What Role Does Emotional Intelligence Play In Our Relationships?

People's emotional intelligence (EQ) refers to how well they can understand, manage, and recognize their own emotions as they relate to the feelings of others.

Building your EQ helps you to be sensitive to the emotions of others. High emotional intelligence allows you to grow and nurture caring relationships, essential components to achieving personal happiness.

To build your emotional intelligence, you need to pay attention to four key areas.

Self-Regulation

Self-management is about controlling your impulses and behavior in certain situations. For instance, people with high EQs will refrain from bursting out in anger without taking a few moments first to analyze the situation. They know that showing a temper may result in only reaping resentment from colleagues, not inspiring any willingness to get things done.

You can improve your self-regulation by:

Being mindful of thoughts and emotions
Building patience and tolerance to frustration
Knowing you always have a choice how to respond
Improving your communication skills

Self-Awareness

Be mindful of your strengths, weaknesses, and the triggers that drive your behavior. This helps you understand how to regulate your emotions and reactions.

To improve self-awareness, you must:

Actively listen
Practice mindfulness
Keep a journal for practicing our daily gratitude
Develop a growth mindset. This welcomes continuous learning and seeing the silver lining in situations.

Social Awareness

By practicing behaviors for self-management and self-awareness, you increase your ability to recognize the emotional states others are in. Being socially aware will allow you to be more sensitive, better at reading non-verbal language and emotional cues.

Be more socially aware by:

Observing people. Notice their social skills and learn from them.
Engage more in social situations
Show and practice empathy
Show interest in other people. Listen actively.

Relationship Management

Once you master all three key EQ areas above, you can integrate them into managing a relationship.

As such, your sensitivity to changes in your personal connections will be heightened. This way, you will improve your ability to spot what relationship aspect would need more attention and some patching up.

While our intelligence quotient (IQ) is one that we develop in school, EQ is one we need to build on our own. Fortunately, it is a skill you can improve on, no matter your age or background.

With a good level of emotional intelligence, we can improve managing and recognizing our emotions to be more socially aware and better at handling relationships.

Photo Credit: Nastyanastya