How to Process and Build Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand your emotions and those of surrounding people. An often-forgotten aspect of emotional intelligence is how to control your own emotions. Many people face the common issue of not being able to manage how they feel, resulting in internal turmoil or unideal releasement. Discovering and building your personal system of what works best with your emotional needs will strengthen your resolve in many areas of life. 

To construct a well-rounded, intuitive mind, you would need to follow five essential steps:

Build self-awareness:

Address and label the emotion. When you think back on an event, does that make you feel distressed, neutral, or at ease? Figure out what side of the spectrum your position falls into and assess the significance of your feelings. This will help you narrow down the exact emotion you are experiencing.

Build self-management:

Understand why you are feeling a certain way. Then, once you are aware of what you are experiencing, figure out what triggered that emotion into existence. Think back to the event again while asking yourself, “What was not right?” If a specific action or series of actions makes your mind or heart race at the thought of it, you have successfully located where the emotion stems from.

Practice empathy:

Try to view any situation from an outside perspective. If the incident made you feel something positive, see if your or another person’s behavior could be repeated or reciprocated in the future to figure out if you could share another good experience, or if it was a personal preference. If the incident made you feel something negative, see if your or another person’s behavior could be altered to avoid a similar circumstance from reappearing. 

Introduce internal affairs to external affairs:

Communicate with someone involved to bring up how something made you feel the way it did. This will let the person know how significant the action was and help reveal how your mind processes certain actions with the knowledge that personal experiences have molded what you perceive as good or bad. 

Build and repatch social relations:

Put effort into communicating transparently, reassessing behavior, establishing boundaries or what you are partial to. This will help reveal to the person you’re communicating with what your limit of social interaction is, and what you value.

By improving your emotional intelligence, you will become more intuitive, which will be beneficial in forming better relationships with yourself and others.