Intelligence on Others

A critical aspect of high emotional intelligence is your ability to influence the emotions of others, according to Psychology Today. When someone in your life comes to you and is stressed out and panicked, are you calm, or do they leave more aggravated after speaking with you? Whether in close personal relationships, interactions with strangers, or with professional relationships, how you deal with and influence others say a lot about your emotional intelligence. To help you boost your emotional intelligence, you need to strive to leave each person that you interact with in a better state than when they first arrived.

2. Why You Need to Develop Your EQ

Emotional intelligence is an essential skill that you need to develop to find happiness and success in all aspects of your personal and professional life. Emotional intelligence will no doubt affect the success you experience throughout your life, and research shows a direct link between EQ and your professional success. Here are five reasons why you need to develop your emotional intelligence.

You Learn Self-Management

The best way that you can learn self-management is to stop and question your emotions before you act or speak. By taking a moment to stop and think before you take action, you can start to accurately perceive your emotions and begin to be aware of them as they happen. From the moment that you’ve identified your emotions in your almost reaction, you can better make decisions more rationally because you are aware. Boosting your emotional intelligence will result in you being able to strengthen your emotional awareness to manage your behavior better and appropriately communicate your feelings. Learning self- management techniques not only applies to your personal life but can become a valuable skill for managing your professional relationships daily.

You Get to Know Yourself Better

When you develop your emotional intelligence, you also end up developing a high level of self-awareness that can lead to a better understanding of yourself, which allows you to manage your life and your preferences better. When you know yourself better, it can help you choose the right jobs and set to work with strong motivation. With high levels of self-understanding and self-awareness, you won’t be as afraid to step out of your comfort zone, to tackle big projects, or go after untouched territories. Whatever your goals are, when you know yourself better because of increased emotional intelligence, you will feel the strength you need to accomplish your goals. When you can achieve your goals, you will ultimately notice a boost in confidence and overall happiness.

3. You Learn to Be More Adaptable

Having a high level of emotional intelligence isn’t just about becoming more self-aware, but also being better able to identify and understand the emotions of the people around you. Being able to identify the moods, behaviors, and emotions of others provides you with the ability to find access to anyone and to fully understand what kind of communication works best when dealing with that person. When you can improve your communication, it allows you to be able to use different relationship strategies that are based on the situation before you.

4. You Build More Effective Professional Relationships

Emotional intelligence helps you to become better at communicating with a wide range of people. When you find the right way to communicate with others in your professional relationships, you become better at making negotiations and becoming a trusted partner for your clients and customers in the long run. If you are dealing with an unsatisfied individual in your business, a high level of emotional intelligence will help you to assess the reasons behind their dissatisfaction before you make a harmful assumption. This can significantly increase your credibility with not only your employees and colleagues, but with your business partners, clients, and vendors. You can effectively increase your credibility and demonstrate your trustworthiness and collaborative spirit when you have high emotional intelligence.

When it comes to your success in your life, your ability to cultivate relationships by building rapport with others and managing long-term interactions will ultimately determine whether people feel drawn to you or are pushed away. This is the social skill component of emotional intelligence and is an essential aspect of the human experience.

5. More Effectively Manage Crises When They Arise

When you can increase your emotional intelligence, you won’t just perform well during a crisis, but you will flourish. During times of uncertainty, as a leader, people will look to and depend on you for guidance and your expertise. Having a high level of emotional intelligence and thorough understanding how your emotions affect not only your thinking but your behavior as well, is absolutely essential for being able to deal with a crisis. Having control over your emotions will also influence how well you are able to navigate any turbulence that might arise.

The good decisions that you can make during a crisis are critical. However, you will never be able to make a good decision during a crisis if it isn’t well-informed. Well-informed decisions are directly linked to the tenets of emotional intelligence. When you take the time to peel back the layers of pretense and spend some time taking a closer look at the various elements that influence your thinking, behavior, and results, you will always have an opportunity to make better decisions during a crisis that will lead to optimal results.

Conclusion

The benefits of obtaining a high level of emotional intelligence is by no means limited to these five. It takes a wide range of skills to succeed in both your personal and professional life. Expanding research continues to show how important emotional intelligence is for finding success in everything that you do.

Many of the skills that are associated with high emotional intelligence might seem to be best suited for those who have a basic understanding of human psychology. While high EQ skills might come more easily to people who are naturally empathetic, anyone can develop their emotional intelligence with a little time and practice. For those who are less empathetic, you will need to spend more time practicing being more self-aware and conscious about how they interact with those around them. By utilizing these five easy ways to boost your emotional intelligence, you will be well on your way to an increased emotional intelligence level and living a life of happiness and success.