How many of your decisions are motivated by emotions with belated realization? Modern scientific rationality has us believe that we are capable of making emotionless logical decisions, yet, countless examples from the stock market to choosing a career have indicated that the imprints of our feelings on our life paths remain deep, or even deeper, than our rational mind.
Relationships ask for a balance between rationality and emotions. Emotional intelligence is a powerful skill to master this seemingly unbridled force in our human experience.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and be able to empathize with the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence strengthens your innate ability to recognize and handle different types of emotional situations.
Also known as Emotional Quotient (EQ), emotional intelligence is often compared with IQ – logical and critical thinking to solve problems and grasp complex ideas. Emotional intelligence does not replace IQ; neither is it more or less important. In fact, IQ and EQ complement each other.
As a skill, emotional intelligence can be learned, practiced, and improved. It is made up of four attributes below.
Four attributes of emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence has the following four attributes that guide how to learn it:
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Social awareness
- Social and relationship management
Self-awareness and self-management are about dealing with your own emotions, while social awareness and relationship management are about dealing with the emotions of other people.
The best place to start improving your emotional intelligence is with yourself. Begin with identifying your emotions, knowing why you feel a certain way (self-awareness), and what to do when you feel that way (self-management). Then, you can extend that understanding to identify the emotions of others and the social dynamics of groups (social awareness). Finally, you can find ways to relate to other people while balancing your own emotional needs (relationship management).
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to acknowledge your emotions. First, stop suppressing your emotions. Unfortunately, this has been taught to many of us, especially men. ‘Men don’t cry’ is a common saying.
To improve self-awareness, men, or any of us, do not have to cry. Instead, we can acknowledge what we feel. Calling our emotions by their precise names is powerful because when we put a name to it, we allow ourselves the clarity to take action. It is like setting a target before going for it.
This is not to say that crying should be avoided. Crying offers its own emotional and psychological health benefits, such as reducing stress and anxiety.
The wheels of emotions can assist you in identifying your emotions. Two well-known wheels are:
- The Junto wheel
- Plutchik wheel
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Both wheels visualize a range of emotions, stemming from six to eight core emotions, such as love, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. These core emotions are the most easily identifiable, and they branch into related, more nuanced, and stronger emotions. For example, being surprised can branch into being confused or amazed, which then branches into being disillusioned, perplexed, astonished, and in awe.
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Each wheel has a different classification of emotions. Start with the core emotion, then see if you can describe it more precisely with the branches.
Getting precise about your emotions helps enrich your emotional vocabulary. A richer vocabulary means you are more discerning about the range of emotional nuances and degrees. Then you can formulate a response that matches others’ emotions at an appropriate level.
How to tell what you are feeling? Emotions are a lot more instinctive than thoughts. They are first experienced as bodily sensations, so pay attention to how your body feels.
What are the physical sensations you feel when a strong emotion sweeps over you? For example, when you feel proud, does your chest puff up, your head held high, your eyes shine, and you sit up straight? When you are ashamed, are your eyes downcast and your shoulders droop?
Your bodily sensations provide cues to the emotions being experienced. Noticing these physical cues in yourself is a practice that prepares you to notice the same cues in others.
Self-management
Self-management starts with accepting and appreciating what you feel. This could be hard because, according to Dr. Joan Rosenberg, we want to feel none of these bodily sensations, but we do want to feel a lot of emotions. We try to run away from the bodily sensations that alert us to unpleasant feelings.
Like waves on a beach, emotions come and go. They come up mildly or strongly, they hang for a moment, then they subside. So do bodily sensations. It takes only about 1.5 minutes to feel the waves of emotions, then they always subside.
Being able to ride the waves of emotions is part of self-management. Allow the emotions to wash through you, with no judgment, and lots of self-compassion. Reflect on why you feel the way you do. It could be an event, a word, a sound, a facial expression, a stimulation, or a gesture that triggers certain emotions in you.
For example, if getting stressed is a daily occurrence, find out the times of the day you tend to get stressed. Consider keeping a feeling journal for this purpose – record your emotions with related events. Simply doing so already sharpens your observation of your emotional state. After a few weeks, you would start to notice the common triggers of your stress. Finding ways to avoid or alleviate those triggers would calm your nerves without relying on substances.
Once you are adept at handling the triggers and their effects, you would have more control over how emotions can influence you. You can choose to rein them in, or unleash them, thereby borrowing the force of your emotions to take the right actions.
Negative emotions are not a bad thing. They are a powerful part of our survival instinct, kicking in to protect us from threats. Registering negative feelings does not mean you have to force yourself to feel the opposite way. Instead, take them as a sign that a change may be needed, or something – the trigger – is not good for you.
Social awareness
Social awareness is the ability to read and handle other people’s emotions. It enables you to pick up on emotional cues and make a good guess about other people’s feelings. A high level of social awareness enables you to recognize the power dynamics in a group or an organization.
You do not have to be a glib talker to have social awareness. The emotional triggers that work on you may work on someone else too. Social awareness stems from this empathy – that we are not so different from others after all, and we can relate to the emotions in others because we too experience the same thing.
Knowing what makes someone feel a certain way clues you to choose the right actions, words, time, and place to broach a difficult subject with the right person. You are also less likely to get blindsided by their reactions, and more likely to give an appropriate response to emotional outbursts.
It is helpful to remember that other people’s emotions are usually not about you, even though you can sense them and are affected by them. We are the protagonist of our own lives, so if someone seems sad, angry, or happy, the reason often has very little to do with you, unless, of course, you are directly involved in the situation.
This also depends on your relationship with the person (see below). Simply put, do not take others’ emotions too personally – pay attention to the relevant triggers.
Ultimately, social awareness involves self-restraint in dialing down your own feelings, and the imagination to shift focus onto the other person, seeing the world through their eyes. It asks for a healthy dose of empathy and firm boundaries.
Relationship management
Relationship management is about being good with people without sacrificing yourself. It includes skills such as:
- good communication
- facilitate teamwork
- manage conflicts
- influencing others
These valuable skills are often required at a leadership level, but you can apply them to personal relationships too. Below, we go deeper into how to manage romantic, family, and work relationships. Remember that these tips build upon the four attributes of emotional intelligence mentioned above.
Emotional intelligence to deepen romantic relationships
Emotional intelligence helps you at all stages of a romantic relationship. We tend to invest deep feelings into this type of relationship, so they present plenty of chances for us to educate, or re-educate our hearts.
Applying the four attributes of emotional intelligence, here are some tips that help you cultivate a healthy romantic relationship.
How do you define a good relationship?
This goes beyond the personal details you may tell a date. It is about knowing the kind of love you are familiar with. We attract the relationships that resonate with who we think we are. Our own definition of love shapes our searching lens – think of the keywords we put into Google – keywords of personalities, values, and habits that help us scan our environment for prospective relationship matches.
A lot of this comes from the relationships you saw growing up, most likely your parents’ marriage, or any other relationships that left a deep impression on your younger self. As you grow up and experience life outside your original family, you also modify what it means to have a good relationship. Gradually, you form a very personal definition of love.
Are we aware of this very personal definition of love or how it influences us in choosing someone? Not at all, for many people. A lot of this is subconscious, and thus, we need to become self-aware of our own idea of love. One way to gain a deeper personal understanding of love is to examine the different ways love manifests in our lives. The subject of love is often the type of self-examination performed in the practice of contemplative meditation.
Knowing why we choose the partners we do, and why we have these ideas of a perfect relationship, is the first step in selecting a relationship that actually suits us.
Practice open communication
Open communication is about expressing your feelings, thoughts, and preferences, in a way your partner understands. You cannot expect your partner to read your mind or intuitively get you, even if you have been together for years. If you want your partner to do something (or stop doing something), say it with as much kindness and clarity as you can muster. Make sure they get your message.
Open communication is also about attentively listening to your partner when they communicate their needs, thoughts, and preferences, without jumping to harsh criticism. Seek to understand why your partner wants you to know these things, with respect and sincerity.
Even if you disagree with what your partner is saying, practice self-management to keep your emotions at bay. Some of us carry past memories of traumas and hurts that are triggered when the same situation occurs again.
Here self-management comes in handy – notice the emotional triggers and ride the waves of emotions when they come; try your best not to get drowned in them. Refrain from cutting them off – attune more to your partner’s emotions and body language, since they can tell you as much or even more than their words.
Your partner deserves to be heard and understood as much as you do. Keeping your heart open, you may also learn something new from them.
The level of communication depends on the people involved, but it should be open enough that both feel safe to be themselves in each other’s presence. If your partner is more into actions than words, give them the chance to do so. With practice, you can become more aware of each other’s intentions.
Open communication brings out the similarities and differences between two people. It is perhaps the differences that often stop us from being honest with each other. However, staying silent about an incompatibility does not make it go away – it only leads to more of them down the line, and you may stop confiding important things in each other. This is usually the first sign of a relationship breakdown.
It is best to communicate and compromise an incompatibility, or failing that, a way to accept and allow space for each other to live their truth separately, without risking the threats of guilt or breakup.
Emotional intelligence to nurture family relationships
Few relationships call for a higher degree of emotional intelligence than family relationships because of the decades of emotional patterns that have shaped us into who we are as an adult. These ingrained emotional patterns influence our other relationships – more than we would like to believe.
When you have cultivated some degree of self-awareness and self-management, you will likely realize how the family members closest to you when you were a child shaped the ways you relate to other people as an adult and how you may repeat some of the enduring patterns with your own family.
Uncover ingrained emotional patterns with self-awareness
Uncovering the origins of lifelong emotional patterns, such as how you may silently withdraw when someone disappoints you, or how you may prefer authority figures of a certain gender, is the hard work of introspection and therapy. Many are afraid to dig deep because of the potential emotional storms that emerge once forgotten painful memories are brought to the surface.
Yet, as an adult, confronting and resolving the lingering emotional troubles you have with your original family would release their stranglehold on you. Then, you can start forming emotional connections in a new way, perhaps, a healthier way.
Make time to acknowledge and process emotions together
Children instinctively learn everything in their environment, including the way we deal with our emotions. Therefore, if you are a parent, teach your children emotional awareness by making time to listen to them.
It may help to set aside a specific time when everyone can be present and is allowed to say how they truly feel. When doing so, avoid talking down to your children – try not to make it into a lecture about what to do and what not to do. When your children talk, pay attention to body language, both yours and theirs.
Children can be quick to pick up on such non-verbal cues, even if they may not understand what they mean. Emotions are felt deeply in the body, so it helps to draw everyone’s attention to it, so they can become more aware of the effects emotions have on them.
Doing this helps two things. You set an example of self-management – being able to voice your emotions calmly and humbly, without shame. Your children learn a graceful way to attune to their emotions, voice them out without tantrums, and reflect on what could be better. They also learn how to avoid helplessness when their needs aren’t met, and to ask for what they want in a way that is considerate of others’ needs.
Some emotions can be too much for the children to handle if being addressed directly in this way. These may include negative emotions such as failure, grief, fear, or loss. Maybe you too are struggling to deal with these emotions yourself.
In this case, consider using stories and anecdotes that are a metaphor for the situation at hand. Stories are mirrors that illuminate thematic issues in our lives. Unlike our messy lives, they are told in a familiar structure of beginning, middle, and ending. Find an age-appropriate story that speaks to you, tell it to your children, and reflect on its meanings. Maybe all of you can reach peace of mind together through a story with an ending that makes sense.
Emotional intelligence to build relationships at work
The relationships at work vary with the nature of your job. For example, to do well in customer-facing roles, you need a lot of social awareness and empathy to respond to complaints and requests; while in technical, solitary roles, stronger self-awareness and self-management are likely more helpful to work well on your own. Communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills – these competencies often come under emotional intelligence.
IQ or technical skills may seem to surpass EQ at work, but it is emotional intelligence that can turn a tolerable workplace into a supportive, growth-oriented workplace. This skill is worth training because, unlike many organizational processes, this very human aspect of work cannot be easily replaced by advanced technologies.
Monitor self-talk to minimize bias
Self-talk is the internal voice in our head that incessantly talks to us. We may think that if we keep this internal voice quiet, it has no effect on us. Rather, the opposite is true. Your self-talk shapes how you relate to other people.
Before you get to know more about your coworkers, the internal voice fills in the blanks for you, shaping your (sometimes stereotypical) assumptions of others. It quickly latches onto their mannerisms, speaking habits, or positions, to pass biased judgments about your coworkers.
Your self-talk reflects your emotional state, so monitoring it also keeps tabs on how someone makes you feel. For example, your internal voice may have nothing good to say about a male smoker with long braided hair; by monitoring it, you can hold off your judgment and allow yourself the chance to get to know the person better.
Balanced self-talk reminds you of your biases – that someone’s work personality may not be consistent with who they really are. Such awareness builds sensitivity and open-mindedness – necessary to get to know other people.
Respond, not react
By redirecting your self-talk to more constructive thinking, you will realize how your feelings spill into your interactions with others. This is reacting – acting on the first instincts without knowing how they may affect others. This tends to happen in stressful situations, such as miscommunication with serious consequences.
While you do not have to keep your emotions under wraps, you can intentionally choose responses that fairly address the issue at hand. For example, you may ask questions to prompt your coworkers to clarify what they really mean.
Wait for reasonable clarification before determining how you would feel about this. Your calm composure also encourages your coworkers to slow down and re-assess.
Beware of potential misjudgments that may hurt people and deteriorate the situation.
A deliberate, thoughtful response keeps you from getting swept away by unnecessary drama. It plays a part in maintaining a healthy boundary at work.
Listen actively for feelings, not just thoughts
Active listening means not just hearing, but listening attentively, with your whole body. Allow what is being communicated to sink in, assess your feelings, and respond. If the issue is fraught, clarify with questions about feelings, not just thoughts. Invite your coworkers to share their hunches in addition to data.
Our workplace is getting increasingly shaped by data-driven smart systems, so sometimes we forget the data is meant to aid our intuition and creativity. Forgetting this could overlook the people whose data is being evaluated, such as employees in performance reviews or customers’ feedback.
It helps to remember that behind a data point are many people who experience a range of feelings toward your company and your work.
Allow yourself the chance to weigh your hunches against your mind, balancing between data-driven rationality and emotion-driven value judgments. This balance may be valuable in setting yourself apart, since many decision-makers have become too enamored with cold hard data, at the risk of appearing tone-deaf to human concerns.
Emotional intelligence goes hand in hand with relationship satisfaction
Our relationships often lie at the heart of our highest and lowest moments in life. We may lose our job or our house, but if by some miracle, our closest relationships stay with us, then we may consider ourselves richer than many.
Practicing emotional intelligence gives you many ways to seek out the right people, mend broken bonds, and build a support network that sees you through thick and thin. When you acquire this learnable skill, you do not just escape into a relationship to stave off loneliness; you can become a master in dealing with this salient facet of being human.
One last note on emotional intelligence: manipulation. Emotional intelligence is a type of ability; it does not make someone a saint. Like how high-IQ people can fool others with numbers and complex ideas, high-EQ people may mislead with insinuations and undercurrents.
Although empathy is present in someone with high EQ, they also are capable of manipulating others’ feelings and motivation to serve their interests. Hence developing emotional intelligence is even more essential: you would avoid falling victim to manipulation.
