How To Increase Emotional Intelligence And Foster Better Communication
The American Psychological Association defines emotional intelligence (EI) as “a type of intelligence that involves the ability to process emotional information and use it in reasoning and other cognitive activities.” Also known as emotional quotient (EQ), EI is essentially the ability to identify and manage your own emotional state. It also involves perceiving and responding to the emotions of others in order to communicate more effectively in your professional and personal life. If you’re looking for ways to increase emotional intelligence, learning about EI models, competencies, and learnable skills may be helpful. We’ll explore these below.
The core abilities of emotional intelligence
Defining exactly what EI is made up of is a task that psychologists have been at for years. According to the original EI model that psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey put forth in 1997, EI includes just four distinct abilities:
- Accurately perceiving and identifying emotions
- Evoking emotion to enable the processing of information and understanding
- Understanding emotional language and using emotional information
- Being able to regulate one’s own emotions and influence the emotions of others to promote well-being
According to psychologist Daniel Goleman’s model, which expanded on Mayer and Salovey’s, there are actually five key components of EI:
- Self-awareness, which involves recognizing and understanding your emotions and how they may affect others as well as understanding your strengths and weaknesses and how you may be perceived by reacting a certain way
- Self-regulation, which entails managing emotions and ways of responding to them, including abilities like delaying gratification, controlling impulses, and tolerating frustration. For example, deep breathing, going for a walk, and meditating are some ways to regulate emotions and handle stress so you can respond more calmly to a situation.
- Motivation relates to your drive to meet goals, learn from past mistakes, and stay resilient despite setbacks.
- Empathy is the ability to grasp someone else’s perspective and understand how they may be feeling as a result—and then respond in a way that acknowledges and validates their perspective.
- Social skills are a set of abilities that enable you to communicate effectively and influence others.
There are other models of emotional intelligence too, including one that takes into account personality traits and another that combines abilities and competencies with innate traits. The latter “mixed” model, which was developed by psychologist Reuven Bar-On, defines EI as a “set of non-cognitive abilities and competencies that influence the ability to be successful in coping with environmental demands and pressures.” It includes the following factors:
- Intrapersonal skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Adaptation skills
- Stress management skills
- General mood
Skills that may help improve emotional intelligence
Building the set of skills below can help foster emotional awareness and EI:
Self-management
This skill involves learning how to constructively deal with stress to enable you to process and handle emotions so they don’t control you. Self-management may also allow you to respond to emotions in a calmer, more conscientious way. Along with self-control, maintaining motivation, the ability to adapt, and a positive outlook are part of this competency.
Self-awareness
While learning to manage stress may allow you to manage impulses and feelings, self-awareness may allow you to identify core emotions—such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust—as they arise from moment to moment. This awareness of how emotions change and dissipate may allow you to understand the connection between thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.
Social awareness
This is the process in which you may pick up on verbal or nonverbal emotional cues in an environment, allowing you to “read the room” and gauge how others are feeling. This type of awareness enables you to understand what others are communicating beyond words as well as to experience empathy and shared emotions. It may also give you cues to the social dynamics at play in a situation.
Relationship management
This is aimed towards improving communication and fostering stronger relationships. By gaining insight into how well you are communicating with others, you can address certain aspects that might be getting in the way. Using body language to show interest and openness, expressing respect and appreciation, and improving listening and speaking skills, for example, can all be part of relationship management.
While this set of skills may be vital to fostering EI abilities, some specific approaches may be needed to develop them. We’ll explore these next.
Approaches that can help you develop EI skills and improve communication
Mindfulness is one approach that has been found to promote many EI qualities, such as the ability to self-regulate. It may also foster emotional balance and awareness, recognition and acceptance of emotions, and empathy and connection with others. Mindfulness may be defined as a shift of awareness to the present moment in which thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations are both recognized and allowed to come and go without judgment. Typically, the breath or senses serve as an anchor for these passing emotions, thoughts, and sensations. Cultivating a sense of mindfulness of the present moment may enhance your ability to perceive what others are communicating, both verbally and non-verbally.
Some other tools for fostering various EI skills include:
- Pausing before reacting. Taking a pause by breathing deeply, going for a walk, or otherwise leaving the room to calm down may help you avoid emotional reactions such as lashing out in anger or frustration.
- Checking in with your emotions. Again, mindfulness can help with this. You might try to notice how different parts of your body feel in response to various emotions, like muscle tension from anxiety or a physical sense of ease from mental relaxation.
- Learning about effective communication skills. For example, maintaining eye contact, nodding when you agree, and focusing on what’s being said (without looking at your phone) let the listener know that they have your attention.
- Recognizing the role of playfulness and humor to relieve tension. Research suggests that laughter may help reduce stress and anxiety. When appropriate to the situation, it can also help build rapport and bring people closer by indicating a similar worldview.
- Learning about conflict resolution skills. Examples include active listening, recognizing and validating others’ feelings, communicating in “I” statements, and identifying and brainstorming potential solutions to a problem or concern.
Considering therapy for additional support
If you feel that you might benefit from receiving support in navigating your emotions and expressing yourself to others, you may want to consider therapy. A trained therapist can offer you a safe space where you can explore your feelings and build skills for emotional regulation and communication. If convenience and affordability are key factors to you, online therapy might be a worthwhile alternative to traditional in-person therapy sessions. A platform like BetterHelp allows you to attend sessions with a licensed therapist via phone, video, or in-app messaging from the comfort of home, and for a cost that’s lower than the average in-person session.
One study that examined the effectiveness of an online training program in emotional intelligence found that “participants in the emotional intelligence training group showed increased performance on the total emotional intelligence score of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test.” A wealth of other research suggests that online therapy in general can offer similar effectiveness to in-person therapy in many cases as well.
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