Build Emotional Intelligence With These Five Techniques

Building your emotional intelligence is essential to ensure that you attain personal as well as professional success. Working with emotional intelligence is a vital skill, especially in the workplace. It’s not just today’s trend on what makes people more effective in their work. 

Many companies hold proof that the emotional competence of employees significantly affects the organization’s bottom line. People who have high emotional awareness are more productive and contribute more to the company or their business. 

Understanding Emotional Intelligence

Before we discuss the five techniques to build emotional intelligence, let’s first delve into what it is and the importance of emotional intelligence to attain success. First, it’s essential to acknowledge that we have differences in our personalities, needs, wants, and the ways that we show our emotions. To navigate through all of our emotions’ complexities require cleverness and tact. 

Emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to recognize and acknowledge his or her emotions. It’s also vital that they know and understand what the emotions are telling them. Emotional intelligence examples also include being able to realize how your emotions can affect other people and your way of perceiving others. By having an understanding of what people feel, you can better manage your relationships. 

Five Ways to Increase Emotional Intelligence

Individuals who have high emotional intelligence are highly self-aware. It means that they have an understanding of their emotions. And through this, they are able to get a hold of their feelings and not let it control them. If you want to be the kind of person who is confident and doesn’t let emotions go out of control, then it’s important to build your emotional intelligence. Here are five ways on how you can do that. 

Take time to reflect on your emotions

How do your emotions affect you? How do you make use of them? To exercise being reflective of your emotions, imagine how you would react if you were blamed by your significant other, and you find it unfair, or your boss doesn’t acknowledge the efforts you’ve exerted for a project. Once you identify and recognize your feelings, you’re more capable of exercising control over them. 

Pause for a moment to think

Before you say anything or do something, pause for a moment so you can think. It doesn’t have to be a long pause all the time. However, if it needs a significant amount of time to think over, then take your time. For example, if you’re going to make an important business decision, then you should absolutely take your time. 

However, for everyday scenarios such as how you would react to upsetting situations, pause for a moment before you say something that would probably start a heated argument. Practice thinking first before you say or do something that you might regret doing. An example here is if you’re about to get into a fight with your significant other. You know you want to retaliate in a way, but think ahead of the consequences that the fight will inflict on your relationship. 

Accept criticism and learn from it

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, the CEO of a large company, or an employee, you’re going to receive some criticism somewhere along the way. Whatever your position may be in an organization, you know that you’ve invested so much into your work. So, when you receive criticism, it’s not that easy to take. 

But here’s what you can do. Whenever you receive feedback that is negative, remember that you have two options. You can either be angry, upset, disappointed, hurt, or offended. Or you can set aside your feelings for a moment and ask what you can learn from that situation? Regardless of how the criticism was delivered, it has some truth in it that you ought to acknowledge. You can learn from it so that you’ll improve and be better. 

Observe how others react to your actions

Another way of building your emotional intelligence is by being observant of how others are being affected by your actions. For example, if you say or do something, are other people delighted or offended? If your intention was different, but it came out as offensive, and if you are observant of other people’s reactions, you’ll be able to catch that and apologize to them. This way, you can save those relationships and know better and be more tactful next time. 

In the workplace, you may be very passionate about your work. You’re the best employee there is, and your boss likes that. Some people may get jealous and don’t like the fact that your hard work is making them look lazy. What are you going to do? If you have high emotional intelligence, then you’ll know that you’re better off not minding what others think as long as you’re taking care of your responsibilities at work. The point of emotional intelligence is that you control your feelings and not the other way around. 

If you are at fault, acknowledge and take responsibility 

None of us is perfect, so we’re bound to mess up every once in a while. Sometimes we may do something that will hurt other people. Having high emotional intelligence is being able to recognize that you’ve done a hurtful thing and apologizing to the person for what you’ve done. 

You may find it embarrassing to admit you’re wrong. You may be tempted to avoid or ignore the person. But it will lead to unhealthy relationships, especially in the workplace. Be humble and be mature enough to take responsibility. Be sincere when you’re saying you’re sorry. Most people are willing to forgive as well as forget if they can feel that you’re genuinely trying to make things right. 

Final Thoughts

The last step in these techniques to build emotional intelligence is to practice. Emotional intelligence is not something that you can improve overnight. So, take every opportunity to practice. Reflect, observe, think, and be mindful. These steps will help you in controlling your emotions rather than being controlled by them.