If you are emotionally intelligent you will communicate effectively, empathise with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.

Improving your emotional intelligence will help you with;

Mental health. Uncontrolled emotion’s and stress can effect your mental health, making you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. If you are unable to understand, get comfortable with, or manage your emotions, you’ll also struggle to form strong relationships.

Relationships. By understanding your emotion’s and how to control them, you’re better able to express how you feel and understand how others are feeling. This allows you to communicate more effectively and forge stronger relationships, both at work and in your personal life.

Social intelligence. Being in tune with your emotion’s serves a social purpose, connecting you to other people and the world around you. Social intelligence enables you to recognise friend from foe, measure another person’s interest in you, reduce stress, balance your nervous system through social communication, and feel loved and happy.

In order to permanently change behaviour in ways that stand up under pressure, you need to learn how to overcome stress in the moment, and in your relationship’s.

Building emotional intelligence

The key four components for building your emotional intelligence and improving your ability to manage emotions and connect with others are as follows:

1.   Self control  

When you become overly stressed, you can loose control of your emotions and the ability to act thoughtfully and appropriately. By managing stress and stay emotionally present, you will be able to;

  • control impulsive feeling’s and behaviour’s,
  • manage your emotion’s in healthy way’s,
  • take initiative,
  • follow through on commitment’s, and
  • adapt to changing circumstance’s.

2.    Self-awareness.

Having a moment-to-moment connection with your changing emotional experience is the key to understanding how emotions influence your thoughts and actions. Consider the following question’s:

Do you experience feeling’s that flow, encountering one emotion after another as your experience uncomfortable change from moment to moment?

Are your emotion’s accompanied by physical sensations that you experience in place’s like your stomach, throat, or chest?

Do you experience individual feeling’s and emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, and joy, each of which is evident in subtle facial expressions?

Can you experience intense feeling’s that are strong enough to capture both your attention and that of others?

Do you pay attention to your emotion’s? Do these factor into your decision making?

3.   Social awareness.

Social awareness enables you to recognise and interpret the mainly nonverbal cues others are constantly using to communicate with you. These cues let you know how others are really feeling, how their emotional state is changing from moment to moment, and what’s truly important to them. When groups’ of people send out similar nonverbal cues, you’re able to read and understand the power dynamics’ and shared emotional experience’s of the group. In short, you’re empathically and socially comfortable.

4.    Relationship management

Once emotional awareness is in play, you can effectively develop additional social/emotional skills that will make your relationships more effective, fruitful, and fulfilling. Learn to:

Become aware of how effectively you use nonverbal communication.

It’s impossible to avoid sending non verbal messages to other’s about what you think and feel. The many muscles in the face, especially those around the eyes, nose, mouth and forehead, help you to wordlessly convey your own emotion’s as well as read other peoples’ emotional intent. Recognising the nonverbal messages that you send to others can play a huge part in improving your relationships.

Use humour and play to relieve stress.

Humour, laughter and play are natural antidotes to stress. They lessen your burdens and help you keep things in perspective. Laughter brings your nervous system into balance, reducing stress, calming you down, sharpening your mind and making you more empathic.

See conflict as an opportunity to grow closer to others.

Conflict and disagreement’s are inevitable in human relationship’s. Two people can’t possibly have the same needs, opinions, and expectations at all times. However, that needn’t be a bad thing. Resolving conflict in healthy, constructive ways can strengthen trust between people. When conflict isn’t perceived as threatening or punishing, it fosters freedom, creativity, and safety in relationships.

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