What is emotional intelligence (EQ)?

Emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and
manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with
others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.

Emotional intelligence helps you build stronger relationships, succeed at school and work, and achieve
your career and personal goals. It can also help you to connect with your feelings, turn intention into
action, and make informed decisions about what matters most to you.

The 4 Key Skills to Emotional intelligence:

1. Self-management. You’re able to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, manage your
emotions in healthy ways, take initiative, follow through on commitments, and adapt to
changing circumstances.

2. Self-awareness. You recognize your own emotions and how they affect your thoughts and
behavior. You know your strengths and weaknesses, and have self-confidence.

3. Social awareness. You have empathy. You can understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of
other people, pick up on emotional cues, feel comfortable socially, and recognize the power
dynamics in a group or organization.

4. Relationship management. You know how to develop and maintain good relationships,
communicate clearly, inspire and influence others, work well in a team, and manage conflict.

The importance of emotional intelligence (EQ)

As we know, it’s not the smartest people who are the most successful or the most fulfilled in life. You
probably know people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially inept and unsuccessful at work
or in their personal relationships. Intellectual ability or your intelligence quotient (IQ) isn’t enough on its
own to achieve success in life. Yes, your IQ can help you get into college, but it’s your EQ that will help
you manage the stress and emotions when facing your final exams. IQ and EQ exist in tandem and are
most effective when they build off one another.

Emotional intelligence affects:

Your performance at school or work. High emotional intelligence can help you navigate the social
complexities of the workplace, lead and motivate others, and excel in your career. In fact, when it comes
to gauging important job candidates, many companies now rate emotional intelligence as important as
technical ability and employ EQ testing before hiring.

Your physical health. If you’re unable to manage your emotions, you are probably not managing your
stress either. This can lead to serious health problems. Uncontrolled stress raises blood pressure,
suppresses the immune system, increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, contributes to infertility,
and speeds up the aging process. The first step to improving emotional intelligence is to learn how to
manage stress.

Your mental health. Uncontrolled emotions and stress can also impact 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. This in turn can leave you feeling lonely
and isolated and further exacerbate any mental health problems.

[Read: Building Better Mental Health]

Your relationships. By understanding your emotions 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.

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

Building emotional intelligence: Four key skills to increasing EQ

The skills that make up emotional intelligence can be learned at any time. However, it’s important to
remember that there is a difference between simply learning about EQ and applying that knowledge to
your life. Just because you know you should do something doesn’t mean you will—especially when you
become overwhelmed by stress, which can override your best intentions.

In order to permanently change behavior in ways that stand up under pressure, you need to learn how
to overcome stress in the moment, and in your relationships, in order to remain emotionally aware.

The following 4 key skills can help you build your EQ and improve your ability to manage emotions and
connect with others.

Skill 1: Self-management to build EQ

In order for you to engage your EQ, you must be able to use your emotions to make constructive
decisions about your behavior. When you become overly stressed, you can lose control of your emotions
and the ability to act thoughtfully and appropriately.

Think about a time when stress has overwhelmed you. Was it easy to think clearly or make a rational
decision? Probably not. When you become overly stressed, your ability to both think clearly and
accurately assess emotions—your own and other people’s—becomes compromised.

[Read: Stress Management]

Emotions are important pieces of information that tell you about yourself and others, but in the face of
stress that takes us out of our comfort zone, we can become overwhelmed and lose control of ourselves.
With the ability to manage stress and stay emotionally present, you can learn to receive upsetting
information without letting it override your thoughts and self-control. You’ll be able to make choices that
allow you to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, manage your emotions in healthy ways, take
initiative, follow through on commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances.

Skill 2: Self-awareness for EQ

Managing stress is just the first step to building emotional intelligence.

The theory of attachment indicates that your current emotional experience is likely a reflection of your
early life experience. Your ability to manage core feelings such as anger, sadness, fear, and joy often
depends on the quality and consistency of your early life emotional experiences. If your primary
caretaker as an infant understood and valued your emotions, it’s likely your emotions have become
valuable assets in adult life. But, if your emotional experiences as an infant were confusing, threatening
or painful, it’s likely you’ve tried to distance yourself from your emotions.

But being able to connect to your emotions—having a moment-to-moment connection with your
changing emotional experience—is the key to understanding how emotion influences your thoughts and
actions.

Do you experience feelings that flow, encountering one emotion after another as your experiences
change from moment to moment?

Are your emotions accompanied by physical sensations that you experience in places like your stomach,
throat, or chest?

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

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

Do you pay attention to your emotions? Do they factor into your decision making?

If any of these experiences are unfamiliar, you may have “turned down” or “turned off” your emotions.
In order to build EQ—and become emotionally healthy—you must reconnect to your core emotions,
accept them, and become comfortable with them. You can achieve this through the practice of
mindfulness.

[Listen: Mindful Breathing Meditation]

Mindfulness is the practice of purposely focusing your attention on the present moment—and without
judgment. The cultivation of mindfulness has roots in Buddhism, but most religions include some type of
similar prayer or meditation technique. Mindfulness helps shift your preoccupation with thought toward
an appreciation of the moment, your physical and emotional sensations, and brings a larger perspective
on life. Mindfulness calms and focuses you, making you more self-aware in the process.

Developing emotional awareness

It’s important that you learn how to manage stress first, so you’ll feel more comfortable reconnecting to
strong or unpleasant emotions and changing how you experience and respond to your feelings. You can
develop your emotional awareness by using HelpGuide’s free Emotional Intelligence Toolkit.

Skill 3: Social awareness for EQ

Social awareness enables you to recognize 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.

[Read: Effective Communication]

When groups of people send out similar nonverbal cues, you’re able to read and understand the power
dynamics and shared emotional experiences of the group. In short, you’re empathetic and socially
comfortable.

Using mindfulness to build social awareness

To build social awareness, you need to recognize the importance of mindfulness in the social process.
After all, you can’t pick up on subtle nonverbal cues when you’re in your own head, thinking about other
things, or simply zoning out on your phone. Social awareness requires your presence in the moment.
While many of us pride ourselves on an ability to multitask, this means that you’ll miss the subtle
emotional shifts taking place in other people that help you fully understand them.

 You are actually more likely to further your social goals by setting other thoughts aside and
focusing on the interaction itself.

 Following the flow of another person’s emotional responses is a give-and-take process that
requires you to also pay attention to the changes in your own emotional experience.

 Paying attention to others doesn’t diminish your own self-awareness. By investing the time and
effort to really pay attention to others, you’ll actually gain insight into your own emotional state
as well as your values and beliefs. For example, if you feel discomfort hearing others express
certain views, you’ll have learned something important about yourself.

Speak to a Licensed Therapist

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Skill 4: Relationship management for EQ

Working well with others is a process that begins with emotional awareness and your ability to recognize
and understand what other people are experiencing. Once emotional awareness is in play, you can
effectively develop additional social/emotional skills that will make your relationships more effective,
fruitful, and fulfilling.

Become aware of how effectively you use nonverbal communication. It’s impossible to avoid
sending nonverbal messages to others 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
emotions as well as read other peoples’ emotional intent. The emotional part of your brain is always on
—and even if you ignore its messages—others won’t. Recognizing the nonverbal messages that you send
to others can play a huge part in improving your relationships.

Use humor and play to relieve stress. Humor, 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.
[Read: How to Be Emotionally Intelligent in Romantic Relationships]

Learn to see conflict as an opportunity to grow closer to others. Conflict and disagreements are
inevitable in human relationships. 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.