What is Emotional Intelligence and How to Get More of It?

19 min readJun 30, 2021

A Full Guide to Emotional Intelligence

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence is the ultimate ability. It’s about mastering yourself and your human interaction with others.

Emotional Intelligence, also named EQ or EI, means having full control over yourself, meaning thoughts, actions, emotions, feelings, instincts, motivation, empathy and being able to form strong relationships with others and knowing how to approach every situation; also called ‘being nice’ by humans.

In his article, Daniel Goleman, a guru of EQ, wrote what it is and what it is composed of, in short. As mister Goleman, I will break emotional Intelligence into the same four categories. The approach will be different, though.

What I like to say is that mastering emotional intelligence is The Art of Being Human. You will fully understand this soon.

Components of Emotional Intelligence

As with every big and complex thing, EQ is also broken up into less complex concepts. There are four of them, in this case. Actually, there are six, but you’ll understand why in a second. They are divided into two sections. There are the individual ones/self-bounded, the first two, and the social ones, the last two.

There are models which work on 5 concepts, adding Motivation stand-alone, which I do not personally like. I’m with Mr. Goleman here.

So, the big concepts are the following:

Self-awareness
Self Management
Empathy and Social Awareness
Relationship Management and Social Skills

Now, to have Emotional Intelligence explained to you, I will describe each of these.

1. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is one of the four big concepts in Emotional Intelligence. It is being aware of yourself, basically. That’s the coat it puts on. Being aware of self means being aware of your own emotions and feeling and why you feel them. It is being able to be conscious of your strengths, weaknesses, and limits.

To know what makes you special, what is that one thing you do better than anyone, and what is that one thing that makes you feel down instantly every time you think of it. Self-awareness means knowing why you have certain phobias and why you like so much the girl you see every morning in the metro…or Burger King, why you like Burger King.

Why Does It Matter to Be Self-Aware?

Simply because this is the route to fully knowing yourself and managing your time and activities. Never be late again! It means having control over what you want to do in life and be mindful of your decisions. Setting goals and getting to them. Even apologizing and actually knowing the reason (this would help guys all around the world in girlfriend situations).

How to Grow Your Self-Awareness?

I can say it shortly. You can become more self-aware by self-analysis, self-tracking, observing others, and reading books.

Simply analyze and track your thoughts and emotions, observe other people’s actions and feelings to discover something in yourself and, of course, read books.

You will find so many things about you, though many indirect things. By default, by increasing your self-awareness, you increase your emotional intelligence as well. You can even keep a notebook in Evernote in which you keep track of yourself.

But I’m not here to say it shortly. So here are some guidelines:

The Three or Five Whys

Ask yourself why. It’s a simple technique.

When a situation is given and you want to find the root of it or the problem, you simply ask yourself why 3 or 5 times.

This can help you to identify what’s wrong with you or with a situation, why you reacted as you did and, of course, prevent this kind of event in the future. This could help you in building self-esteem and being accountable for your own flaws.

Monitor and Manage Your Self-Talk

Everyone is talking to themselves. Period. If you’re saying right now that you don’t do it, you actually just did it. The key is to manage it.

How? Well, just by stopping your thoughts and asking yourself if they are actually worth consuming your energy and time on. For example, it’s not useful to think about how could kittens be so cute when you have to study for an exam.

Also, when encountering a problem, it’s useful to argue against yourself and ask yourself and others questions about you.

Also, you ought to question your assumptions. Before asking someone for help, emotionally intelligent people find themselves the problem and the roots of it.

More than that, they find out arguments, pros, and cons and they try to talk themselves out of liking one or more solutions. If they cannot, they go to ask for help. If mostly everyone agrees with them or gives them the same solutions and arguments, they are good to go, the solutions are valid. If not, well, they have more work to do.

Be Aware of Your Body Language and Voice Nuances

Verbal communication accounts for about 7% of the information transmitted. So studies say. The rest is non-verbal communication. You send so much information from your voice nuance, your tone, and your body language.

Know your Personality Type to Know your Strengths and Weaknesses

Do some online personality tests like Myers-Briggs or DISC assessments to find out more about your personality type.

These are not life-long results. They are insights. Take the tests and pay attention to the results. Write them down. Make a table with the results you think suit you and another column with the results you think don’t suit you. Once you do that, make two SWOT Analysis tables.

For the results that feel like you and for those that do not feel like you. Draw your conclusions from those. You ask yourself why you should do the extra effort for those you think that don’t suit you?

Because you can draw conclusions and find opportunities there and because you should observe and validate those results with yourself and others. The test may not be 100% right, everyone is unique, but it could help you with increasing your emotional intelligence.

Ask for Feedback. Especially Constructive Feedback

You are subjective. I am sure of that. everyone is. That is why we need validation from others.

When you feel something you’ve done is wrong, just ask someone present ‘Where was I wrong?’. He’ll give you a very personal list of things they don’t like about you. This is because people don’t know how to give feedback.

When they say that they don’t like something about you, they didn’t like how you acted in a specific situation. Accept that they don’t know how to do this and trigger your Emotional Intelligence to understand it and don’t take it personally. Approach it as they would be objective, even if they are not. You yourself should be objective.

Analyze the feedback and implement it. When someone says something is wrong about you, try and fix it if you think this is actually something it bothers you. If it’s a part of you and it affects your integrity, don’t fix it. Also, don’t try to have tunnel vision. Be open and understand their perspective.

Use self-evaluation and reflection regularly

Periodically take some time to reflect and evaluate yourself. Sundays, for example. Or once every 2 weeks. Update yourself like that. Track your flaws, write down what you did like and what you did not do, and write down what other people did and did not like about you.

Observe and evaluate them. Take some time to reflect. Mediation could help you with this. Usually, the people who meditate are more emotionally intelligent than those who don’t. You can even take this one step further and set goals for yourself, for the next two weeks. See how it goes. And do it again and again. Constantly improve yourself.

Build a Growth Mindset.

Create your Manifesto

Create your set of core values. Write down the concepts that guide your life. Write down your beliefs, what you have faith in. Write down your strengths and weaknesses and what you want to improve in yourself.

More than that, keep those in mind and act upon them. You can use a certain technique to find out your Eulerian Destiny. It’s easy, you find the intersection point of What you grew up around, what do strangers say about you, subjects you can talk endlessly about, and what your background is (past 5–10 years of experience).

You can also create what your concept of ‘perfect community would be like. How you want your friends to be, what to talk about, activities to do together, etc.

Another tool to help you is The Freedom Diagram.

Create your life’s strategy

Once you have your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, Core Values, and Eulerian Destiny you can arrange and transform those into a strategy and even a plan.

A Strategy is composed out of a mission, a vision, and a strategical direction. A vision is your ultimate purpose, maybe even your Eulerian Destiny. It has to be vague.

A mission is how you want to get to your vision. It’s still vague, but it’s a bit more descriptive. Strategic directions are the aspects you want to act in (lifestyle, family, professional life, personal development, etc.).

A Plan is made out of SMART Objectives and KPIs. You can even add instruments and processes to be more specific. Just a bucket list is not enough. You need specific, relevant, and time-bound items on that list. Once you have your macro vision, you can use this tool to build a strategy for the next 1,2 or 3 years. Or to open a business.

One more thing you should do is to write down your tasks for the day or the week. It helps you be more productive for professional goals and helps you keep track of yourself: your attitudes, emotions, problems, etc. Yes, emotional intelligence covers these aspects as well.

Critical Thinking Plays a Major Role in Self-Awareness

This is not the main component of Emotional Intelligence, but another base skill for it. Critical Thinking is the ability to objectively analyze and evaluate an issue in order to get to a conclusion or judgment.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. It has to be active in your mind always. Most things you read about in this article are actually based on Critical Thinking.

This is based on more sub-skills. You have to be aware of more aspects when thinking critically when a problem or situation needs solving.

You have to identify the problem at first, with the 3 or 5 whys, which would be a way to do it. You need to identify biases. It’s critical to know what the bias is and what is that circumstance that makes your or others’ opinions subjective.

Also, you need to determine the relevance of arguments, ideas, hypotheses, and problems. Analyze every aspect of each argument, problem, and idea. Keep in mind that you have to be objective, therefore, use logical reasoning for this. Predict what issues may appear in the future and how to solve them. Evaluate the outcomes of what you thought of and conceptualize the solution.

Also, for the strategy and planning part of Self-Awareness, there is another skill involved, Strategic Thinking. This is the ability to have a vision of the future and know how to act step by step, according to the plan. To arrive at conclusions by deep analysis and segmentation of how to get to the solution or goal.

2. Self-Management

Self-management is the next step in Emotional Intelligence after Self-Awareness. It means more than being aware of your thoughts, emotions and making a plan. It means also controlling them. Not only being aware of your strengths, weaknesses, limits, values, strategy, and plan. It means being in control of everything. It means knowing when to stop, what to do according to your values, how to showcase your strengths, and how to improve your weaknesses.

Why Is Self-Management important?

It is extremely important to be able to control, at first, your impulses. Just think how many times a relationship broke just because of an uncontrolled impulse out of anger. Or how many battles and problems have been caused just because someone said ‘No, it’s my piece of the pie and I don’t allow you to take or touch it!’ This is also a game of ego, which is even harder to control than anger because it is longer-lasting.

How to Grow Your Self-Management?

First of all, you do this by increasing your Self-Awareness. It will become way easier. You can manage yourself by having a Growth Mindset, regulating your emotions, stress management, being persistent and persevering, being resilient, having Patience, and being perceptive. Another important thing is to forgive and forget. One more important aspect is motivation and self-motivation. You need to know what motivates you and how to motivate yourself. You need to manage your mood and thoughts and emotions to get the motivation anytime you need it. That is why I don’t see it as a fifth item.

These are just the concepts to relate to. Let’s develop these and make them easier to adopt and practice.

Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck has an entire book about this one. It is one of my favorite books. It explains largely this concept and gives exact situations about how to approach it. Simply put it is the power to believe you can improve. Here is a quote: “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work — brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” (Dweck, 2015)

How does this relate to Self-Management and Emotional Intelligence? It relates to hard work, perseverance, dedication. This implies you getting the motivation and the power to carry on. You need to change your perception of the situation and change your mood to be motivated. You control motivation, not the reverse.

Emotion Regulation

In order to manage yourself, you have to control your feelings and emotions. You need to know what to do when you feel fear or stress. You need to take control of yourself. Be careful when they happen, know their causes, and act accordingly.

The easiest way to do this is to refresh your brain, as you would do with a computer. When stress or fear occurs just clear your mind and take a few deep and slow breaths.

Meditation helps with this control over time. But simply breathing slowly a few times without thinking about anything slows your heart rate and allows you to approach the situation differently, thinking critically, for example.

Stress Management

A major part of emotion regulation is Stress Management. But this deserves its own bullet point. Stress is your body’s reaction to external stimuli.

When stressed, your body thinks it is being attacked so it releases a complex mix of hormones and chemicals such as adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine.

This is not good, that is why you feel so bad and alert when stressed. The key here is, yet again, breathing and applying critical thinking to the situation. Understand why you feel that way and act upon it.

Persistence and Perseverance

Part of the Growth Mindset, it’s an important point. Being persistent and perseverant is complicated. Usually, if you are turned down you feel down. You feel discouraged, you don’t want to get to do that thing again. These two items are the Resistance. They act against the bad mood. They tell you to fight back and continue. After you try, again and again, you’ll get what you want. Even Colonel Sanders was refused 1009 times, and now KFC is one of the major players in Fast Food. Imagine the emotional intelligence this guy has.

Patience

This is quite a big thing. And no, Patience and waiting are not the same thing. Waiting is awful. Waiting in a queue, for the traffic light, etc. Patience is waiting for the perfect moment to act. Waiting for results. More than that, not only waiting and doing nothing but working aligned to your plan without thinking of the endgame. Do your part and feel assured about the outcome.

What’s more, it is the ability to tolerate and endure difficult situations without acting out impulsively, acting emotionally intelligent.

Resilience

The ability to bounce back. The ability to quickly recover from damage. The ability to get back up powerfully when life is breaking down and when nothing works. Like a Superhero. It’s a skill as well as a mindset. Maybe you get knocked down, but nothing can knock you out. It may knock you down, stun or impair you, not more. In these situations, you can recover. Resilience is quick recovery. They may put you down, but when you get up, you’ll be stronger. You know what they say ‘what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.’

Perceptiveness

Perceptiveness is the quality of being very good at noticing and understanding things that many people do not notice. The key here is to be observant and pay attention to details. Not only paying attention to them but remembering them and being able to identify the mistakes. It’s kind of like what entrepreneurs do when they identify the needs of people.

Forgive and forget

Most people have egos. Strong egos. They don’t understand that it’s no use in taking things personally and getting back at someone just because that person made them feel uncomfortable, for example.

The ability to forgive and forget is a good start to improve your emotional intelligence. It’s your life, this means you are the only one responsible for what happens.

Don’t get angry with someone and then not speak ever to them just because your feelings got hurt. It’s your problem you allowed external stimuli to affect you. Nobody else is to blame. Even if people feel or don’t feel sorry, you have the duty to forgive them for what they did and just forget.

It’s done, you cannot change it now. If you don’t forgive someone, how do you expect that person to forgive himself/herself?

Self-confidence

I’ve heard too many people having self-confidence problems. By showing emotional intelligence you have to manage yourself. Therefore, you have to learn how to be confident in your own person.

Just learn who you are and what are your strengths and weaknesses, work on your weaknesses and you will not have the problem of not being confident in yourself. You’ll know you have limits, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to get over them. Be confident, nothing bad can happen and if it does, nobody will remember one year from that moment.

3. Empathy and Social Awareness

These two make up for the social part of emotional intelligence: the following Social Skills and Relationship skills. The difference between them is that Empathy is a part of Social Awareness.

Social Awareness is how can people react and handle relationships and awareness of others’ needs, feelings, and concerns. It engulfs Empathy, Organizational Awareness, and Service Orientation.

Social Awareness refers to how people handle relationships and awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns. The Social Awareness cluster contains three competencies: Empathy, Organizational Awareness, and Service Orientation.

The last item on the list is going corporate, therefore I will not cover it. It means anticipating, recognizing, and meeting customers’ needs.

Empathy

Empathy is basically being kind and nice. It means sensing others’ feelings and perspectives, being actually concern bout them, and having an active interest in their concerns.

Here is how to show empathy as a human that has a good level of Emotional Intelligence:

Listen and don’t interrupt

When having a conversation, don’t rush to speak only about yourself and only tell the person what to do. Listen to them. Actually listen and if anything, if you want to intervene, ask them how they felt or why they did that. Most often, people don’t look for answers, instead, they only want to be listened to.

Be there, not on your phone

Don’t spend time on your phone. When you are going out with friends or someone wants to talk to you, just leave your phone. Listen to people, engage with them in conversations. If you need to, make a rule so you stack up the phones, and the first to touch them has to pay for everyone.

Encourage people

If anyone has an unachievable goal or just something that you don’t think they can achieve, don’t show it. Encourage them, give them a piece of advice if you can. People don’t need to have their wings cut off, no matter if they have or not emotional intelligence, they need to fly, they need encouragement, moral support, and help.

Empathize with people

Show people you care. Empathize with them. If a person comes to you with a problem or situation and a bad mood, the last thing that person needs is you being a jerk. Show them you care and understand them. Put yourself in their shoes, see how it feels like. Don’t judge them, be there and help.

Give genuine recognition

If someone has an idea which you like or if someone did something you liked or if someone did something nice for you, go on and appreciate that person.

It doesn’t take much to tell someone ‘Your idea is great’ or ‘What you did for me was really nice, thank you! I appreciate.’ Also, smile while doing this. They will feel good and so will you. Even if it’s hard to believe, people feel good when doing nice things, even if it hurts their egos or whatsoever.

Have deep conversations with people

This helps with bonding time. Have deep conversations about family, personal background, feelings, books, or interesting subjects you both like.

Most of my closest friends study politics and they talk a lot about this. I knew nothing about this at all, and I learned from them and engaged in conversations. Even though my ideas are not always valid, they appreciate the effort and it makes all of us feel good.

Validate other person’s perspective

When you know someone’s right, validate the idea. If it’s the greatest idea and nobody validates it, the person will feel that it’s an awful idea and lose their self-confidence. It would be nice for you to tell them ‘Hey, dude awesome idea! Can you tell me more about it?’

Help others grow

When you have more knowledge or skill than others, help them develop. Mentor them, Coach them, Delegate tasks for them. This is a more formal case. In a social situation, have conversations about topics that might help people. Go talk to your friends about Emotional Intelligence after you read this article. It should be useful for them.

Put others first

Don’t be egotistical and selfish. Don’t think only about yourself. Sometimes people need you more than you need yourself. Sacrifice your time for them.

If your friend wants to talk to you about his most recent break-up, don’t cut him off because you have to go to the gym and then you have a party. Help your friend, for if you don’t, you’ll have more to lose.

I have lost so many epic parties because I spent time with people that need me. And I don’t regret it. I kind of felt sorry for a bit because I did not see how a guy jumped off the roof dressed in Santa Claus. But it was worth spending my time with a friend in need.

Organizational Awareness

This means reading a group’s emotions and tensions in situations and the power relationships between them.

It is about feeling when there is tension between two or more people in the room, feeling the emotion flowing around at every moment so you know when something is good or it is not. When people are tense and have problems is disruptive for the group’s dynamic.

Then you split up into groups and stop talking to each other. It’s a human’s duty to spot these tensions and solve them so nobody suffers and nobody gets angry with anybody else.

4. Relationship Management and Social Skills

Relationship Management and Social Skills are the same thing. The difference is that for a professional frame, as in corporations, they use Relationship Management. It’s useful for sales and leadership and teamwork and stuff. But I am not here to write about this subject. Not now.

Social Skills

Social skills are vital to society and emotional intelligence. This is the reason we even have societies. Because people communicate with each other. This term refers to the interaction with others. So here are some of the most important things about inter-human communication:

Active Listening

Actually listen to a person. Don’t spend time on your phone. Look at them, make eye contact, and come up with follow-up questions. Make them feel you are listening to them and that you actually care.

Non-Verbal Communication

Pay attention to your body language and how you say things. Verbal communication alone counts for only about 7% of all communication and information sent to the other person. Don’t use closed positions

Verbal Communication

Be careful about what words you use. People get things personally and they may perceive things in a different way than you originally intended. Words can be the most powerful weapon and the greatest defense, the most destructive and the most soothing. It matters only how you say them.

Storytelling

Storytelling is the most primal skill. It is still one of the most influential skills. The ability to speak your mind in such a way makes people dream with you and follow you. You can create a sense of belonging, you can make people believe in the same ideals as you. It’s all about how you speak your mind.

Public Speaking

One of the most important life skills. Even if you have to hold a speech, a presentation, or just speak to a group of people, you need to know how to do it. How to speak, how to move, how to pause.

Conclusion

Summing up, emotional intelligence is the art of being human. It teaches you how to be fully aware of yourself, how to manage yourself, how to empathize with people, and how to interact with them. It is composed of two categories, social and individual and each is divided in two. If you observed, there is another interaction between these items. Self-Management is Applied Self-Awareness and Social Skills are Applied Empathy and Social Awareness.

I hope you got some value out of this article and feel free to share it, tweet it, and like it.

What are your thoughts about this topic? Any feedback is welcome. May Emotional Intelligence be with you!