How to Be Emotionally Smart

We often associate success with intelligence. Specifically with the ability, to think, understand, and solve complex problems, and that's why we came to a conclusion that the smarter we are, the more successful we are going to be. That sounds like rational thinking.

In fact, our entire school system is designed to make us smarter. But unfortunately, I have some bad news, Intelligence is mostly genetic, which means that you are born with it and you can't really change it much.

Now, Before you get disappointed, let me share with you the good news! Being intellectually super-smart isn’t exactly what you want because intellect isn’t necessarily going to make you successful. In fact, there is the smartest person alive, his IQ is much higher than Einstein’s one.

And I am optimistic that you haven’t even heard about him and that's because he hasn’t achieved the kind of success that you are imagining.

What will determine your level of success is your emotional intelligence and guess what!

You can improve it as much as you want. So why don’t you hit that subscribe butting and the bell beside and find out how!

Let's understand what is emotional intelligence in the first place.

There are many different types of emotions that affect our actions, Almost everything we do is a result of one of them, It might sound simple to manage your emotions but it's extremely difficult in practice.

How many times you have found yourself getting angry and out of control?

How many times do you found yourself constantly worried that you can't even sleep when you really want that?

Even things such as your level of motivation or confidence are a direct result of your emotions. Emotional Intelligence can be broken into 5 parts.

01. Self-Awareness

It's the ability to realize and understand your own feelings. Often when we get angry for example, we don’t really realize we are in a state of anger because our emotions are in control.

It's later on when we calm down, we regret the things we said or the things we did because if we would have been conscious at that moment, we might have acted differently.

The ability to understand what you feel every moment will help you to manage them better.

Self-awareness also allows you to understand your strength and weaknesses so you will make better decisions when it comes to choosing what to study in college or which job to accept that's best for you!

02. Managing Emotions

Most people are really bad at managing their emotions. Something bad happens and we can stop thinking about it for the whole day if not weeks.

It's already 2 am and you can't fall asleep because you are still stressed out about it — how could he possibly offend me, why didn’t I do this instead of that.

Sometimes even if nothing bad is happening, we might remember something not so good happened to us in the past and freak out again about it now and spoil the rest of the day.

Especially when we go through some real problems such as breaks ups, failure, rejection we might spend days being sad, disappointed, and angry at life.

Why did it happen to me?

Why I am always rejected?

Why me again!!!

This is all a result of not knowing how to manage your emotions. And by improving your emotional intelligence, you will drastically free your mind from unnecessary worries and focus more on the beauty of life.

You understand that hardship and setbacks are an essential part of life and worrying about them isn’t going to change anything.

03. Self Motivation

Have you ever watched a motivation video or a movie that suddenly motivated you, made you feel energetic and ambitious to go out there and change the world or become the person that history will remember for centuries to come.

You suddenly felt that you can achieve what seemed to be impossible before and that's all because of your emotions.

In other words, knowing how to better manage your emotions can help you to keep yourself motivated consistently to stay focused on your goals.

04. Empathy

But being emotionally intelligent isn’t only about understanding your own emotions but rather the emotions of people you are dealing with. Understanding what they feel and why they feel like that.

Whether it's sadness, misery, or perhaps envy, you will be to approach them in the way they would want to be approached which will help you to build a strong relationship with that person.

What does it mean to put yourself in another person's shoes and look at the situation from their perspective?

Imagine how many arguments we could have avoided or how many relationships we would have saved if we would good at empathy.

Often breakups for example happen when we fail to understand each other's emotions. This is by far the most important social skill.

05. Handling Relationships

This has to do more with leadership, Charisma, and popularity. Managing people is probably what distinguishes successful people from the rest of us.

If you just take a look at those whom you consider being successful, whether it's a great entrepreneur or a politician, you will realize that the common trait amongst all of them is that they could inspire people to follow them, their ideas, and beliefs.

In fact, studies have proven we our emotions are contagious, they spread like viruses. That's why you find great speakers energizing their audience.

In short, this is what emotional intelligence is all about, and getting better at these 5 things is far more important than your IQ.