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How to Improve Emotional Intelligence?

By Linda S. Davis

It is evident, emotional intelligence becomes more and more important for most employers. Every company wants to have top performers, people who create long-term results, individuals who are “easy to do business with.” Those people have a high level of emotional intelligence. We can define emotional intelligence as the ability to understand, manage and express one’s feelings, as well as engage with emotions and reactions of others. It is a self-development journey with lots of hard work on yourself.

To understand Emotional Intelligence more properly here are four key attributes for developing high level of emotional intelligence

emotional inteligence

Self-control

It means being capable of controlling and channeling your negative emotions. We all face up with a huge amount of stressful situations. Self-control certainly is not a skill you can develop in a short period. This skill is on the test every day, and it demands the ability to think before reacting. Practically it means to respond rather than react. If you let only reactions lead to your decisions, you will feel negative and frustrating. Responding is the quality of self-control. It is a conscious process of acknowledging the feelings and deciding how you want to react. Self-control is crucial in resolving conflict negotiations, and there are many tools how you can improve your self-control and reduce stress levels.

How to Resolve Conflict Negotiations?

No matter whether you have a business or personal communication, interpersonal conflict can arise in every area. Conflict is a creation of basically two or more people with different opinions about some subject, with no willingness to reframe their views to make a better mutual solution. Solving conflicts demands to have empathy for others, assertiveness, deep active listening, building rapport, controlling emotions and other neuro-linguistic (NLP) skills.

At your growth journey, those skills are “must have,” because to get more you need to be more. There is no other way. It takes extra effort to learn these communication skills, but the results will be impressive. You will be able to attract better jobs, have better relationships, have better business results, and all other.

If you have conflicts at your workplace or personal life here are some tips that can be helpful:

Be flexible and open minded

Rather than confronting about who is right, be willing to review yours and others opinions.

Don’t take it personally

Words can hurt when we bring into a conversation all sets of limiting beliefs and high levels of emotional sensitivity. Certainly, a bad and negative attitude cannot help. To see the situation more objectively, you need to disassociate yourself and take an observer position. That is how you will be able to access all of your knowledge and find different solutions because you will act as a counselor to yourself. From that position, you can observe yours and others behaviors and see the true meaning. There are also many other NLP techniques that can help you to detach yourself from the hurting words and remain objective.

Don’t be afraid of conflicts

Conflict is not a situation you need to be worried about because disagreement is natural and everybody needs a space to speak what’s on his or her mind. In personal life, it decreases the level of stress, and in business, it shows assertiveness and willingness to do something better. After all, we all end up in conflicts because we want things to be better. So, approach conflict calmly and consider it as a way of learning.

Build rapport and show empathy

Building rapport is a matter of being able to see other persons representation systems and match it with words, tone, and other gestures. It will be much easier to be calm if you know skills on how to lead the conversation. Another important thing is to figure out why another side is showing so much anger or disagreement, what is hurting the personal values of the other side and find the way to show empathy.

Take a break

To get a fresh vision, you need to break the pattern of negative and nonconstructive discussion. It means to get a break and distract yourself from conflict. Break a meeting for a few hours or even days. It is no use to force driving to the end of the one-way street just to conclude it is hard to get back. Make a turn around while you can. Both sides will have different thoughts and views after breaking the pattern and clearing the mind.

Resolving conflict negotiations or any other discussion demands patience and real skills. Once you decide to work on yourself and use self-development tools, you will be ready to negotiate with life, people, and others and get what you ask for. 

Empathy

One of the key elements of EQ is empathy. It is the awareness of feelings and emotions of others. Often we describe empathy as “putting yourself in other people shoes.” However, it is a vital communication skill for developing the long-term relationship. For example, if customer service representatives have no empathy for clients' problems it will be tough to find an appropriate communication level and get a loyal customer. It is simply not possible. The results will be low-quality service and potential customer churn. 

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is being aware of your perception, your personality, emotions, moods, behaviors, having a clear understanding of your thoughts and connections with other people. That is how you develop self-awareness. It is paying attention to all these expressions of thoughts and emotions and understanding them.

Passion & Motivation

If you have passion, then you will be motivated. You need to love what you do and know what reasons will drive you to give the best of yourself even when obstacles occur. If you are on a high vibrational level, you will attract people in a more natural way. It is like you go to a coffee shop or bank and you meet people who are energetic and passionate to help you with no expectations whatsoever whether you will buy something or not. Those people are top performers, great sellers, and relationship builders. Employers are willing to pay those people as much as they need because they bring results.

Developing Emotional Intelligence is not just developing one skill. It is a matter of training and accepting new behaviors to achieve positive results. So if you want to get your promotion, have more success in your business and personal relationship start practicing self-development tools. Be willing to do hard work on yourself; then success will be the consequence.

About the Author

Linda S. Davis works as an English teacher at Local College. Besides, she is a highly experienced editor at an academic writing help. By the way, she is a great speaker and communicator.



Disclaimer:

The above guest post is published based on the premise that it will be helpful and informative. The opinions made within it are those of the author and not of sunnyray.org. The links you may find within this post do not necessarily imply our recommendation or endorsement of the views expressed within them.



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