Love & Marriage 14

Today's topic continues on how to improve your emotional intelligence and stay happily married.

Research show that happy couples have more emotional intelligence than unhappy couples. Don't despair as you can practice becoming more emotionally intelligent.

https://pixabay.com/en/engagement-couple-love-romance-man-519811/

1. It is about self-awareness. Start to tap into your feelings. Know how you feel and what made you feel like that.
   Practice this daily to be aware of how you feel. If you start doing this and practice it, it becomes second nature.

2. Start to notice how you behave. Does the way you behave has positive consequences or does it affect your life negatively? You have to become very honest with yourself.

3. The most challenging step and also the most helpful is to take responsibility for your feelings and behavior. It is your feelings and your behavior. If your spouse make you angry and you shout at him/her you are responsible for that. The other person can not make you do things. Stop and get your emotions under control. If you can manage to control how you feel and react, you will see the positive results in your marriage.

4. Practice to respond and to not react. Reacting is where you experience an emotional trigger and you behave in a way that relieves the emotion. Often we react in a way that doesn't have a positive outcome. If your spouse reacted back it can go over into a full blown fight. This closes the communication channel.
   When you respond you experience an emotion for instance anger, but you don't just shout at your spouse. You recognize your emotion but decide how you going to respond to it. For example, If your spouse is doing something wrong, you will tell him/her, "I don't like it when you do that because it makes me feel this way." If you respond, it opens up the channel for communication. You can see how responding and not to react can benefit your marriage.

5. Practice having empathy with yourself and with others. As said in the previous blog it is to put yourself in someone else shoes, try to think how they feel and how would you have felt if you were in the same position and have empathy with others. With yourself, identify the emotion and ask questions, why I am feeling like this, what triggered it? Sometimes you will maybe say, "I don't know"but keep on practicing it and more answers will come.

6. Remember that emotional intelligence is a life-long process. It is not something you can learn overnight and then you are perfect in it. You keep on developing and practicing it. I am sure everybody heard that people that are older say,: " I am calmer now that I am older, things that stressed me up don't stress me anymore." That is nothing else than emotional growth that happened while you were growing older.

A happy marriage is equal to personal happiness. It makes you feel loved, secure and respected. It is worth the effort to practice to improve your emotional intelligence in order stay happily married. That is after all why you got married in the first place to have a life-long friend and partner till the end of your life.

Thank you for reading. I would love to know if this was helpful or how you feel about the post.
If you liked it please upvote and follow me @hope777.

Photos: pixabay.com
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/7-practical-ways-improve-your-emotional-intelligence.html