3 Easy Steps for Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence and 5 Ways to Improve Your Social Skills and Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

Over the last several years, the topic of emotional intelligence has become increasingly popular. People with average IQ’s have been shown to outperform people with high IQs by roughly 70 percent of the time because they have higher emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is your ability to evaluate, control, and express your emotions and assess the feelings of others. If you want to increase your emotional intelligence and become successful in both your personal and professional life, there are three easy steps that you need to follow.

Step #1 – Notice

If as a leader you find yourself anxious or tense when you are trying to solve critical issues, the energy you are expending can end up permeating the rest of your team and stall the progress that you’re trying to create. These emotions can also end up causing you to make decisions that alleviate your anxiety, but that might not be the best decisions to address the challenges you are facing. To increase your emotional intelligence, you need to take the time to notice how you are being. Take stock of how you are feeling at the moment. Noticing your' way of being' can help to increase your self-awareness, which is a crucial aspect of emotional intelligence.

Step #2 – Choose

After you’ve successfully noticed how you’re being, the next step is to decide how you want to be. Consider when you are stuck in a contentious meeting that is causing tension. While being tense isn’t wrong, it might not be helpful for the team. They might benefit more from a calming presence, which will allow them to see all of the possibilities rather than becoming mired with negativity that is associated with the current conflict. However you choose to be, you need to acknowledge that it is your choice. This will help you to manage your emotions and recognize the role your choice plats in boosting your emotional intelligence.

Step #3 – Be

Channel the way of being that you have chosen and become it. If you’ve decided to be peaceful, take the time to calm your mind, slow your breathing, and relax your muscles. This is the step where you effectively implement the decision you’ve made.

These steps are a way for you to start to manage your emotions and be an effective leader during difficult times. To improve your emotional intelligence, practice these steps over and over again until it becomes second nature. This process can help to empower you as a leader in a way that will benefit the entire team.

Social Skills and Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

The term "social skills" is incredibly broad, but it is also used correctly in the context of emotional intelligence. When it comes to emotional intelligence, your social skills refers to how you handle and influence other's emotions effectively. Emotional intelligence starts with your understanding of your feelings and being able to effectively manage them to achieve your goals. When you can understand and manage yourself, you can begin to learn how to understand the feelings of others and how to influence them. Here are five ways that you can improve your social skills to increase your emotional intelligence.

Work on Your Communication Skills

Your communication skills are a vital part of having good emotional intelligence. People who demonstrate high emotional intelligence can effectively listen to others and convey their own thoughts and feelings appropriately. Good communicators listen well to others and make sure that they understand what is being said. This allows them to register and act upon the emotional cues so that they can respond appropriately.

Improve Your Conflict Management Skills

Conflicts and disagreements are a natural part of life and can happen at any time. The art of managing and resolving disputes is a crucial aspect of emotional intelligence and is critical for your success both personally and professionally. Improving your conflict management skills starts by being aware of the importance of diplomacy and tact, and how they can be used to diffuse a situation.

Improve Your Leadership Skills

Your leadership skills are inextricably linked to emotional intelligence. Leaders must be tuned into their own and other's emotions if they want to be influential. Good leaders tend to have high emotional intelligence because they can articulate a vision and provide support and guidance to their colleagues while holding them accountable for their actions.

Develop Persuasion and Influencing Skills

Persuasion is the art of motivating others and winning them over to your ideas. People who have high emotional intelligence are apt at persuading others to their proposed course of action. They can read the emotional currents of any given situation and fine-tune their response to appeal to everyone involved.

Work on Building Rapport

If you want to improve your emotional intelligence, then it is vital that you figure out how to build and maintain relationships with others. Developing this skill will lead you to have better relationships and an increased ability to get on with life. Not only are highly emotionally intelligent people good at building rapport, but they also work to maintain the relationships they already have.

When you have high emotional intelligence, it’s obvious based on your social skills. If you want to improve your emotional intelligence, then you need to work on these five ways for developing your social skills.