2 Emotional Intelligence

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” – Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.

What Is It?

First, let’s define emotional intelligence:

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. There are varying definitions of emotional intelligence but we can sum it up by representing it with these three skills:

1Having emotional awareness, which means identifying your own emotions and others emotions. It is a skill—which means that with patience and practice, it can be learned or it may come more innately. For example, this means you are able to get in touch with difficult emotions and manage uncomfortable feelings so you remain in control, rather than being overwhelmed.

2Using your emotions and applying them to problem solving tasks and thinking. People with high emotional intelligence are able to enhance thought and solve a variety of emotion-related problems faster and more accurately. They understand how certain feelings might make them bias to a situation or how another person may react given a certain emotion. This can be very important not only in relationships but in the workplace

3 Managing emotions, which means having the ability to regulate your emotions, and help others do the same (ability to cheer up or calm down another person) (#9)

Why Do I Care?

Studies have shown that improving your emotional intelligence can boost career success, entrepreneurial potential, leadership talent, health, relationship satisfaction, humor, and happiness. It is also the best antidote to work stress and it matters in every job — because all jobs involve dealing with people, and people with higher emotional intelligence are more rewarding to deal with.

In relationships: examples

In life: examples

Top ten traits emotionally intelligent water elements possess: (#1, #2)

1. You are AN AGENT OF CHANGE: People with high emotional intelligence aren’t afraid of change. They understand fear of change can be paralyzing and a major threat to success and happiness — and they adapt.
2. You have EMPATHY: The greatest trait of emotionally intelligent people is their ability to relate to others, (which is turn makes them essential in the workplace, a reliable and kind partner, and a good friend). With an innate ability to understand what people are going through, they can get through difficult times drama free.
3. You are CURIOUS: Curiosity about people is a product from the above trait, empathy. The more you see people as individuals going through their own journey in life, without judgement, the more curiosity you have to learn more about them.
4. You APPRECIATE and are GRATEFUL: Being able to appreciate people and be grateful for all aspects of your life not only improves your mood but reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. People that work toward an attitude of gratitude experience better moods, energy, and physical well being. They also don’t allow toxic people to affect their life. Also, by being appreciative of relationships in their lies, they build strong relationships and are more likely to give while expecting nothing in return.
5. You seek BALANCE, not PERFECTION: Perfection doesn’t exist, we are humans and need to acknowledge we make mistakes in all aspects of our lives – work, relationships, self-care. If we try and seek perfection we will always be met with failure, and that breeds negativity. Instead, finding balance means accepting failure, learning from it, and building upon it. Instead of becoming negative you become excited about moving forward and have healthy boundaries and see experiences as positive.
6. You know HOW TO SAY NO: Emotional intelligence means knowing how to exert self-control. You delay gratification, and you avoid impulsive action. Research conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Saying no is indeed a major self-control challenge for many people. “No” is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. Avoid phrases such as “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.”
7. You are a good JUDGE OF CHARACTER:
Emotionally intelligent people don’t just understand emotions; they know what they’re good at and what they’re terrible at. They also know who pushes their buttons and the environments (both situations and people) that enable them to succeed. Much of emotional intelligence comes down to social awareness; the ability to read other people, know what they’re about, and understand what they’re going through. Over time, this skill makes you an exceptional judge of character. People are no mystery to you. You know what they’re all about and understand their motivations, even those that lie hidden beneath the surface.
8. You let go of GRUDGES, MISTAKES AND TOXIC PEOPLE:
Emotionally intelligent people distance themselves from their mistakes, but do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode. Holding onto a grudge means you’re holding onto stress, letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health. Dealing with difficult people is frustrating and exhausting for most. High EQ individuals control their interactions with toxic people by keeping their feelings in check. When they need to confront a toxic person, they approach the situation rationally. They identify their own emotions and don’t allow anger or frustration to fuel the chaos. Even when things completely derail, emotionally intelligent people are able to take the toxic person with a grain of salt to avoid letting him or her bring them down.
9. You take CARE of yourself:
You Disconnect. Taking regular time off the grid is a sign of a high EQ because it helps you to keep your stress under control and to live in the moment. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even—gulp!—turning off your phone gives your body and mind a break. Studies have shown that something as simple as an e-mail break can lower stress levels.
You Limit Your Caffeine Intake. Drinking excessive amounts of caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline, and adrenaline is the source of the fight-or-flight response. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response to ensure survival. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior.
You Get Enough Sleep. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams) so that you wake up alert and clearheaded.
You Stop Negative Self-Talk in Its Tracks.
The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that—thoughts, not facts. Emotionally intelligent people separate their thoughts from the facts in order to escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive, new outlook.
10. You don’t let anyone STEAL YOUR JOY: When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from the opinions of other people, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. Think about this when your boss is on your back, your friends are doing something without you or your partner just won’t listen – emotionally intelligent don’t let anyone’s opinions or remarks take their joy from them. That doesn’t mean it’s possible to stop yourself from reacting or feeling bad about how others treat you, but you can take it with a grain of salt, and realize self-worth comes from within.

Top ten signs that Your Partner Lacks Emotional Intelligence: (#5)

1. Unable to control their emotions: Emotionally intelligent people are able to regulate and control their emotions. If your partner is prone to lashing out in anger—or gets over-the-top giddy for no reason—he or she likely lacks this core element of EQ.
2. Clueless about your feelings: The ability to read others’ nonverbal emotional cues, such as facial expressions, is a critical component of EQ. If your partner can’t read your obvious displeasure, or thinks that your happiness is really contempt, there will be problems making emotional connections.
3. Can’t maintain friendships: High-EQ individuals have strong networks of friends and acquaintances. If your partner is unable to make or maintain good relationships with friends and colleagues, this is an indicator of low EQ.
4. Always has a “poker face:” While reading others’ emotions is important for EQ, so is the ability to express your own. If you can never tell how or what your partner is really feeling (especially if you are generally good at reading others’ emotions), it’s likely that your partner is missing this key element of emotional intelligence.
5. Is emotionally inappropriate: Making jokes at a funeral; getting angry over nothing; not realizing that he/she is angering someone—these are signs that your partner doesn’t understand the social workings of emotions and emotional expression, which is another important aspect of EQ.
6. Can’t cope with sadness: An inability to manage others’ emotions indicates a lack of emotional intelligence. Low-EQ individuals have particular difficulty in reacting to others’ negative emotions.
7. Is emotionally “tone deaf:” A great deal of emotion is communicated through tone of voice. If your partner can’t sense your irritation or joy from the next room, it may be an indicator of a deficit in detecting emotions in voice tone.
8. Can’t really be sympathetic: Empathy and sympathy involve recognizing others’ emotional states and reflecting back appropriate emotional concern. This is a complex skill that suggests high levels of emotional intelligence.
9. Has no volume control: Of course, we’re talking about emotional volume here. Too-loud emotional reactions, whether positive or negative, suggest difficulty in controlling emotions.
10. Trivializes emotions in general. Low-EQ individuals are often somewhat aware of it and will therefore downplay the importance of emotions, saying that what really matters is cool, calm logic and cognition. Don’t be fooled: Emotions are not only an important part of communication and relationship development, they are critical for effective thinking, particularly when it comes to dealing with crises or risk.

4 Questions to Assess Your EI WORKSHEET: (#6)

All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Our research shows that only 36% of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions. (#2, #1)

Research has shown that some of our most cherished beliefs about ourselves are either dead wrong, or just partly right. Keep in mind that “we” includes me. Of course we *think* we know what we are feeling, but that’s not exactly true.

The fact that our emotions are embodied makes us more confident about our ability to know what we’re feeling and our emotional intelligence. It’s “the above average” effect —our tendency to over-rate our skill set and abilities—except on steroids. Self-reports of emotional intelligence and tests of it showed little correlation — which mean someone who reports themselves as emotionally intelligent may very well be lacking.

Yes, the body speaks what we feel: Being sad can give you a lump in your throat, while shame or embarrassment can make you feel hot. The universality of where we “locate” the source of our emotions was demonstrated by a study by Lauri Nummenaan and others, published last year in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, which was deliberately cross-cultural (using participants from Western Europe and Asia), and had participants “paint” on a schematic of the human body. The parts of the body indicated as the source of the feelings were the same, regardless of the culture. The researchers suggest that the physical sensation of emotions, the most “conscious” aspect of our feelings, may “help the individuals to voluntarily fine-tune their behavior to better match the challenges of the environment.”

Does this necessarily mean that we’re all equally adept at knowing what we’re feeling—given that we’re all equipped to feel fear and other emotions in and through our bodies? The short answer is “no,” and what we’re talking about here is how emotionally intelligent each of us is.

What’s important to realize about emotional intelligence is that it isn’t a single trait or skill, but a series of graduating skill sets. If you’re wondering how emotionally intelligent you are, ask these questions first:

1. How do I think about feelings?

Do you avoid talking about your feelings?
Would you rather skip?
How good are you at making fine distinctions such as realizing that you’re more ashamed than embarrassed, or frustrated instead of angry?

The better you are at these distinctions, the more emotionally intelligent your behaviour will be.

Here’s the problem, some situations in life prompt emotional responses that are relatively straightforward and labeling what we’re feeling isn’t very challenging. Your beloved pet dies and waves of sadness wash over you. No problem there because what you’re feeling is clear. But more complicated events—a fight with your spouse or close friend, or a massive and very public failure in your work life—may evoke a range of different emotions, either sequentially or in simulcast, or a blend of feelings. In these situations, identifying your feelings requires the kind of dexterity that a game of pick-up sticks does; you need to label and identify your different feelings in the moment. Everyone agrees that people who can manage negative emotions are healthier and happier than those who can’t, but it turns out that your ability to differentiate feelings is directly tied to whether you can manage those feelings.

In a study conducted by Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues, they found that people who think about their emotions on a simple continuum with good and pleasant on one end and bad and unpleasant on the other —thus differentiating between and among them in broad strokes without nuance—had much more trouble managing their feelings.

It’s been suggested that motivation may also be tied to poor emotional differentiation. People who are made uncomfortable by their emotions and are motivated to avoid emotional situations tend not to be able to differentiate their feelings very well, as a study by Yasemin Erbas and others showed. On the other hand, people who recognize that they’re not good at labeling and identifying their emotions may actually want to approach emotional situations in the hope of improving their skills. This result led Erbas and her team to conclude that volition and motivation have a lot to do with your ability to differentiate your feelings.

It turns out that labeling your emotions—putting your feelings into words—actually causes physiological changes to a part of the brain, the amygdala, as an MRI study by Matthew D. Lieberman showed, literally tamping down reactivity.

2. Do I see the big picture?

Can I identify, discriminate between, and understand different emotion?
It’s not just how skilled you are at differentiating your emotions; what matters too is how much emotional clarity you possess. What is emotional clarity? It’s an enhanced or greater ability to “identify, discriminate between, and understand the type of affect (e.g., anger vs. frustration) and source of affect one typically experiences.” While this sounds like emotional differentiation, it’s actually a bit different since this is a skill associated with reflection, as opposed to labeling and identifying in the moment. One research study by Matthew Tyler Boden and others found that the two skills were not just different but unrelated. While being able to distinguish your feelings with accuracy will guide your behavior (realizing you were frustrated, not angry, will lead you to apologize to the unwitting target of your hissy fit), understanding what kinds of events yield different emotions and outcomes —seeing the big picture—will give you more control over your choices and actions. Emotional clarity is a specific kind of knowledge, which takes in causes and effects, and anticipates emotional responses.

3. Am I a skilled emotional manager?

Do negative emotions slow you down or stop you in your tracks? Do they insinuate themselves into everything you do and think? Do you tend to internalize those feelings? If so, the likelihood is that you’re “state-oriented” and not as good as managing your emotions as you need to be. On the other hand, if negative emotions are something you can cope with—not by brushing them off but dealing with them in the day-to-day—the likelihood is that you’re “action-oriented.” Coping skills are key to both achievement and satisfaction, and understanding how well you cope is critical. An experiment conducted in Amsterdam tested for action and state orientations, and then had half the participants visualize a demanding person in their lives. They were asked to recall both their dealings with that person —whom they identified by initials to make the memory even more vivid—as well as their feelings at the time. The remaining participants were asked to visualize an accepting person. After the visualization, the participants were asked to pick out discrepant schematized faces on a screen —a happy face in a crowd of angry ones, or an angry one in a sea of happy ones—and then to identify or not identify with a list of positive and negative traits.

Action-oriented people picked out the happy faces more quickly and self-identified with positive traits, even after visualizing a demanding person. Not so for the state-oriented who were slower to find the happy face and who identified themselves with all negative words. Stress spills over onto some of us, it turns out.

Pay attention to how negative feelings affect you; ask yourself whether your coping skills are those of action or a state-oriented person. Finally, be honest about how well (or badly) you manage your feelings.

4. Do I have a bead on my moods?

Moods affect each and every one of us; they impact how well we manage our emotions as anyone can attest: Get to the office in a bad mood and just see how a minor irritant can escalate into major drama. Unlike emotions which have an identifiable source or cause —I’m happy because I got a raise or I’m sad because I messed up my presentation—moods are much more diffuse, harder to think about, and to pinpoint. Becoming conscious of your moods and their effect on your actions and reactions is one way of honing your emotional intelligence skills. Engage in quiet self-reflection and focus on what is causing you to feel the way you do.

One thing is clear: The more emotionally intelligent we are, the more able we are to manage life’s inevitable stresses and to savor its pleasures.

5 Ways to increase your EI: (#3, 4, 10)

#3 https://hbr.org/2013/05/can-you-really-improve-your-em
How to increase your emotional inelligence
#4 – https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication-success/201410/how-increase-your-emotional-intelligence-6-essentials
Five strategies to increase it

#10 – https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/leading-emotional-intelligence/201604/five-strategies-raise-emotional-intelligence-self