Emotional intelligence is the real-time management and judgment of your immediate emotions, attitude, actions and reactions, you use on a daily basis. Your reaction on how you make decisions while navigating through your life, and career.
There’s now more focus placed on emotional intelligence, and how it translates into the context of the real world, than there is on IQ.
If there’s ever a time to use your emotional intelligence, it’s during your work performance appraisal, for instance.
For most, what these job appraisals triggers are a series of anxieties peppered with reactions of dejection, and at times even anger.
What you can do is fine tune your emotional intelligence by knowing, refining, and improving certain areas of your life.
These include areas such as emotional management, self motivation, and interpersonal expertise.
Managing Your Mood
Mood management refers to the ability to manage and command your emotions under duress.
Begin by recognizing which emotions usually compiles most of your thoughts and actions.
When combined, what’s formed is your emotional operating system as each influences the other.
Your goal is making each of them work in perfect harmony complimenting one other, rather than against one other.
If your initial thoughts are, “This job performance appraisal is going to be brutal, I’m going to suck.”
This attitude will more than likely increase your heart rate, which promotes defensive behaviour.
But instead, if you tell yourself, “This is an excellent opportunity to learn how much more effective I can be.”
This will keep you calm and collected, while being receptive to the evaluation.
Then use your self-awareness which reminds you to breathe slower, keeping you relaxed while allowing you to listen and pay attention.
Managing your thoughts will allow you to command your behaviour, so you won’t say anything impulsive which may get you in trouble.
Having Self Motivation
This the ability to get yourself started on something on your own, an action you take based on what you’ve learned.
To make it easier to get self motivated, take one suggestion and one step at a time, as doing so will prevent you from becoming overwhelmed.
Try blocking off some time during the day to do a specific self improvement oriented task, such as completing your paper work on time on a set schedule, then make it a routine.
Interpersonal Relationships
Refers to your personal skills when relating to others. Learn to listen while taking criticism well, and non-defensively.
What this results in is not suddenly interrupting or making excuses, making yourself annoying.
You want to fully articulate someone’s thoughts so you’ll be able to gain awareness into how you’re perceived by others.
Ask for suggestions which will help you to improve, so you can formulate an action plan.
If you don’t understand what’s being said, then ask for more information or clarification.
Refrain from making evaluations or debating issues such as, “I disagree you’re wrong.” Never become defensive by using noneffective thoughts.
5 Signs Of High Emotional Intelligence
It’s thought emotional intelligence can be improved upon, where increasing IQ generally cannot.
This provided you have a fairly good idea how well developed your EI is, and which areas need improvement.
1.) – Knowing Your Strengths And Weaknesses
A big part of self-awareness is being completely honest with yourself, and knowing who you are.
Knowing exactly where you excel, where you might struggle, and accepting or correcting them.
An emotionally intelligent person knows how to identify where their strength and weaknesses are, and will analyze how to work the most effectively within this framework.
2.) – Always Motivated
This began with how ambitious and hard-working your were in school, as a student, even if you weren’t rewarded for it.
You are a self starter who’s motivated, and can focus and dedicate your attention along with your energy towards the pursuit of your goals.
This is a good sign you’re self motivated, and have high emotional intelligence.
3.) – You’re Interested In People You Don’t Know
Do you love meeting new people, and naturally and instinctively tend to ask a lot of questions about them.
You do so directly after you’ve been introduced to someone new whom you’re interested in, for the first time.
If this is the case, what you’re displaying is you 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.) – Do You Know The Exact Reasons Why You Get Upset
We all experience bouts of emotional fluctuations, get moody during the day under different circumstances.
And at times, we have no idea or understand what’s causing this sudden wave of anger or sadness.
It’s thought one of the most important attributes when it comes to self-awareness, is the ability to know where these emotional outburst are coming from.
To know what’s triggering them, knowing exactly why you’re feeling and reacting the way you do.
5.) – Are You Capable Of Paying Attention
Do you get easily distracted, you look whenever someone walks by or enters a room, you lose focus on every email, share, post, tweet, text, you get.
If so, then it’s most likely keeping you from functioning at peak efficiency, which is your highest emotional intelligence level.
The Importance Of Emotional Intelligence
The biggest issue when it comes to a lack of emotional intelligence, is being unaware of how others view them, or how they come across.
So, how important is high emotional intelligence considered to be, when it comes to social or work success.
There are now company’s who will hire their entire sales and marketing personnel, based strictly on emotional competency testing.
The good news is it’s possible to improve your emotional intelligence, while it’s counterpart, Intelligence Quotient, 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.