How to Develop Emotional Intelligence

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert, and this week we’re going to talk about emotional intelligence, EQ. Daniel Goldman, the researcher who made this concept famous, basically said, and proved to an extent, that your emotional intelligence is going to be more predictive of your life success, then is your IQ, your measure of intelligence. So, you really have to ask yourself, “Do you want more friends? Do you want to be able to make friends easily? Do you want to be comfortable in social situations almost regardless of where you are? You want to achieve more? Do you want to get more stuff done, feeling that the things that are important to you sort of come towards you, that you can go after things and you can get them? You want to know yourself and feel like you’re comfortable in your own body and in your own ego-based identity? And, do you want to live with clear intentions? You want to be able to have this sense that you have a mission, that you’re going to go out and achieve?” Well, the secret to all of those things is emotional intelligence, EQ, and today I’m going to share with you six tips to improve, and boost up your own EQ. So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Well, what exactly is EQ? It’s this idea of a way of being socially, at an emotional level, that facilitates us getting what we want in our lives, whether it’s in purely social situations or other ways that require our own emotional regulation. Daniel Goldman explained it this way. Essentially, he says it’s made up of five underlying skills: social skills, self-regulation, that’s the capacity to manage one’s own emotions as and when necessary, it’s also about motivation, and the way that we can stay disciplined to get the things that we want done. It’s about self-awareness, and in big part, it’s about empathy. So, if social intelligence is made up of those five fundamental characteristics, well, how do we get more of them?

Well, there’s a bunch of ways that we can get more emotional intelligence, but I’m going to share with you six tips that kind of cover that span of five areas that emotional intelligence is made up of. First tip is this: get out of your social media. I say it over and over again, but we know that social media is this kind of fake way of being connected with other people, and it generally is hard on our self-esteem and helps us feel actually socially distant from people rather than closer. We need to get out there in real life, and in some respects, we can consider our real life encounters like practice, a practice to grow our social skills. Friends, associates, people that you work with, invite them out for coffee. Just have dates with all kinds of people as often as you can, and you will learn to be a better social animal. You’ll just improve your skills.

Second tip: leave the country. I know that sounds like a funny thing to say, but we get so accustomed to being in our own culture and our own milieu, and we’re so familiar with things that we’re so familiar with. And when we get into a different country, we are challenged in ways to observe society, culture, in a brand new and unique way. And especially if you get out of the tourist areas and go and hang out where locals are, you’ll get a real feel for how people act and behave and have interpersonal exchanges. And these insights will take you out of your normal pattern of looking at how people relate, and cause you to have brand new insights. And by the way, it also is a real incentive to go and get vaccinated, so there’s my little public health message is that most of us aren’t going to be able to travel a whole lot unless we get a vaccine. So if you’re thinking that you won’t, well, you’re probably not going to leave the country.

Thirdly, deliberately take perspective, especially perhaps when you’re irritated or angry with somebody, because then you’ll be seized with this idea that something is wrong with that other person, perhaps. And maybe in those moments, you can really stop for just a moment, have a deep breath, and say, “What is the experience of this moment for that person?” And that practicing empathy, it can be really powerful. It’s like, what would lead this person to get to the point where they’re feeling this way, where they’re behaving this way? What emotions are they feeling right now, and how is it that their view of this circumstance differs from mine? Brilliant, useful, emotionally intelligent way to look at difficult circumstances.

Get out of your comfort zone. You know, the more we challenge ourselves to do things that kind of stretch us, that grow us, well, it expands us as individuals, and therefore, it grows also motivation. When we get out of the comfort zone, we have little successes with things that we’re not totally familiar with, then we have this reservoir that grows in terms of our confidence and our motivation to do stuff. Number five: set a schedule. This is all about self-discipline and self-regulation. If we commit to a schedule, literally write it down or put it in our computer schedules, it’s a basic fundamental tenet of self-regulation. If it’s in your calendar, you become committed. And I would suggest, basic things should be in your calendar too. What is your bedtime? Because your life works around very basic routines that need to repeat over and over and over again. And if you are getting your regular bedtime and getting up at the same time, the rest of your day kind of fits into place. But when we have erratic bedtimes, It’s hard to have a stable, self-regulated, day-to-day life. And number six, this may sound like a weird one, but go and watch my recent video on intuition. Intuition is all about a very basic kind of self-awareness, one that many of us, especially in the West, feel alienated from. We don’t really trust our gut instincts because we are so proud, in our society, of conceptual thinking, of the preeminence of intelligence over what sometimes we just know. And there’s interest in research showing that really successful entrepreneurs are usually very much basing their most important decisions on intuition. We are not going to logic out the best way to live our life, and so when we can take a look at our intuition, we actually become more self-aware and therefore have greater emotional intelligence. So, the link to that video is in the description below.

I hope those tips are very helpful. I really encourage you to think deeply about your own emotional intelligence and be grateful for what you’ve got. And know that it’s a buildable talent, that you can work on things to grow more EQ and get more success in your life as a result. If you like this kind of content, please click the like button, share it with your friends and family, and more people will get more of this kind of source for greater happiness. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.