How Emotionally Intelligent Are You?

When you think of intelligence, do emotions come to mind? Most people think of intelligence as the product of knowledge, a trait completely unrelated to emotions. There are even countless quotes and mantras out there about making decisions with your head over your heart. But why should you have to choose?

The ability to make decisions with your head and your heart is a sign of emotional intelligence, and it is a quality that is just as valuable as traditional intelligence. If you find that it feels very natural for you to reflect upon your own emotions and take the emotions of others into account in your daily life, then you might have a high level of emotional intelligence. If you are not one of these people, however, there are still ways for you to improve your emotional intelligence and incorporate it into your daily life.

Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life

In daily life, emotional intelligence reveals itself in very recognizable ways. People with high emotional intelligence are often empathetic, good at active listening, capable of self-reflection, and able to adjust their words and actions to the situations and people around them. Conversely, individuals with low emotional intelligence may often feel misunderstood or apathetic, miss social cues, or lack the capacity to adapt their decision-making skills to the current situation.

Research shows that emotional intelligence also directly affects relationships and workplace interactions. In one study. couples in which both partners scored low emotional quotients also self-reported higher levels of unhappiness within their relationship, with the opposite being true for couples with high emotional quotients (Salovey & Grewal 2005). Additionally, the same study also reported that individuals who scored highly were rated by coworkers as easier and more enjoyable to work with than their lower-scoring counterparts.

Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence

Just as knowledge can be increased through learning and experience, emotional intelligence can also be improved. Specific exercises can beef up the connection between your emotions and your actions and lead to greater application of emotional intelligence in everyday life.

1. Understand what emotional intelligence is and how it can affect your daily life.

Many people have never given much explicit thought to how their emotions habitually affect their actions. Although you may have noticed how you act when you feel a certain way (e.g. ‘I always yell at people when I’m stressed out’), you may have never given deeper thought to why an emotion leads to a particular action. Understanding how self-awareness, empathy, and other facets of emotional intelligence feed into your behavior and decisions can help you identify your emotional habits and patterns.

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2. Verbalize or write down your feelings.

Sometimes, emotions seem too complex to understand, but writing down your feelings can be beneficial for identifying them and how they inform your actions and habits. Articulating your emotions can improve your self-awareness and allow you to better address the sources of your feelings.

One of the core tenets of emotional intelligence is the need to identify what you are feeling before trying to understand how it affects behavior. Writing or talking through emotions can be a cathartic activity as well as helping you think through situations before acting on them impulsively.

3. Be purposefully empathetic in daily life.

Accounting for the feelings of others when making decisions is not only a practice in improving emotional intelligence but also a key to being a better peer and leader—the goal of increasing emotional intelligence to begin with, right? Empathy can be easy to abandon in the stress of daily life, but being intentional about reflecting on the feelings of those affected by your actions is one of the best ways to apply your emotional intelligence.

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Practicing empathy-driven internal dialogue is another way to apply emotional intelligence to daily life. Being empathetic toward others, even when you are not making decisions or interacting with people, will make empathy more instinctual.

4. Ask yourself “what,” not “why.”

Self-reflection is a large part of improving emotional intelligence. After all, how can you improve the quality of your emotion-based interactions if you are unwilling to truthfully assess yourself? However, one study showed that the majority of people consider themselves self-aware,—but fewer than 15% of people actually met the psychological criteria for self-awareness (Eurich, 2018). Tasha Eurich, the psychologist behind this research, identified the reason for this failure: Many people ineffectively use introspection.

Many people ask themselves “why” they might feel or act a certain way—without having access to the subconscious thoughts and feelings that answer that question. Eurich believes the more effective question is “what”; it can yield more objective and therefore informative answers. For example, instead of “why am I upset?” ask yourself, “what situations cause me to be upset and what do they have in common?” Asking yourself “why” you feel a certain way can also belittle your own emotions. (Remember, feeling emotions isn’t bad, but it is important to understand what makes you feel a certain way in order to grow your emotional intelligence for the future.)

By improving your emotional intelligence, you will be able to make more informed decisions in your daily life and better connect with those around you. Connecting with other people is vital to happiness; improving your ability to do so begins with increasing your emotional intelligence.