Recognize, regulate and influence emotions better with ‘Emotional Intelligence’

November 25th, 2021 – Reading time: 5 minutes

In my view, emotional intelligence is still one of the most underestimated skills, both in business and personal life. And like all skills, it can be improved by regular training. While a lot of people are talking about this ‘Emotional Intelligence’, most people have no idea what they mean with it. Basically, there are three core intelligences to reach your goals:

You need rational intelligence with which you will faster be able to learn new things, deal with new situations or will better be able to think abstractly.
You need to plan and organize yourself to execute the steps towards achieving your goal, thus requiring operational intelligence.
Emotional intelligence, at last, empowers you to recognize and use own emotions and emotions of other people, which is beneficial in many different ways.

While the topics of rational and operational intelligence are not self-explanatory, but everyone certainly already has a pretty good understanding of them, Emotional Intelligence is still a black box for many. So what exactly is this much-described Emotional Intelligence and how can you take advantage of it?

Well, there are two perspectives if you want to understand the effects of emotional intelligence. There’s the introspective and the outrospective.

On the introspective, harnessing emotions means on the one hand regulating negative emotions when they occur, ultimately leading to increased frustration tolerance. On the other hand, it means to make the best use of positive emotions for self-motivation. However, bot require a very good self-awareness of the own emotions.

One method to become aware of these is the following:
Think of a situation in the past in which you were angry (since this is the strongest emotion we have). Analyze the trigger of your emotion, reflect if you experience several emotions in a short sequence and reflect the action you finally took in that situation. Would you react again in the same way? If not, what could prevent you from doing so?

On the outrospective, you can use empathy to perceive emotions of others better in everyday situations. By this, you will be able to motivate others to achieve goals, but also to actively build sustainable social relationships, both in the short term (e.g., in business conversations) and in the long term (e.g., friendship).

Fascinated by that topic, I created a training on emotional intelligence. Together with the participants, we learn how to better manage our introspective of emotions: being more aware of our own emotions, regulate our emotions and motivating ourselves through the power of emotions.

What is your experience with emotional intelligence and do you have good practices to train your emotional skills?

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