Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Achieve High Level of Emotional Intelligence (Last Part)

In my last two posts on emotional intelligence I tried to figure out the basic understanding of emotional intelligence. In this last part I will try to shape or determine few techniques that could help someone to achieve the high level of emotional intelligence. As we know, it’s not the smartest people that are the most successful or the most fulfilled in life. It is pretty normal phenomenon that people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially inept and unsuccessful at work or in their personal relationships. Only the intellectual intelligence (IQ) isn’t enough for people to be successful in life. The IQ can help you get into your academic pursuit, but ultimately the EQ will help you manage the stress and emotions when facing in final exams and afterward.

Emotional intelligence is significant because it affects person in various ways like,

Professional Performance

Emotional intelligence helps people overcome the social complexities of the workplace. It excels the leadership capabilities and helps to lead and motivate others. Now most of the companies consider emotional intelligence as important as technical ability and academic soundness for a job offering.

Being Healthy

The ability to manage stress helps people to be healthy both physically and mentally. The inability to maintain stress can lead to physical and mental health as well. Uncontrolled stress can raise blood pressure, suppress the immune system, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, contribute to infertility, and speed up the aging process. Not only physical health uncontrolled stress but also impact mental health. It may make you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. The ability to understand and managing emotions, helps be open to mood swings, while an inability to form strong relationships can leave you feeling lonely and isolated.

Relationships

Understanding and ability to manage and control of emotions make people able to express the feelings and to understand how others feel. This will help us to communicate more effectively and forge stronger relationships, both at work and in personal life.

How to Improve Emotional Intelligence?

As all we know all kind of instructions come from our brain through neuron or sense. There are two kinds of neuron found to communicate between our brain and other parts of our body, namely sensory neuron and responsive neuron. The sensory neuron convey the information from our other body parts to our brain and the responsive neuron pass the instruction or action on this that comes from our brain.  In order to make good decisions we need to get access to the wide range of choices and the ability. Therefore we need to be able to bring our emotions into balance at will. Technically speaking, improving the emotional intelligence means improving on the following areas that collectively shape our level of emotional intelligence. Now let us discuss the methods or techniques that may help us to improve our level of emotional intelligence.

1. Improving Self-Awareness:

Self awareness specifically means the ability to understand emotions and emotional feelings rule us. A self aware person will never let his emotion to get control over his mind. In order to improve the level of self-awareness the following practices may helpful for us:

• • A continuous attempt of self evaluation will help someone to understand his emotion and feelings. It may help us to find what is out weakness and how emotions affect us.
  • Examining the feeling on unfavorable situation:  How you feel when you fail to get something you wanted? How these inabilities affect you and your life? Examine every time you had such bad time and try to figure out how you react and respond on it.
  • Try find out the things that give you the pleasure when you are depressed or stressed. Get some practices that will help you to shift your mind from the things you are thinking about and were anxious.
  • Don’t judge or edit your feelings too quickly. Try not to dismiss your feelings before you have a chance to think them through and try to connect your feelings with your thoughts.

2. Improving the ability of Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is the way that may help you to control emotions and impulses. The tips are follows:

• • The first rule of self-regulation is not to allow you become too angry or jealous, and they don’t make impulsive, careless decisions.
  • Think and think before you act…. But once it is done just let it go, never think again. It is not easy… I know try hundred times and one day you will find your success.
  • Very important one…………. Learn how to say no? Be thoughtful, adaptable and comfortable with changes, new things and so on but get practiced to say no, because there are sometime when saying no becomes essential for your well being.

3. Motivation

Motivation is a word we all familiar with but surprisingly very few of us really understand what motivation actually means. High degree of emotional intelligence helps people to get motivated.

• • Try to understand the situations when enough is enough. Learn how to stop looking inward; learn when its time to shift your focus outward.
  • Train yourself to defer immediate results for long-term success.
  • Try to be proactive and get practiced to be highly productive.
  • Don’t escape from challenges or problems rather learn to love a challenge. A problem is a problem for a while but in near future it will turn out as an opportunity for you.

4. Achieving Empathy

Empathy means the ability to understand others. Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the wants, needs, and viewpoints of those around you.

• • Try not to interrupt or change the subject. If feelings are uncomfortable, we may want to avoid them by interrupting or distracting ourselves but ultimately it may lead us to a wrong conclusion of others.
  • Lear to Forgive…… Ok Ok….. it is challenging and yes indeed it is. But the best solution that comes from a incident is from forgiveness. Other people’s hurtful behavior is in the past. To resolve conflict, you need to give up the urge to punish or seek revenge.
  • If the conflict is unreasonable then just end it… ending does not necessarily means come out with a resolution it is about letting go without any conclusion.
  • Try to be excellent at managing relationships, listening, and relating to others. Avoid stereotyping and judging too quickly, and they live their lives in a very open, honest way.

5. Improving Social Skills

It’s easy to talk to and like people with good social skills, isn’t it? Peoples with strong social skills are team players. Rather than focus on their own success first, they help others develop and shine. They can manage disputes, are excellent communicators, and are masters at building and maintaining relationships.

• • Take responsibility for your actions. If you hurt someone’s feelings, apologize directly – don’t ignore what you did or avoid the person.
  • Examine how your actions will affect others – before you take those actions. If your decision will impact others, put yourself in their place and then thing how it would affect others emotions.
  • When we see an expression from someone that we don’t understand fully, come up with at least two possible interpretations before jumping to conclusion.
  • Seek clarification when needed. If necessary, inquire with the other person for clarification on why he’s behaving the way he does.
  • Try to focus on the others. If you are planning what you’re going to say next, daydreaming, or thinking about something else, you are almost certain to miss nonverbal cues and other subtleties in the conversation.
  • Lean to make eye contact. Eye contact can communicate interest, maintain the flow of a conversation, and help gauge the other person’s response.

Emotional intelligence is such a area of study that there is no specific mechanism to come out with strong emotional intelligence. The high level of emotional intelligence cannot be achieved overnight. It need time and practice over and over again. You must have to understand that your emotions needed time to get mature. You need time to understand what, why and how you feel because feelings are such a thing that has no specific model, it very from person to person, from age to age, from culture to culture. Bu you need to cultivate few practices to achieve the level of emotional intelligence required for our success. I repeat take time and give time to time to pay back you. I would like to conclude my article with a quotation about time of Albert Einstein. He quoted, “Few things usually take time. You cannot get a baby in one month by making nine women pregnant.” Can you?????

First Part: Emotional Intelligence: Basic Overview (Part – 1)

Second Part: Emotional Intelligence: Components and Emotional Competence Frameworks (Part-2)