Blog Short #250: How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence (7 Strategies)
Photo by Fethi Benattallah on Unsplash
As promised last week, I’m outlining some strategies for you today to boost your emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence refers to your ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.
There are five skills associated with EQ, but today we’re going to address three of them:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Regulation
- Empathy
Let’s start with self-awareness.
Improve Your Self-Awareness
The two primary tasks for increasing your self-awareness are:
- Identifying your emotions
- Exploring your emotions
The first step—identifying your emotions—means recognizing your feelings as they come up, without suppressing or avoiding them.
This is not always an easy process. Feelings can arise fast and overlap, requiring you to step back and sort them out. They can also be painful or unwanted, causing you to suppress or ignore them.
The second step – exploring your emotions – is an analytical process. You decide what the particular feeling (or feelings) means, and how it’s going to impact you.
Generally, the process is as follows:
- A feeling arises.
- You think about it and interpret what it means to you.
- You decide whether a response is needed, what it will be, and when you’ll execute it.
Ultimately, you decide either purposefully or unwittingly how much power that feeling is going to have.
One thing to keep straight in your mind is that feelings arise without your permission. It’s not something you can control, nor should you try. Your job is to identify the feeling and then determine what it means and how to respond to it.
Meta-Feeling
I recently read an e-book by Mark Manson, titled Developing Emotional Intelligence. He discussed a concept I really liked called “meta-feeling.”
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of meta-cognition, which is thinking about what you’re thinking. Meta-feeling is feeling about how you’re feeling.
He outlines four directions that meta-feelings can take, which is useful. They are:
- Feeling bad about feeling bad (self-loathing)
- Feeling bad about feeling good (guilt)
- Feeling good about feeling bad (self-righteousness)
- Feeling good about feeling good (ego-narcissism)
His point was that when we have meta-feelings, we’re creating stories about our feelings and assigning judgments based on shoulds.
Should I feel this, and if I do, what does that mean?
Yet, there are no shoulds when it comes to feelings. They just come up.
The meaning you assign is what creates your reactions, whether good or bad.
This means that if you want to become truly self-aware, you need to accept several facts about your emotions:
1. They can be misleading and inaccurate.
They’re often based on assumptions you have, misinformation, amygdala reactions to faulty alarms or fears, or extensions of long-term memories.
Their value is the energy, drive, and color they bring to your life. They motivate and inspire you to act. But you are the one who controls that action.
2. They’re temporary.
Feelings are just that – feelings. They come up and, after a while, reside. Keep in mind that feelings are different than moods. Moods are a more stable state of being, also based on emotions, but they’re complex and longer-lasting.
3. Feelings operate on the pain-pleasure continuum.
They’re either pulling you toward pleasure or plunging you toward pain. They can also be neutral. We’re a pleasure-seeking species, so we tend to repel painful feelings and favor those that bring pleasure.
Self-awareness is the ability to watch this movie play out from beginning to end without acting impulsively.
Instead of relying on meta-feeling, lean more toward meta-cognition. Think about the narrative you’re constructing and the interpretation you’re embracing.
Meta-cognition is the tool of mindfulness, which allows you to watch the flow of feelings while examining the validity of what they mean and how you wish to react to or act upon them.
Strategies:
1. Get more precise in naming your feelings.
Most of us use the same five or six words repetitively to describe how we feel. Maybe you use more, but when you look at a substantial list of positive and negative feeling words, you’ll find there are many gradations and variations of feelings.
The words you choose to describe a feeling to yourself have an impact on the narrative you create and the power you give the feeling.
2. Practice identifying feelings for a few minutes each day as they arise.
Let them surface and then sit with them without acting on them. See what meta-feelings arise. How long do they last? Do you want to act on them right away? In ten minutes? In an hour? Do you feel the same after a while?
When you sit with painful feelings or those you want to avoid, they will lose some of their power over time, and you’ll feel less inclined to react to them or suppress them.
Now let’s move to regulating emotions.
Improve Regulating Your Emotions
The two strategies above are both designed to set the stage for self-regulation.
When you’re aware of your feelings and have examined their accuracy and meaning from a distance, you have already exerted some control over them.
Instead of jumping into action, you’ve set up a weigh-station like trucks used to have to go through on highways to see if they were too heavy.
It’s a process that goes like this:
- The feeling arises.
- You identify and acknowledge it.
- You evaluate its accuracy.
- And you decide how to react to or use it.
The key ingredient in this process is spacing.
When you set up your weigh station, you have the opportunity to decide how and in what manner you express the feeling.
The space between you and the feeling is the means by which you can regulate your behavior, thoughts, and reactions.
Strategies:
3. The key strategy here is to figure out how to give yourself that needed space.
You can practice meditation. Journal or write out your feelings and discern what you think is valuable and true. You can talk it out with someone you trust. You can practice sitting with feelings. You can also wait overnight or longer to respond if needed.
4. Ask yourself what judgments you’re having about your feelings.
Meta-feelings often occur under your radar, but they have an undermining effect on you. It’s important to stay on top of them and run interference. Judgment isn’t helpful when examining emotions.
Increase Your Empathy
Empathy is a crucial skill in emotional intelligence because it honors our shared humanity.
Common humanity is an idea introduced by Kristin Neff in her book, Self-Compassion.
It means recognizing and accepting our shared capacity as human beings to make mistakes, fail, and suffer. And also our shared capacity to love, connect, and understand one another.
Empathy requires acceptance, not of bad behavior, but of our fallibility and frailty.
That applies to you as well as to other people. If you judge your feelings and mistakes with self-loathing, you will do the same when dealing with others. If you are compassionate with yourself and honest about your thoughts and feelings, you can be that way with others.
Self-awareness must be accompanied by self-acceptance if you’re to be empathetic. In other words, empathy begins at home.
That doesn’t mean excusing mistakes, but forgiving and repairing them while always striving to improve. If you accept yourself, you’ll find it much easier to empathize with others.
Self-loathing as well as self-righteousness keep you locked in an emotional cell with no means of getting out.
Strategies:
5. Reflect on a time when you showed empathy to someone.
What did you do that conveyed empathy, and do you think the other person felt it?
6. Now reflect on the opposite scenario.
Examine a time when you could have been more empathetic, but didn’t?
What got in the way?
7. Practice observing your feelings without judgment or shoulds.
If you tend to be judgmental about your feelings, consciously practice letting them arise but without judgment.
When someone meditates, this is part of the process. In fact, when you meditate, all kinds of thoughts and feelings arise.
I was initially horrified at the stuff that came up when I began practicing meditation. But just because it does, doesn’t mean that’s who you are.
Let it come, sit with it, and let it go.
The more you’re able to do that, the more self-aware and empathetic you’ll become. You’ll also be able to direct your responses the way you’d like to.
Last Note
Emotional intelligence is a big subject, and we’ve just scratched the surface today. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend reading “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. It’s the EQ bible, so to speak.
A quick read for basic information about EQ can be found in an article on the Verywell Mind website titled ”5 Key Emotional Intelligence Skills.”
The e-book I mentioned by Mark Manson appears to be unavailable any longer. Or at least I can’t find it on his site. He has many other articles about emotional intelligence that you may enjoy at MarkManson.net.
Happy reading!
That’s all for today!
Have a great week!
All my best,
Barbara