How to Build Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence like any other skill can be built up with conscious and regular practice.

Self Reflect to Build Self Awareness:

The ability to observe oneself and reflect helps one make  conscious choices. The more you acknowledge and name your feelings, better aware you become at knowing your own emotions, what triggers them, how do you feel at that time and how do you behave or act. Deliberate reflections on your own actions, helps you realize you have choices in your actions.

For Self Reflection to be a part, you can practice following-

• Practice being in present.
•  Deliberately stop over the day many times to check your mental state at a given point of time.
• Acknowledge your feelings and name it.
• Practice observing others and their feelings.
• Notice your judgments for the self as well as about others. Doing this helps you realize that people are different.
•  Practice sharing your feelings through speaking. This helps you pay attention to why of the feelings around.
• Notice the intensity of your positive and negative emotions, thoughts or feelings.

Self Soothe to Build Self Regulation:

Self soothing is like positive re-affirmations to the self. It helps us to manage ourselves when somebody is attacking or blaming us. Self soothing helps us to remain objective and take the feedback positively.

Practice self soothing by-

• Have faith in yourself and your capabilities. To have faith in your capacities, regularly ask feedback from others.
• Be objective and look at the situation without adding emotions to it.
• Look for what is right and not who is right.
• Act as if you really count. This helps you to overcome your fear and empowers you to listen to yourself.

Practice Empathy to Build Empathy:

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and see where is it pinching. Being high on empathy makes us able to understand others, their viewpoints, helps us to listen more and we become able to appreciate differences.

To build up empathy, we can practice;

• Acknowledging self and self feelings.
• Acknowledging others and their feelings.
• Trying knowing others; your friends, colleagues, team members.
• Try listening without interrupting.
• Try initiating conversation during stress.
• Practice keeping yourself at other person’s place. Consequently we get more control on our actions and behaviors.

I believe, being high on Emotional Intelligence is the new mantra of success because in real life it is all about our abilities to understand self and others, their feelings, emotions and intentions. Once we can see through that, we can enhance the outcomes of our interactions. We can see what drives us and at the same time what drives others. Together as a team, we can be more productive, at home we can be more accepting of others, at work place we may learn to go well with others. We can choose to be not in agreement at all times but our manners of disagreement can be more agreeable. We can choose to be more happy, peaceful and successful just by building on our emotional intelligence.

Happy Emotional Intelligence Building!