How To Improve Your EQ ?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a personal quality that you possess which if you leverage can improve your on the job performance by 60% besides helping you in every other aspect of your life including your health.

Most people are aware of what EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is but suffer from the mistaken impression that this is a static quality that one is either born with or not and that it cannot be improved.

Emotional Intelligence is made up of four intelligences: self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management. Self Awareness

This is the ability to be conscious of your emotions as they happen.

This requires that you think about your feelings while they occur. Emotions are a cue that something that you deem important has happened in your surroundings be it with people or situations. Emotions do not arise from nowhere even though that is what some people with poor EQ might think of. By understanding where your emotional reaction is coming from and why it is coming you will be in a strong position to stay on top of your emotions. Self Management

Self Management is the follow up to self awareness.

It is acting on your self awareness and adjusting your behavior based on an awareness of your emotions. Together self awareness and self management make up the personal competence of an individual. Social Awareness

Social awareness is the ability to read other people. It is to be aware of what the other person is thinking and feeling. It is putting yourself in the other person's shoes and becoming aware of their perspective. Relationship Management

Relationship management relies on the preceding three skills and has to do with how you build and maintain interpersonal relationships. By becoming aware of your emotions and that of the other person and managing your own behavior you are in a strong position to develop and nurture relationships.

Skills To Improve Your EQ

The reason you can learn EQ skills is that your brain is plastic. It can grow new connections. Learning leaves a physical change in the brain.Every thought creates a pathway in the brain. The more often the behavior resulting from a given thought pattern is practiced the more pronounced the pathway becomes. Once the pathway is sufficiently strong the associated behavior starts occurring naturally without any conscious effort or discomfort.Building up emotional intelligence then is a matter of following certain habits.

Improving Self Awareness

It is very uncomfortable for most people to recognize and understand their feelings. Rather than face the discomfort most try to repress by avoiding them. Lean into your discomfort and confront your feelings. This is the only way to get the best of your feelings.

Improving Self Management

First reflect on what behaviors you tend to follow when faced with emotions. This will help you discover opportunities for improvement. Prepare in advance. Plan ahead for situations that will cause a behavioral problem and decide in advance on an appropriate behavior to adopt. If there are situations that you cannot plan in advance, and there will be plenty, where your emotional reaction will take you by surprise, pause before you react.Sometimes all you need is to pause for a few seconds. Sometimes you may need to wait for a couple of hours or days or even weeks.Pausing will give you a chance to think and let better counsel prevail. Another strategy is to put the situation that is causing an emotional reaction in you in perspective. Finally the most powerful determinant of our behavior is self talk. Thiis is not the talk that others can hear but the talk that we cotantly have in our minds.Whether we realize it or not we are always indulging in self talk.Done the wrong way self talk can sabotage us. Done the right way self talk is a very powerful empowering tool that strongly influences our behavior.

Improving Social Awareness

Listening is the most important skill you need to build up your social awareness.

When you listen you must stop trying to anticipate the person's point or prepare a response to send out as soon as the other person has stopped talking.

Improving Relationship Management

The quality of relationships will determine the effectiveness of your communication.

If you have a good relationship you will be able to get your point across successfully. The quality of the relationship is determined by the depth, frequency and the time spent in interactions. Emotions play a significant role in relationships. Unless the emotional aspect of a relationship is addressed not much progress can be made. So tune in to the emotions.