Emotional Intelligence

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage and use your emotions in positive and constructive ways. It's about engaging with others in  ways that draw people to you. Emotional intelligence is also about recognizing your own emotional state and the emotional states of others.

Emotional intelligence consists of four fundamental capabilities:

• Self-awareness — the ability to recognize your emotions and their impact while using gut feelings to guide your decisions.
• Self-management — the ability to control your emotions and behavior and adapt to changing circumstances.
• Social awareness — the ability to sense, understand, and react to other's emotions and feel comfortable socially.
• Relationship management — the ability to inspire, influence, and connect to others and manage conflict.

Emotional intelligence skill 1: Rapidly reduce stress

The first key skill of emotional intelligence is the ability to quickly calm yourself down when you’re feeling overwhelmed. This skill is essential for your resilience to stress, enabling you to bring your stress levels down and refocus. . Then you won’t lose control of yourself, no matter what challenges you face.

Stress busting: functioning well in the heat of the moment

Our ability to think is impaired when stress hits our nervous system. Stress triggers automatic “fight-or-flight” responses that make us feel like running or fighting – but not much of anything else. When this happens, rational thinking and decision making goes out the window and our emotions and the emotions of others can seem threatening and overwhelming. In such a heated situation, there’s no time for a long, soothing bath or meditation. What’s needed is a quick way to reduce stress in the moment.

The best way to reduce stress quickly is through the senses: through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. But each person responds differently to sensory input, so you need to find things that are soothing to you. For example, certain kinds of music may relax one person but irritate another. The smell of incense can lift one person’s distress, but another may benefit most from candle light. Be a “stress-buster detective;” search out things that help calm and focus you. You can also create soothing, sensory-rich environments in your home, car, office – or wherever you spend time.

Emotional intelligence skill 2: Connect to your emotions

The second key skill of emotional intelligence is moment-to-moment awareness of your emotions and how they influence your actions. Many of us – especially people who have experienced early-life traumas such as loss, abuse, or isolation – are not adequately in touch with our emotions. But although you can distort, deny, and numb emotions, you can’t eliminate them. They’re still there, whether we’re aware of them or not.

Unfortunately, without emotional awareness, we are unable to fully understand our own motivations and needs, or to communicate effectively with others. In order to be emotionally healthy and emotionally intelligent, your must reconnect to your core emotions.

Emotional intelligence skill 3: Improve nonverbal communication

Nonverbal communication is emotionally-driven communication that answers the questions: “Are you listening?” and “Do you understand and care?” Answers to these questions are expressed in the way we talk, listen, look, move, and react. Our nonverbal messages will produce a sense of interest, trust, excitement, and desire for connection – or they will generate fear, confusion, distrust, and disinterest.

Part of improving our non-verbal communicant involves paying attention to:

• Eye contact: Does it seem lacking, too intense, or just right?
• Facial expression: Is it mask-like and unexpressive, or emotionallypresent and filled with interest?
• Tone of voice: Does the voice project warmth, confidence, and delight, or is it strained and blocked?
• Posture and gesture: Does your body feel frozen or relaxed? Is their tension in your shoulders and jaw? What do you observe about the tension in the body of the person you are speaking to?
• Touch: How do you like to be touched? How do you communicate your feelings through touch?

Emotional intelligence skill 4: Use humor to deal with challenges

Humor and play lighten our burdens and help us to keep things in perspective. A good hearty laugh reduces stress, elevates mood, and improves brain functioning.

Using playful communication broadens our emotional intelligence and helps us:

• Take hardships in stride. By allowing us to view our frustrations and disappointments from new perspectives, laughter and play enable us to survive annoyances, hard times, and setbacks.
• Smooth over differences. Using gentle humor often helps us say things that might be difficult without creating a flap.
• Simultaneously relax and energize ourselves. Playful communication relieves fatigue and relaxes our bodies, which allows us to recharge and accomplish more.
• Become more creative. When we loosen up, we free ourselves of rigid ways of thinking and being, allowing us to get creative and see things in new ways.

A note of caution: Interactive play is not a competitive game; we’re not trying to win or lose. Instead, the play we engage in has to be interesting and equally fun for both people. Something isn’t funny unless it is funny to both parties—and this includes teasing.

Emotional intelligence skill 5: Resolve conflict positively

Conflict in relationships can be a deal breaker and a heart breaker. Two people can’t possibly always have the same needs, opinions and expectations. However, that needn’t be a bad thing!

Resolving conflict in healthy, constructive ways can strengthen trust between people. When conflict isn’t perceived as threatening or punishing, it fosters freedom, creativity, and safety in relationships.

Tips for resolving conflict in a trust-building way:

• Stay focused in the present. When we are not holding on to old hurts and resentments, we can recognize the reality of a current situation and view it as a new opportunity for resolving old feelings about conflicts.
• Choose your arguments. Consider what is worth arguing about and what is not.
• Forgive. If you continue to be harmed, protect yourself. But if the harm isn’t continuing in the present, remember that conflict resolution involves giving up the urge to punish.
• End conflicts that can't be resolved. It takes two people to keep an argument going.

Once you know how to remain emotionally present, and manage stress, you can avoid overreacting or under-reacting in emotionally-charged situations. And with the aid of nonverbal communication and humor you can catch and defuse many issues before they escalate into conflict.

Learning the skills vs. learning about emotional intelligence

Most of us know that there can be a world of difference between what we know or learn and what we can actually do with this knowledge. This is especially true when it comes to acting on personal and interpersonal information, because this information relies on nonverbal communication for its success.

What this means is that you can’t simply read about or memorize the skills of emotional intelligence in order to master them. Emotional intelligence is not learned in an intellectual way; it must be learned and understood on an emotional level. This works only if the whole brain is engaged–especially the nonverbal, emotionally-driven, and sensory-rich parts of the brain.

Fortunately we have a very reliable model for developing the skills of emotional intelligence. It’s a model that works very successfully with infants – it’s how mothers and babies bond – and it can work equally well in adults. In this model, nonverbal cues have more influence than words.

Related Links: Relationship Help Series

Relationship Help: The Five Key Tools Managing Relationship Stress Emotional Communication

Nonverbal Communication Playfulness & Humor Conflict Resolution

Jeanne Segal, Ph.D., Melinda Smith, M.A., and Robert Segal, M.A. contributed to this article. Last modified on October 20, 2008.