How To Improve EQ (Emotional Intelligence): 19 Strategies
If you want to understand how to improve eq (emotional intelligence), you’ll love this article.
If you realize that you’re not emotionally clever person then there isn’t any need to worry because there are several ways of enhancing emotional intelligence.
Here I will provide and explain the 19 main tips and that I believe that it’ll open you up to a path towards personal and experienced growth.
These tips are a summary of techniques that typically improve your social and communication skills and therefore reason why it takes you through a journey of building as much success as possible.
Read through each tip and find a way of applying them:
How To Improve EQ:
1. Make a Habit of Always Watching Your Feelings
The whole point of being emotionally clever is so that you can all the time be in charge of all of your feelings and also those of others.
An important step to take towards increasing that’s all the time taking time to observe how you normally feel about various things in your life.
This will help us know whether our reactions and response to them are healthy and positive.
You will therefore have an opportunity to decide how best various things should be handled and the kind of reactions that allow for a happy existence.
The more you watch your feelings, the more you learn to be in charge of them. The same is experienced even when dealing with different people in your life.
By paying attention to your feelings you finally learn to trust your emotions and also become more clever at managing them. Much of these essentially involves being conscious and aware of how your emotions influence other things in your life.
By watching them and living in the moment it is going to be easier for you to control and manage them.
2. Take Responsibility for Your Actions and Behavior
It is your emotions which all the time influence your actions and responsibility and learning to be responsible creates room for you to direct them effectively.
It is a way of directing yourself to all the time do what is best for you and others an in the process allows for the growth of eq.
When your actions and behavior are negative you’ll find reason to get back to the root cause which is your emotions and start making changes from there.
All this should begin by knowing you are responsible for hurting someone or lashing out.
By taking responsibility you’ll understand how your feelings and those of others are affected at different times and then from there make an effort to make changes.
Another thing is that once you begin taking responsibility for how you behave and feel then that positively impacts all areas of your life including boosting your emotional intelligence.
3. Getting Rid Of Negative Feelings
Negativity is generally what holds us back from thinking straight and even be in control and manage our emotions. What it does is that t clouds our hearts and minds making us prone to quick anger and disappointment.
Working towards eliminating negative feelings is a process towards taking back control.
Through it you realize how best to think and feel when encountered with different events and experiences. A person will in the process change their attitude and actions.
According to research, each of us has the ability to manipulate our brains changing our feelings, emotions and attitude with time.
Taking the chance to feel your mind with positive vibes allows the same to grow in your heart too and you’ll begin understanding the importance of guarding your emotions and allowing yourself not to be guided by how things are but rather by a deep analysis of each situation affecting you or any other person in your life.
The more positive you feel then the more open you’ll be to cultivating emotional intelligence.
4. Exercising Mindfulness
Mindfulness is that easy act of paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, emotions and external environment without passing any judgment. It is watching your life moment by moment as it happens and being of all of your present happenings.
We can enhance or emotional intelligence by being conscious of all that happens in the present moment and mainly those that affect our emotions.
To be conscious you’ll have to remember of your thoughts, emotions and feelings.
The whole idea of being present with experience gives you the ability to understand your emotions and then from there find out how to manage them.
It is seen that purposefulness is a crucial aspect of mindfulness and precisely what contributes to an increased level of emotional intelligence.
A big part of being conscious is to make sure that you don’t allow thoughts to be in charge of you but rather gaining all the control yourself.
This makes it easier for you to gain emotional intelligence as you’ll be paying more attention to the present moment and not getting stuck in worries about the past and future (1).
Generally, mindfulness helps you observe the way you think and feel about different life experiences.
5. Improve Listening Skills
By improving your listening skills it is going to be much easier for you to begin to actually be in touch with what other people feel. This gives you time to give emotions more attention and that entails what other people feel.
The easy act of listening confirms that an individual is really ready to understand people’s perspective and having taken time to truly be in the present with their words then you won’t be limited with your judgment.
The better of our leaders are aware of the undeniable fact that taking time to listen to others is a crucial life aspect.
Each person all the time has a robust desire to be heard and by developing effective listening skills we not only get information but are also able to connect with people having picked up meanings and messages behind the words spoken.
With good listening skills you are also able to find out how to interpret your emotions and those of the people you are listening to and then understand how best they can be managed.
6. Building a Growth Mindset
Individuals with a growth mindset are those who show willingness to look beyond the scope or the evident before making a positive or negative judgment.
They understand that our abilities and skills aren’t limited or constant and that there’s all the time room for improvement.
This means that when you have a growth mindset you find out how to give situations a second chance of thought before deciding it’s the way it’s.
The moment you develop a growth mindset, you’ll be more open to change and will begin seeing the world through different clever eyes.
A big part of you’ll start understanding step by step what others feel, the best way to handle different situations in life and also how to respond to all your life’s experiences and events.
An individual with a growth mindset never uses their emotions to make decisions or take actions but rather think through every situation.
You will even be in a position to know that intelligence can all the time be developed and improved and that it’s within your power to continue learning and finding out other ways of handling and managing life.
7. Be More Social
Socializing is all the time an opportunity to learn of individuals’s behaviors, emotional changes and thoughts and also seeing yourself through your response to them. Having great social skills can highly improve a person’s social skills.
This is so because it lets you be a better person both at heart and mind.
It is a chance to learn of various people’s behaviors and also train yourself to adapt to each and each one of them.
Being social means being an outgoing person and one who relates with people well. It is much about reaching out to the world and trying to understand it through different people.
The more one socializes then the easier it is going to be for them to put their emotions I place having understood the importance of enhancing their relationships with others.
You in fact learn to take time and think of situations before reacting and also find the need to help people through their difficulties.
This means that you’ll never find it difficult to share your pains and joys with other people and also take time when they reach out to you and this makes up for a big part of you being emotionally clever.
Through all that you learn not to get angry quickly and know the importance of maintaining a peaceful co-existence.
8. Practicing Empathy
Being empathetic is all about knowing why someone feels and behaves in specific ways and having the ability to bring some kind of understanding to them.
To effectively exercise empathy you must all the time put yourself in the shoes of others. Think of what it would feel to be in the situation they’re in and think of ways that you would have managed through it.
This whole process lets you be in touch with your own feelings and with the emotions of other people and therefore know what to say in times of pain and difficulties.
You should note that empathy is all about having the ability to recognize and share the emotions of what other people are going through.
Exercising it every moment you get makes you more aware of emotions thus leading you to emotional intelligence.
9. Read People’s Body Language
Another easy way to cultivate eq is through reading people’s body language.
This is important because you are all the time able to pick up their true feelings and thinking to yourself how best you can connect with them.
The whole idea here is reading between the lines and getting to understand how people really feel about different life aspects.
It will help you to all the time concern when need and even have a way of connecting with different kinds of emotions at different times.
It is very likely for you to find that people say one thing but mean the other and making an effort to read people’s body language ensures that you can intelligently connect with them.
10. Reducing Stress Levels
When one is stressed then it means they’re overwhelmed by different emotions and in most cases have allowed them to take control of their lives.
It is one of those conditions that deter you from being emotionally clever as you can’t control how you feel.
To gain back emotional intelligence you’ll need to make an effort of reducing your stress levels as it’s the only way you can gain control over your thoughts, emotions and actions.
Am sure you have noticed so many people finding it hard to stay emotionally balanced when they’ve things stressing them.
It normally takes over your mind and feelings and makes it difficult for you to act out of a point of reason and understanding.
The moment you get rid of stress however, that weight is lifted and you can now use your power of thought and feeling more effectively.
11. Always Being Grateful
It is believed that gratitude is a life quality that has the power to influence all other areas of who you are positively.
It is through appreciating what you have, who you are and the world around you that you really begin to be more reasonable.
You will all the time feel the need to make things better and that is simply possible if you’re more emotionally clever.
Gratitude makes yet one more positive and this helps you to not act out of the emotions you hold but by having understood situations.
12. Reflect On Your Emotions
It also helps if you learn to take some time after a long day and just reflect on how you felt during different events of the day and whether those emotions were good for you or not.
This way you can determine where to make changes and how to strategically do this particularly when you understand how not being in charge of your emotions at a particular time led to a negative result.
Think of how a workmate made you angry and how you reacted and whether or not that response was good.
The more you do this the more you learn the need to be in touch with and relate well with your emotions and also those of other people.
13. Always Be Observant
Being a more observant person gives you an opportunity to see how things are and how certain feelings and emotions impact your life and the life of other people in your environment.
This should include observing yourself and how you influence the environment and also observing other people and how they influence the environment.
This way you’ll determine how things should be best done and the role you need to play to make life better.
14. Don’t Take Offense
In times when people make you feel bad or pass any criticism it would all the time be a good thing if you force yourself to not feel offended but instead try to understand why they do this.
Try as hard as possible to not let yourself feel angered but instead use your intelligence to make sure that you raise your opinion in a positive way.
This will help you to find out how to all the time calm yourself down when faced with challenging or miserable circumstances.
15. Practice
Just like any other skill in life, developing emotional intelligence also takes practice to make perfect. You need to keep controlling your emotions and helping through theirs having understood them every chance you get.
The more you bring out your emotional intelligence skills the more they keep growing in you and that creates room for you to become that precisely.
By practicing I mean all the time reasoning with emotions, understanding them, managing etc. it is really the simplest way for you to make that skill become a part of you and also share it with other people.
16. Acknowledge Your Emotions
For you to find out how to manage or control your emotions you must first begin by acknowledging them.
When you feel you are angry just acknowledge that anger and let it go, when you feel disappointed just do the same and you’ll feel all that negativity fading away.
The more you keep fighting your feelings the more you increase your chances of being in charge of them.
This is an act you’ll see in emotionally clever people, whereby during high tense situations they all the time process information in a timely manner and finally respond in the most appropriate way.
17. Show Interest in People
There is part of emotional intelligence that involves showing concern for and having the ability to manage the emotions of other people (2).
You can’t do this when you show little interest in people as that utterly locks your mind and heart from them.
The thing is that you need to be a part of other people’s lives for you to find out how to recognize, understand and manage their emotions.
Having a greedy attitude brings about so much negativity, and makes it impossible for you to grow your emotional intelligence.
18. Love
A loving person all the time has an open mind and heart and are accommodative to all the emotions being experienced, either theirs or of the people in their life.
This tip calls for you to exercise love and that should be both self-love and that shown to other people.
This way, it creates a path for you to all the time find it important to be sure that emotions are well managed and that they don’t lead to you or any other person being hurt.
With love, it becomes simpler for you to think through situations before acting because you understand how important it’s for you to increase your general wellbeing and for the people you love.
19. Have a Company Of People Who Are Emotionally Intelligent
They say that it’s all the time easier to pick up a habit if the people you have as friends have the same.
If you therefore have the desire to grow your emotional intelligence then try to be around people who are emotionally clever.
You will slowly learn from their actions, thoughts and feelings and that is really easier for you to know what emotional intelligence entails.
It is all about finding the right kind of individuals to show you direction and you’ll at the end get there.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article about how to improve eq and was able to help you to improve your emotional intelligence and your social & communication skills, making you more able to attain your goals.
The next step is to take action and begin practicing what you learned, remember that these skills also require training and practice to master.
I gave you the tools, but you’re the one who must use them.
