Your emotions often tell you how you’re feeling quicker than your thoughts.
If anxiety sets in during a meeting, it might indicate that something’s wrong. And you might need to evaluate the situation to decide why you feel this way. Maybe you disagree with a coworker’s point but fear speaking up, or perhaps you know a new project deadline forces you to work overtime.
Once you know what triggers your anxiety, you can work to manage this feeling, perhaps taking deep breaths or excusing yourself for a few minutes.
And the ease with which you conduct this process — noticing, evaluating, and managing your feelings — illuminates your emotional intelligence skills.
What’s emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), is the ability to identify and manage your emotions. Having this intelligence also means you can recognize and adapt to the emotions of others.
The first step is recognition, so when you feel a certain way you can name it and understand why you feel it. Then comes managing this emotion, which involves regulating your behavior and taking any necessary steps, like breathwork or meditation, to mitigate overwhelming or unwelcome emotions.
What are emotional intelligence skills? 5 examples
Emotional self-management offers enormous benefits, like improving your social skills because you understand others’ motivations and pursuing professional opportunities despite your imposter syndrome.
To improve your EQ, you can practice the following five emotional intelligence soft skills.
1. Self-awareness
Self-awareness is your ability to consider yourself from an outsider’s perspective, trying your best to remove personal biases and automatic negative thoughts about yourself.
Understanding who you are and why you behave the way you do more objectively can help you better understand your feelings and how they affect your behavior.
To practice emotional awareness, try labeling your feelings. This practice lessens their intensity, making it easier to assess and address them objectively. You could also start a journaling practice to better understand your feelings and how they affect yourself and others.
2. Emotional regulation
Once you’re self-aware enough to recognize your emotions more objectively, you can learn to self-regulate. This involves moving past labeling and toward creating action plans that help you calm overactive feelings or those that negatively impact your life, like public speaking anxiety or frequent worrying.
Other coping mechanisms include listing the pros and cons of behaving a certain way as an emotional reaction or taking five deep breaths before acting on your feelings.
3. Self-motivation
Self-motivation regards how internally moved you are to achieve your goals. If you’re highly self-motivated, you’ll put in the hard work to better understand how your emotions impact your success — and you’ll also work hard to regulate these emotions.
Determine your motivators — be it financial security or stronger relationships — and use these to encourage you to evaluate your emotional landscape. Focus on how your feelings and accompanying behaviors impact you achieving your goals.
Then, work with a career coach, professional mentor, or mental health professional to determine the best path for regulating your emotions and improving your behavior.
4. Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share someone’s feelings. If a friend feels down because they didn’t receive the raise they wanted, you can relate to their disappointment since you’ve felt this emotion, too. This means you can offer them more authentic and meaningful support.
Becoming more empathetic means understanding your emotions better so you can relate them to others’ experiences. In the workplace, you might showcase empathy by approaching workplace conflict calmly since you never know the day a coworker is having. Or you might avoid rushing a trainee so they don’t feel overwhelmed.
5. Effective communication
Practicing your effective communication skills means you can talk more accurately and objectively about your feelings and what you need from others.
This builds transparency, honesty, and trust in your relationships. It also shows that you have the emotional intelligence necessary to move past simply recognizing your emotions and into articulating them to others.
To become an emotionally intelligent communicator, practice active listening skills regarding your thoughts and others’ words. This might involve listening to yourself by journaling about your feelings and using welcoming body language to build trust.
How to improve emotional intelligence skills: 6 tips
Emotionally intelligent people are an asset in the workplace because they can effectively communicate their needs, empathize with coworkers, and diffuse emotionally-charged conflict.
Here are six tips for developing your emotional intelligence skills:
-
Exercise: Physical exercise releases endorphins that can relieve stress and improve your mood. If you notice you’re experiencing negative and unprofessional emotions or recognize a potential trigger, consider getting active to mitigate unwanted feelings.
-
Establish emotional boundaries: Although there are healthy ways to express emotions at work, oftentimes the best method to stay professional is to establish emotional boundaries in your work relationships. You might decide not to discuss personal matters extensively with your manager or share political views in client meetings.
-
Remain flexible: Cognitive flexibility helps you adapt to unplanned events and manage your negative emotions. Delayed tasks from a colleague might slow down your workflow, causing frustration. If you’re mentally flexible, you can quickly adjust to this update in a positive manner and communicate any frustration professionally.
-
Develop empathy: When you improve your emotional intelligence, you improve your empathy, as well. You know more about your emotions and can then recognize them in others.
This helps you better understand why your coworkers behave the way they do to approach their actions in a compassionate and supportive manner.
-
Work with an accountability partner: If you feel too close to your emotions to evaluate them objectively, consider working with a trusted friend, mentor, or mental health professional. You might ask a friend about their take on your emotional regulation skills or work with a therapist to name your feelings and explore the physical symptoms these feelings cause.
And these sidekicks can hold you accountable, checking in with progress and pointing out moments when you let your emotions get the better of you.
-
Ask for feedback: When creating your emotional-intelligence-focused professional goals, ask coworkers and your manager for feedback on your emotional regulation skills.
You can also request more specific feedback, like whether they think you showcase habits of an empathetic person or if you tend to raise your voice during conflicts. Use these insights to make your goals specific, and check in with these individuals about progress throughout your self-improvement journey.
6 benefits of improving your emotional intelligence skills
Increasing your EQ means you can better manage your emotions to improve your overall well-being. This emotional intelligence also offers you the chance to influence others’ impressions of you. Whether you feel it or not, you can behave professionally, confidently, and in a supportive manner.
Here are six benefits of improving your life through emotional intelligence.
1. More effective leadership
Emotional intelligence is a key leadership trait. Effective leaders foster empathy to better understand their team’s needs. They also recognize their own emotions well enough to manage them depending on the circumstances.
As a manager, even if you’re feeling demotivated you might express excitement and encouragement to boost your team’s morale and engagement levels.
2. Better overall communication
Poor communication is a common cause of workplace conflict and misunderstandings. If you can’t express yourself professionally, you might escalate an otherwise healthy dispute. And sharing unclear project specifications might lead to wasted time and effort, frustrating teammates.
Understanding your emotions means you can articulate your wants and needs more clearly, accurately setting expectations so people don’t disappoint you or feel confused about your behavior.
3. Increased self-control
If you know how you feel, why, and how this feeling affects your behavior, you gain more self-control over your actions. You can self-regulate negative emotions and their resulting behaviors and advocate for your needs to feel more self-determination over your life.
4. Decreased stress
Stress hinders your ability to focus and perform tasks accurately. And when you can’t complete your work, it leads to even more stress. But high emotional intelligence means you learn more about what overwhelms you. You can then avoid stressful situations altogether or calm yourself quicker when these situations are unavoidable.
5. Greater desirability to recruiters
Those with high emotional intelligence tend to perform their jobs better and achieve more professional success. And a CareerBuilder survey found that 71% of employers value EQ over IQ. So improving your emotional intelligence skills might help you land that new job or gain a promotion.
6. A higher salary
Improving your emotional intelligence can also lead to a higher salary. According to Travis Bradberry, the co-author of “Emotional Intelligence 2.0,” 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence, and individuals with a high EQ make more money on average than those with a low EQ.
Raise your EQ to raise your well-being
Developing your emotional intelligence skills means improving every area of your life. You’ll understand yourself better so you can spend your energy strategically and go for the right things. And you’ll understand everyone else better, too, so you can approach them with kindness and care.
Start with a journaling practice, writing about different emotional states and what triggers them. Then determine what you’d like to work on — be it empathy, communication, or motivation. Work solo or with a life coach to achieve your EQ-level goals.
