10 BEST WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The top 10 best ways to improve your emotional intelligence have been discussed in this article. EI or emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize others and one’s own emotions. EI is the use of emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour. You can easily improve your emotional skills by practising in the real world. By getting feedback on your performance from an experienced coach or person, you can improve your social behaviour and emotional intelligence. Everyone lives his life in his way. It is not sure he lives life perfectly because there is always room for improvement. Here, I am going to tell you some ways to improve your emotions and emotional intelligence to bring about a revolutionary change in your emotional behaviour. It depends upon your way of thinking and determination to act upon my advice.
1-Try to become more self-aware
Self-awareness is indeed one of the important areas of your emotional intelligence. This is the cornerstone of all the other areas. First of all, try to be aware of your own emotions before knowing about other’s emotions. By joining a course or group, by hiring an instructor, you can easily become more aware of your feelings, and thoughts. You can use a notebook to record your feelings, good work, and mistakes. This will provide you with adequate information to think about your behaviour and priorities. It will help you to figure out how to pay more attention to your emotions. Rate your emotions from 1 to 10 to analyze their intensity.
2-Express your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
The proper way to express your emotions can often help you in managing those emotions. It is difficult to share real feelings, thoughts, and beliefs with others. This approach is not only hard to do but makes it for a very lonely life. We do not often try to know others and others also do not get to know what we think and feel. So try to express your feelings and beliefs so that people can know about you, your likes and dislikes. On contrary, blathering out your innermost feelings and thoughts to everyone is a mistake. You need assertiveness and it is the appropriate sharing of thoughts and feelings. You need to have the right people at right time to express what you think and feel.
3-Discover your inner passions
Everyone does his daily work. But this question has the million’s worth that how many people are excited about the work which they do? A lot of people feel that they are stuck in a rut at their jobs. Many of the people do not magically pluck them up and place them where they are. You will find a few people strive to do the kind of work that makes them excited. It is a tragedy in this modern era that most people have a passion for some kind of activity or work but they have to do different work professionally. It is not so easy to find work that you are passionate about. But keep in mind that the right amount of planning to discover your inner passions will lead you to do your desired work.
4-Know your strengths and weaknesses
Some people are falsely in the view that they are capable to do everything. Some of the people understand their strengths and capabilities. Everyone needs to accurately know his strengths and weaknesses. When you will be able to know about yourself, you will have strong choices in your life. Try to pursue the things you are good at. Try to pursue the thing you have a passion for. This thing will enable you to live a richer and fuller life. Focus on both areas of your personality: your strengths and weaknesses. While making the decision, get the message from both areas of your personality and choose the area of strengths. While decision making, make a combination of your heart and head philosophy. Never let them alone. But as compare to your head, your heart and emotions are a bit valuable.
5-Walk in the other person’s moccasins
An extremely powerful emotion is empathy. The most successful politicians, media personalities, leaders, philanthropists are high in empathy. The ability to empathize will help you to get closer to other people. In this way, you will win their support when you need it. In this way, you will be able to defuse potentially high-charged situations. When you will try to understand others, you will gain respect. Do not be self-centered in behavior. Be social be happy. Try to pay more attention to others being empathic. While communicating with someone, lesson her/him carefully and attentively. You will become more emphatic by paying attention to what people are trying to say.
6-Respect and manage other’s emotions
It is an impressive skill to respect another person’s emotions. We often see leaders or politicians who easily calm down an angry crowd. You might have noticed that some people mismanage the emotions of others. Suppose you are the CEO of an esteemed company and the company is confronting its downfall. While facing media your wrong body language, the wrong tone of voice and facial expression will be considered to guess about the current situation of your company. You will have to manage your emotions to deceive the media. This is what I try to explain. It is a two-step process to manage other people’s emotions: first of all, you should try to feel the pain, fear, expectations, and joys of other people. Respond to them in the way that you are serious to solve their problems, share their grief and celebrate their joys.
You have to determine the core problem after that you can decide to manage the thing properly so that people get happy or relieved. Try to look at the situation calmly. Be capable to analyze what is going on. If bad things have happened try to be on your toes. You should assure the other person that you both are on the same page. Be consistent in your body posture, message voice to make him/her realized that you have deep sympathy for him/her.
7-Be socially responsible
One of the pleasant emotional experiences is social responsibility. It shows how much you care about others. Being socially responsible is what you can do for other people. At the gross root level, you can donate money to a worthy cause or charity. It is the first step of being socially responsible. The second phase is to help a charity organization to collect money. You can easily motivate your family, friends, and people where you work to contribute for charity purposes. If you want to work by yourself then you will have to detect social problems including, homelessness, hospitalized people, spousal abuse, food shelters, specific diseases, and elderly care. After identifying a cause you should think about the best way to contribute. You can also contact the organizations involved in social service. You can join an organization as a volunteer to serve others.
8-Manage your impulses
Another important pillar of emotional intelligence is to manage your own emotions, specifically your impulsiveness. In other words, the ability to have adequate awareness about your emotions and managing other’s emotions. Try to manage your impulses in three basic ways: distraction, analytic and coping. If you feel a problem in impulse control coming, try to quickly deal with it by distracting yourself. Try to shift your thinking by counting to ten or focusing on prepared distracting thoughts. Try to gain the ability to change your thoughts quickly. Analytic involves stopping and analyzing your thoughts when you feel impulsive. Ask a question yourself that why are you thinking about this stressful event or problem. Why I am not thinking something less stressful and what is the best alternative thought.
A Coping strategy is an advanced practice to cope with some specific thoughts. Such types of thoughts include statements e.g. I can control and slow down my thoughts. I can think of alternatives and do not have to rush with a response. This strategy will help you successfully deal with stressful problems or events provided that you practice them in advance. For normal levels of impulsiveness, these techniques are most effective. If you feel that the emotional problem is more intense, you should consult a psychologist or psychiatrist. To learn more you can visit CHADD.
9-Be more flexible
Every person has his/her routine and habit of doing things in his/her favourite ways. You will feel problems when you get stuck in a rut and become more inflexible. A rigid person misses out on opportunities and falls behind in learning new approaches and techniques. He often does work in an unproductive way. A person having emotional intelligence and flexibility can easily handle all types of situations. Try to look at all possible consequences before taking any step. Sometimes you will have to go with the flow and sometimes you will have to change your routine to kill monotony.
10-Be happy
Try to find out the scale of your happiness. Divide the happiness from 1 to 10 levels. I have observed the people high in emotional intelligence are happy. They are happy because good things happen to them due to their emotional intelligence. The person who manages his emotions well can easily handle all types of situations. He walks up happy in the morning and while encountering challenges throughout the day he can easily maintain a certain level of happiness. While encountering the tribulations and trials of daily life his happiness buoys his spirits. He keeps his mind clear to prevent himself from unproductive self-pity or other non-helpful emotions. As compare to depressed people, happy people come up with more solutions to cope with problems.
Being a happy person you can control your mood to serve your purposes. After acquiring emotional intelligence you will have an awareness of when to be vigilant, excited, happy, anxious, or happy. Happiness involves many advantages: you will be appreciated, you will get through tough times easier, you will be more helpful to people and you will always feel better. It has also been proved through research that happy people live longer. People try to find happiness in material goods. The real happy people are the givers. I hope, when you will develop your emotional intelligence, you will come to know that it costs you nothing to spread happiness in society. It will be precious which you will receive in reward from God.