5 Quick Tips for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence. and Increasing Your Success in All Areas of Your Life

Transcription

1 5 Quick Tips for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence and Increasing Your Success in All Areas of Your Life

2 Table of Contents Self-Awareness... 3 Active Listening... 4 Self-Regulation... 5 Empathy... 6 Positive Outlook

3 Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to understand, regulate, and control your emotions. Studies have shown that people with a high EI have better interpersonal, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and communication skills, and all of this translates to better performance in your professional and personal life. EI is a bit like the emotional version of IQ. But unlike IQ, EI can be learned. Here are five key areas you can improve to boost your EI and a tip for each. Self-Awareness Self-awareness is one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence. It is defined as conscious knowledge of your own character, feelings, motives and desires. Self-aware people make better leaders and decision makers because they understand their own feelings and have a clear perception of them. Developing self-awareness is the first step in realizing and achieving what you really want. You can develop your self-awareness by training yourself to be mindful. When you learn how to play the guitar, you are mindful of how you hold the instrument, how you place your fingers, the feelings of the strings when they're played, and the sound it produces. We nearly always drive mindfully; we notice how the car is running, pay attention to the instrument panel, and carefully watch what's going on around the vehicle. Being mindful means doing exactly the same thing you do when you learn guitar or drive, but to do this with your own thoughts and feelings. A good way to learn mindfulness is to practice mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is a type of meditation where you sit in one place and, rather than meditating on a theme or object, you simply let your mind be still and observe what it does. 3

4 Sit in a comfortable place and quiet your mind. Don't think about anything. Instead, focus on the physical sensations and sounds around you. You'll find that it's nearly impossible to keep your mind clear. Thoughts will arise of their own accord. When a thought arises, acknowledge it and let it pass. Don't become attached to it and don't let it grab ahold of you. Let each thought or feeling arise and pass. This is a type of training that teaches you how to observe thoughts and emotions. These thoughts and emotions don't stir you, and you don't judge them. The point of this exercise is that as you get better at meditating, you'll find yourself doing the same thing observing and acknowledging thoughts without becoming attached to them when you're not meditating as well. As a result, you'll become better able to understand and assess your emotions without them grabbing hold of you. Active Listening Active listening is a communication technique that is used in training, conflict resolution, consulting, and other situations where emotional intelligence is key. It involves the listener repeating to the speaker what was said in order to confirm that they understood the meaning clearly. Repeating what was said also shows the speaker that you are listening. The idea is simple enough You listen and then you repeat and confirm what the speaker said. But how can you be sure that you're getting it right? If your confirmation isn't what the speaker actually said, your attempt at active listening could spiral into a frustrating misunderstanding. Also, you don't want to be telling the speaker what they're thinking or feeling. It takes practice, but the first step is to eliminate distractions and focus solely on the person speaking. You need to make a conscious effort to focus on the speaker only. If you're in an environment where there are distractions such as background noise, tune them out. One way to do this is 4

5 to maintain eye contact with the person with whom you're speaking. Don't let your eyes wander. In addition to environmental distractions, you need to get rid of the distractions inside your own head. Don't judge what the other person is saying, or let your mind race to think of a response. When someone is speaking, focus only on their words and feel their full impact. Afterward, you'll have time to think of a response. In fact, if you improve your self-awareness as described above, you can also use mindfulness to be more mindful of what another person says. Self-Regulation Self-regulation is important to emotional intelligence because EI is about two things: recognizing and understanding emotions, and controlling those emotions in an appropriate way. EI training allows you to control and use your emotions in the best way possible. A good simple tip you can use to regulate your emotions is to stop and refocus. It's easy for emotions to take control of us and make us do and say things we later regret. However, if you can distract yourself for just one moment and take yourself out of the current situation, this can be just enough to allow those emotions to cool off and lose their sting. Then, you can handle the situation in a way that's calm and clear-headed. The first step is to identify when emotions are carrying you away. There is usually a physical reaction. Your heartbeat and breathing may increase, you may sweat, or you may experience tenseness in certain parts of your body. This is your body's natural response to stress and there's nothing wrong with it. For you, it's a warning that you need to take a second to re-focus. At this point, there are several techniques that you can use. You can take control of your breathing by breathing deeply. You can learn to relax your 5

6 muscles. A visualization exercise where you picture something calm and relaxing can help. There's even the traditional idea of counting down from 10 when you feel angry or stressed. You can choose whichever of these you like. Choose something that's effective for you. Learn to recognize when you get emotional and make rash decisions, and each time it happens, take a moment to take a quick break and refocus on the problem at hand. Empathy Empathy helps you in your professional and personal life in many ways. It helps you better understand those around you and their perception of you. As a result, improving your empathy helps you better understand those parts of communication that are unspoken. You know what's really going on behind the words, and this helps in problem solving, motivating teams, conflict resolution, sales and more. There are many ways to improve your empathic skill, but the starting point is to improve your observational skills. Learn to be a skilled people-watcher. First, as mentioned above with active listening, eliminate distractions so that you can give your full attention to others and what they're saying and doing. In general, we're going beyond the simple statements that people say. Those are clear enough. Rather, you should look for clues such as: Non-Verbal Clues. Notice when there are visual changes in someone. For example, a person may change their posture, their breathing, their movements or their facial expression. They may sweat or blush. Try to notice subtle changes like the narrowing of eyes or the downturn of the edges of a person's lips. Changes in Tone. Not only the words we say, but also the way we talk can reveal much about what's behind the words. Pay attention to changes in pitch, volume, tempo and tone of voice. 6

7 Words. Pay attention to the way people use the words they use to express themselves. There are many ways to phrase any particular sentence. The specific words used can tell you that there is anger, resentment, enthusiasm or another emotion behind the words. Absence of Emotion. Sometimes a person tells you a great deal not by emotional clues but by their absence of emotion. Absence of emotion may express any number of things, such as anger, disappointment, distraction, or resentment. Pay attention especially when a person's usually effusive communication suddenly falls flat. Once you develop your observation skills, you'll gain a better understanding of other people. You can then effectively put yourself in their shoes and figure out how to communicate with them in the most appropriate way. Positive Outlook Emotionally intelligent people have a positive outlook. They aren't foolishly positive, expecting everything to be all-good all the time and ignoring things that are difficult or negative. Rather, they see the silver lining and face challenges with a firm resolve, knowing that they may or not succeed but in either case they'll learn something. This is the kind of positive outlook that can handle any problem positively but realistically. A good way to make yourself authentically more positive is to identify negative self-talk and turn it positive. Negative self-talk refers to the voice in your head that turns a situation bad. This includes things like: "This is going to be difficult." "I did such a stupid thing today." "This situation always ends up like " "I'm sure my boss is going to give me trouble today." 7

8 "There's no way this will work." Negative self-talk is a self-defense mechanism. Based on past experience, your mind sets you up for the worst, preparing you to accept it so that it's not a shock. The problem with this is that things may not turn out badly, as you expect them to. And negative self-talk is stressful and can put you in a bad mood with on good effect whatsoever. When do you say things like the above to yourself? Learn to recognize that voice and counter it by either shutting it up or replacing it with something positive. For example: "This won't work" A positive alternative would be: "We've never tried this before but whether it works or not, we'll learn from it." If you're going into a meeting with an associate who is extremely difficult to talk to, don't dwell on past experience. Instead, tell yourself that you're going to do everything you can to make the meeting go well. This can be quite a challenge, but learning how to turn negative self-talk around can have major benefits. The best way to approach a difficult situation is to be as prepared as possible and to have a positive attitude. These are just a few things you can do to increase your emotional intelligence. Give them a try and they'll definitely make a difference in how you react and respond to emotions. 8