When it comes to happiness and success in life, EQ is just as important as IQ. We will learn what EQ is, how to improve EQ to live a happier, fulfilled life, build stronger relationships, and achieve your goals.
What is EQ?
EQ is an acronym for Emotional Intelligence which translates to Emotional Intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to reduce stress. direct, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflicts. EQ helps you build stronger relationships, succeed in school and work, and achieve your personal and professional goals. It can also help you connect with your emotions, turn intentions into action, and make informed decisions about what’s most important to you.
EQ is usually defined by four attributes:
- Self-management You can control your emotions and impulsive behavior, manage your emotions in a healthy way, take initiative, make commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances.
- Self-awareness – You recognize your own emotions and how they affect your thoughts and behaviour. You know your strengths and weaknesses, and have confidence.
- Social awareness – You have empathy. You can understand the feelings, needs, and concerns of others, absorb emotional cues, feel socially comfortable, and recognize power dynamics within a group or organization.
- Relationship manager You know how to develop and maintain good relationships, communicate clearly, inspire and influence others, work well in teams, and manage conflict.
Why is EQ so important?
As we know what EQ is, it’s not the smartest people who are the most successful or satisfied in life. You may know people who excel academically but are poor socially and are unsuccessful at work or in their personal relationships. Your intellectual ability or intelligence quotient (IQ) is not enough to achieve success in life. Yes, your IQ can get you into college, but it’s EQ that helps you manage stress and emotions in the face of final exams. IQ and EQ exist side by side and are most effective when they complement each other.
EQ affects:
Study and work performance. High emotional intelligence can help you navigate complex social relationships in the workplace, lead and motivate others, and excel in your career. In fact, when evaluating key candidates for jobs, many companies now value emotional intelligence as important as technical ability and use an EQ test before hiring.
Health. If you can’t control your emotions, you’re probably not controlling your stress either. This can lead to problems health serious. Uncontrolled stress raises blood pressure, suppresses the immune system, increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, contributes to infertility, and accelerates the aging process. The first step to improving emotional intelligence is learning how to manage stress.
Mental health Uncontrolled emotions and stress can also affect your mental health, leaving you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. If you can’t understand, feel comfortable, or manage your emotions, you’ll also have trouble forming strong relationships. On the contrary, this can leave you feeling lonely and isolated, and exacerbate any mental health issues.
Your relationships. By understanding your emotions and how to control them, you can better express your emotions and understand the feelings of others. This allows you to communicate more effectively and forge stronger relationships, both in your work and personal life.
Your social skills. Being in tune with your emotions serves a social purpose, connecting you with others and the world around you. Social skills allow you to recognize friend and foe, gauge others’ interest in you, reduce stress, balance your nervous system through socializing, and feel loved and happy.
Four key skills to increase your EQ
The skills that make up emotional intelligence can be learned at any time. However, it’s important to remember that there’s a difference between just learning about EQ and applying that knowledge to your life. Just because you know you should do something doesn’t mean you will – especially when you’re overwhelmed by stress, which can overwhelm your best intentions. To permanently change your behavior in a way that withstands pressure, you need to learn how to work through stress in the moment and in your relationships to remain emotionally aware.
Key skills to build your EQ and improve your ability to manage emotions and connect with others are:
- Self-management
- Self-awareness
- social awareness
- relationship manager
Manage yourself
For you to use your EQ, you must be able to use your emotions to make constructive decisions about your behavior. When you become overly stressed, you can lose control of your emotions and your ability to act in a mature and appropriate manner.
Think about a time when stress overwhelmed you. Is it easy to think clearly or make rational decisions? Sure is not. When you become overly stressed, your ability to think clearly and accurately assess your emotions – your own and those of others – is compromised.
Emotions are important information that tells you about ourselves and others, but when faced with stress that takes us out of our comfort zone, we can become overwhelmed and lose control of ourselves. With the ability to manage stress and stay emotional, you can learn to take in offensive information without letting it overwhelm your thinking and self-control. You will be able to make choices that allow you to control your emotions and impulsive behaviors, manage your emotions in healthy ways, be proactive, follow through on commitments, and adapt to circumstances. change.
Self-awareness
Managing stress is just the first step to building emotional intelligence. Attachment science indicates that your current emotional experience may be a reflection of your early life experiences. Your ability to control core emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, and joy often depends on the quality and consistency of your early emotional experiences. If your primary caregiver as a child understood and valued your feelings, it is likely that your emotions have become a valuable asset as an adult. However, if your emotional experiences as an infant left you confused, threatening, or painful, you may have been trying to distance yourself from your emotions.
But the ability to connect with your emotions — having a moment-to-moment connection with your changing emotional experience — is key to understanding how emotions affect your thoughts and actions.
Do you experience overflowing emotions, Do you experience one emotion after another as your experiences change from moment to moment?
Are your emotions associated with the physical sensations you experience? in places like the stomach, throat or chest?
Do you experience personal feelings and emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, and joy, each of which is evident in subtle facial expressions?
You can experience intense emotions strong enough to get the attention of both you and others?
Do you pay attention to your feelings? Do they influence your decision making?
If any of these experiences are unfamiliar, you may have “denied” or “turned off” your feelings. To build EQ — and become emotionally healthy — you have to reconnect with your core emotions, accept them, and become comfortable with them. You can achieve this through mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness is the practice of focusing your attention purposefully on the present moment and non-judgmental. The cultivation of mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism, but most religions include some sort of similar prayer or meditation technique. Mindfulness helps shift your preoccupation with thoughts into appreciating the moment, your physical and emotional feelings, and offers a broader perspective on life. Mindfulness keeps you calm and focused, making you more self-aware in the process.
Develop emotional awareness
It is important that you first learn how to manage stress, so you will feel more comfortable reconnecting with strong or unpleasant emotions and changing the way you experience and react. respond to your emotions.
Social awareness
Social awareness allows you to recognize and interpret the primary nonverbal cues that other people regularly use to communicate with you. These signals tell you how the other person is really feeling, how their emotional state is changing from time to time, and what is really important to them.
When groups of people give the same nonverbal cues, you can read and understand the group’s shared strength dynamics and emotional experiences. In short, you are empathetic and socially comfortable.
Relationship manager
Working well with others is a process that begins with emotional awareness and your ability to recognize and understand what others are going through. When emotional awareness is at work, you can effectively develop additional social/emotional skills that make your relationships more productive, fruitful, and fulfilling.
Be aware of how effectively you use nonverbal communication. It is inevitable to send non-verbal messages to others about what you think and feel. Many muscles in the face, especially those around the eyes, nose, mouth, and forehead, help you communicate your own emotions and read the emotional intentions of others without using words. The emotional part of your brain is always active – and even if you ignore its messages – the other parts won’t. Recognizing the nonverbal messages you send to others can play an important role in improving your relationships.
Use humor and fun to relieve stress. Humor, laughter and play are natural antidotes to stress. They ease your burden and help you keep everything in sight. Laughter helps balance your nervous system, relieves stress, calms you down, trains your mind, and makes you more empathetic.
Learn to see conflict as an opportunity to get closer to the other person. Conflict and disagreement are inevitable in human relationships. Two people cannot always have the same needs, views, and expectations. However, that’s not a bad thing. Resolving conflicts in healthy, constructive ways can strengthen trust between people. When conflict is not seen as threatening or punitive, it promotes freedom, creativity, and security in relationships.
