Emotional intelligence is the real-time management and judgment gauge of your immediate feelings, emotions and mood. The reaction and response time you mindfully navigate and use, once faced with a situation. This towards everyone and everything you come in contact with, on a daily basis.
It’s your subconscious attitude on how you make decisions, how you instinctively behave, when navigating through life, such as your work and social affairs.
There’s now more focus placed on emotional intelligence, and how it translates into the context of the abstract social and working world. More so than any other measurement, such as IQ.
Emotional intelligence usually activates during those times of stress such as during a job interview, or mingling in a party setting.
The Measurement Of Cool
For many, what these stressful situations trigger are a series of anxieties. These activates are a series of negative emotions such as the fear of rejection or failure, which at times can result in anger.
What you can do, is fine tune your emotional intelligence by knowing, refining, and then improving certain areas of your life.
This includes mindful mood management, self motivation, and interpersonal expertise, as your mind interferes with your immediate emotions at that moment.
Managing Your Mood
This is the ability to manage and command your emotions under duress and fire. Begin by recognizing which of your emotions, springs to the forefront of your thoughts and actions during this time.
Once combined, what’s formed is your emotional operating system, as one influences the other. Your goal is making each of them work in unison, rather than against one other.
If your initial thoughts are. “This job performance appraisal is going to be brutal, and I’m going to suck.” All that does is increases your heart rate, which promotes defensive behaviour.
So instead, tell yourself. “This is an excellent opportunity to learn how I can be more effective at my job.” Reacting this way, once keeping calm, cool and collected, you’ll be more receptive to the evaluation.
Using self-awareness such as breathing slower, will keep you relaxed while allowing you to listen and pay attention. Commanding your behaviour, will stop you from saying anything impulsive.
Generating Self Motivation
This is the ability to get yourself started on something on your own. An action you take based on what you’ve previously learned.
To make it easier to get self motivated, act on a single situation or suggestion, and take it one step at a time.
Doing so will prevent you from becoming overwhelmed or defeated, then procrastination sets in.
Begin by blocking off some time during the day, to do a specific self-improvement oriented task. This could be completing your paperwork by 4 PM, then make it a routine.
Interpersonal Relationships
What you need is to improve your personal skills, when relating to others. Learn how to listen better, while taking criticism well, and not defensively.
What being attentive results in, is it will stop you from suddenly interrupting or making excuses impulsively.
What you want, is to completely articulate someone’s thoughts, so you’ll be able to gain awareness into how you’re perceived by them.
Asking for suggestions on how you can improve, can formulate an action plan. If you don’t understand what’s being said, then ask for more information to clarify.
Refrain from making evaluations or debating issues such as. “I disagree, you’re wrong.” Never become defensive, by using noneffective thoughts.
5 Ways To Improve Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence can be improved upon, provided you know exactly how well yours is developed, while knowing which areas need improvement. Having high emotional intelligence includes:
1.) – Know Your Strengths And Weaknesses
A huge part of self-awareness, is being completely honest with yourself. This by knowing who you are, knowing where you excel, where you might struggle, and then accepting or improving on them.
A highly emotionally intelligent person, knows how to identify where their strength and weaknesses are, and will analyze how to work the most effectively within that framework.
2. ) – Always Remain Motivated
How motivated you currently are, originally began from how ambitious and hard-working you were when younger in school, as a student. Even if you weren’t rewarded for your efforts.
You are a self-starter who’s motivated, if you can focus on and dedicate your attention along with your energy towards the pursuit of your goals. You then have high emotional intelligence in this area.
3.) – You Enjoy Being Around People
Do you absolutely love meeting new people. You also instinctively tend to ask a lot of questions, this immediately after you’ve been introduced to someone new for the first time.
If this is the case, what you’re displaying is having a certain degree of empathy towards others. This is thought to be one of the main components when it comes to high emotional intelligence.
4.) – You Know Why You Get Upset
We all experience bouts of emotional fluctuations during the day, under various circumstances. Most often, we have no idea or understand what’s causing this sudden eruption of anger or sadness.
When it comes to high emotional intelligence, it’s knowing where and how these types of negative emotions are activated, what triggers them. This means knowing why you react the way you do.
5.) – Always Stay Focused
Do you easily get distracted and can’t concentrate. You lose your focus on external stimuli, such as once someone enters a room, or you constantly check your email or Facebook every few minutes.
If so, what it’s doing is keeping you from functioning at your peak efficiency, which is your highest emotional intelligence level.
The Need For High Emotional Intelligence
How important is emotional intelligence, when it comes to your social, business or work success? There are now companies, who’ll hire their marketing staff based strictly on emotional competency testing.
The good news is, it’s possible to improve your emotional intelligence. While it’s counterpart, intelligence quotient or IQ, is thought to be difficult to improve upon, especially increase.
It’s thought emotional intelligence can be increased with deliberate practice, along with focused training.
What’s found effective to improve your emotional intelligence, is getting honest feedback, by someone who’s capable of doing so, such as a mentor.
The biggest issue being, most have no idea or don’t care how others view them.