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Emotional intelligence is rooted in the profound understanding and adept management of emotions. It shapes how individuals interact, bond, problem-solve, and collaborate within classrooms, sports teams, and business meetings. For all its importance to our well-being across various aspects of life, it’s perhaps our most undertaught skill. Without it, our emotions can become dominated by conflict and misunderstanding.
While the concept has gained recognition and acceptance over the years, the challenge with emotional intelligence, often referred to as “EQ,” lies in its implementation and the development of its component skills. Let’s take a look at the origins of emotional intelligence, its value, and how to develop it to benefit our personal and professional relationships.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
While we might be more culturally open or connected to our emotions today—think TikTok reflections, “rizz” as Oxford’s word of the year, and more people talking openly about therapy—it was unorthodox in 1990 when psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer first studied emotion as a skill. They contended there was “a set of skills contributing to the accurate appraisal of emotions and the effective regulation of emotion in self and others” and that feelings could be harnessed to motivate oneself and to achieve in life.
Now, EQ is a hallmark of effective leadership and interpersonal dynamics in the workplace.
According to the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Group, EQ is considered one of the top skills required for success at work, surpassing cognitive skills. Research from TalentSmart, which tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs. Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills—it impacts almost everything you do and say each day.
Building Emotional Intelligence
Despite this evidence and its indisputable importance, EQ skills often take a back seat to technical competencies. It’s not an inherent trait but a skill set that can be systematically nurtured through intentional practice and reflection. Parents and educators wield immense influence in modeling and imparting EQ to future generations, laying the groundwork for a society equipped with emotional resilience. Against the backdrop of escalating rates of mental health challenges, the urgent need for effective emotional regulation strategies in navigating the complexities of modern life cannot be overstated.
So, where do you begin in growing this skill? Salovey writes that studying EQ encompasses four clusters of skills.
The first is identifying and naming emotions in yourself and others through verbal and nonverbal means. Psychologist Katrina McCoy, Ph.D., refers to the process of getting specific about these feelings as “emotional granularity.”
“The more accurately we can describe our emotional experience and the context in which the experience is happening, the more information we have to decide what will help,” she says. Neuroscience even suggests that labeling our emotions can decrease activity in brain areas associated with negative emotions. By meticulously identifying and articulating nuanced emotions, individuals gain deeper insights into their internal experiences, empowering them to deploy more adaptive coping mechanisms.
A second skill is understanding how emotional vocabulary gets used, how emotions transition over time, what the consequences are of an emotional arousal—for example, why shame often leads to anger, why jealousy often contains a component of envy. Third is emotion management, which includes managing not only one’s own emotions but also the emotions of others, and the fourth is the use of emotions, such as in cognitive activities like solving a problem and making a decision.
Simple, right? That’s the thing about emotional intelligence: It’s easier said than done. Those of us who have felt the heat of an argument know that. This is where self-management comes in.
Self-management Is the Key to Unlocking Emotional Intelligence
Self-management is the cornerstone of emotional intelligence, and it demands deliberate and tailored practice. Embracing techniques such as mental self-distancing and reflective pauses enables individuals to avoid impulsive reactions. Taking conscious control of your attention and shifting from allowing your limbic system to guide your behavior (reacting) to engaging your cerebral cortex (responding) lets you choose how to act. Early on, it can be helpful to note the particular physical experiences that accompany troublesome emotions. Then, when a situation arises that triggers those physical responses, take a moment to mentally step out of your immediate experience.
As part of this, work to take control of your self-talk. Becoming aware of your self-talk is an important skill because it is those background beliefs that fuel our emotional responses. To genuinely defuse a strong negative emotion, you must examine the underlying belief and how accurate or useful it is. Ask others you trust to help you, too. Agree on a gesture or word to serve as a signal that your trusted individual can use to jump you off the limbic/reaction train.
The last step, in being able to act with emotional intelligence, requires a choice. People with high emotional intelligence cultivate a spirit of curiosity and openness with others. It fosters empathy and relatability. In short, you have to want to try to be more emotionally intelligent.
Conclusion
Mastering emotional intelligence is not just about understanding and managing emotions but about transforming how we interact, collaborate, and ultimately thrive in various facets of life. By embracing intentional practice and cultivating skills like emotional granularity, self-management, and empathy, individuals can unlock the full potential of EQ, fostering richer, more fulfilling relationships both in and out of the workplace.
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