Emotional intelligence is the ability to maintain awareness of, healthily express, and regulate your emotions. Emotional intelligence skills help people to recognize and understand their emotions. Emotional intelligence also teaches people to understand, maintain awareness of, and relate to the emotional experiences of others. In learning to understand and regulate our own emotions, we also learn to understand, and learn to cope with others and their own emotional experiences. Emotional intelligence is also known EQ, or emotional quotient.
The Value of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence, EQ, is a valuable skill for everyone to learn. EQ presents us with the opportunity to not only understand, but to also excel at, developing a healthy sense of self, healthy relationships, better quality social interactions, and an enhanced quality of life. Since EQ provides us with the skills to better understand our emotions, it allows us to learn to understand what we are feeling, learn to name and validate those feelings, and gives us better skills to communicate and express those feelings so that we can get our unfulfilled needs addressed.
EQ teaches us skills of self-awareness, self- compassion, self-recognition, and self-expression. While it may seem selfish to focus on our own emotional experiences, the value of EQ extends far beyond ourselves. As we become more in tuned with ourselves and our own emotional experiences, our understanding of others and their connections to their emotions grows. Increased understanding of social interactions helps us to reduce conflict, improve decision-making and problem-solving skills, strengthen the quality of our relationships, and enhance the quality of our life experiences.
Emotional Intelligence Skills
As with any other skill, practice improves ability. Taking the time to learn and develop EQ skills is essential. EQ skills impact all areas of our lives. With ourselves, they help us gain better understanding of our triggers, our actions, and their consequences. With others, we gain a better understanding of their ability to manage their own feelings.
Consequently, this helps us to learn how to problem-solve during times of conflict as well as how to address the needs of others to help them cope. At home, learning to understand our family members’ abilities to regulate themselves, or becoming more empathetic to their difficulties identifying and expressing their needs, teaches us how to navigate our relationships with these individuals. At work or school, we gain increased ability at recognizing signs of distress in our friends, we learn how to choose quality friends, and we maintain awareness of making decisions that negatively impact us in these environments.
To sum up, examples of skills we learn by increasing our emotional intelligence skills include:
· Self-awareness
· Self-management
· Self-compassion
· Self-expression
· Stress Management
· Social Awareness
· Relationship Management (Helpguide.org)
· Communication
· Emotion Expression
· Emotion Regulation
In Summary
If your desire is to lead a healthy life that allows you to build healthy relationships at work and at home and have lived experiences that align with the person you want to become, increasing your emotional intelligence skills will help you to do this. You can live a life with reduced conflict and stress, improved communication, and enhanced self-expression when you take the time to develop the necessary skills to allow you to achieve these goals. And as emotion intelligence is a skill, it is a goal you can work on over time. You can build your skills as your life situation changes, and you can adapt as needed.
If you are struggling with your relationships and/or sense of self, and believe that you may need to work on your EQ skills, schedule a free 15-minute consultation call with me today!