1. Knowing your own emotions
Knowing your emotions is like being a good wine connoisseur. It is too simple to say that wine is good or bad. A wine can be described as dry or fruity, smooth or complex, smoky or spicy, tart or buttery. Does your feeling vocabulary express the complexity, subtleties, and wide range of emotions in your life. Get a feeling magnet and hang it on your refrigerator or filing cabinet at work to help you identify your emotions throughout the day.
2. Managing emotions
Stuffing leads to hypertension, headaches, muscle tightness, and emotional constipation. Spewing leads to conflicts with people, hurt feelings, aggression, and impulsive behavior. The balanced approach to managing emotions is to simply share your feelings. The healthy benefits of sharing personal feelings are self awareness, physical relief, better understanding and communication in relationships, and emotional intelligence.
3. Motivating yourself
What are the benefits of intrinsic motivation? Self responsibility, healthy relationships, happy mindset, and winning in everyday life. How does a person boost their motivation? Read and learn everything you can on something that interests you. Watch movies and listen to music that inspires you. Spend quality time with other motivated people. Set goals and make it a personal competition to achieve those goals. Celebrate your victories.
4. Recognizing emotions in others
Reading facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and eye contact are crucial to emotional intelligence. Listen for what is said and not said to fully understand another person. Learn to state the obvious. For example; "You keep looking at the floor when you are talking to me. Help me understand what is going on inside of you." The better you can read and understand traffic signs the more successful you will be in getting to your destination. Just try ignoring the signs and see what happens. The same is true in relationships and emotional intelligence.
5. Care in relationships
It's true that people don't care how much we know until they know how much we care. What kind of behavior does it take to grow a garden? Preparation of the soil, planting of the seeds, watering and fertilizing the plants, controlling the weeds, and harvesting the fruit. Even so, happy, healthy relationships take a series of caring behaviors. You may not have a green thumb but you better learn how to express care and emotional intelligence.