Emotional Intelligence

The ability to make connections with other people is a necessary aspect to building relationships both on a personal and business level.

Emotional intelligence is just as important as intellectual ability when it comes to building and maintaining relationships.

Emotional intelligence also helps in our decision making ability and helps us to create peaceful and productive connections with others.

Last week's curriculum described The 5 Domains of Emotional Intelligence which are
Self Awareness, Managing Emotions, Social Awareness, Relationship Management, and Emotional Reasoning.

Having a high level of emotional intelligence allows us to communicate effectively and compassionately, show concern for others, resolve conflict, manage the challenges in our lives, and helps us to create and maintain peace within our lives and our communities.

Methods for Improving Emotional Intelligence

Self Awareness

In order to understand how our emotions may influence our thoughts, decisions, and actions, we must first be able to connect and identify our emotions.

If you have a hard time identifying or experiencing emotions then you need to reconnect with your core emotions.

Mindfulness practice or meditation can help to achieve this by focusing on the present moment, shifting away from thoughts to focusing on physical and emotional sensations.

Part of emotional intelligence involves connecting with unpleasant or uncomfortable emotions as well.
Denying, ignoring, or repressing emtotions that are unpleasant is unhealthy.

Techniques for stress management can help you to accept and emotionally integrate these darker emotions instead of hiding from them.

This will bring you to a higher level of emotional intelligence that will help you respond better in times of stress and conflict, and will help with your decision making abilities as well.

Managing Emotions

Stress management is the key to managing our emotions.
Being overwhelmed by stress being and emotionally raw during times of conflict can lead to unpleasant decisions if we aren't managing our emotions.

When we gain the ability to manage stress and our reactions to stressful events, then we can experience the event without letting it overwhelm us.

We can then maintain our self control by managing our impulses which will lead to more productive and healthier decision making.

Social Awareness

This is the ability to recognize the emotions of others by picking up on non-verbal cues and subtleties and then reacting in an empathic way.

Mindfulness and awareness is key.
Instead of focusing on our own thoughts during a social interaction, we can focus on the other person and the interaction itself. In doing so we will be more able to read the emotions of others and build rapport by responding in an appropriate way.

It also teaches us more about our own self awareness by recognizing the emotions we are experiencing during the interaction.

Relationship Management

Relationship conflict is natural and inevitable.

Learning to resolve conflict in a healthy, productive way through compromise and understanding can actually strengthen the relationship.

Shifting a viewpoint from seeing it as negative and destructive to seeing it as an opportunity to grow and learn more about yourself and another person is a way to increase your emotional intelligence.