Armed with enormous emotional strength and tightly honed emotional intelligence skills, women can, and will, shift the paradigm in the business and entrepreneurial world like never before-Susan Liddy, MA, CPCC
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Emotional Intelligence (EI) or Emotional Quotient (EQ) should be an essential component of self-improvement and personal growth for middle-aged women. It is an instrumental skill for anyone who wants to create a more joyful, happy, and fulfilling life.
When it comes to happiness and success in Life, EQ matters just as much as IQ.
This piece will explore in-depth the concept of Emotional Intelligence. How do we define EI, the five elements or categories of EI, why they matter, and how we can improve these areas. This article will also include the way Emotional Intelligence affects the most important areas in our lives, such as jobs, relationships, and achievement of goals.
Multiple studies have shown that people with high EI have greater mental health, job performance, and leadership skills. EI is generally associated with empathy because it involves an individual connecting their personal experiences with others.
What is Emotional Intelligence (EI) or Emotional Quotient (EQ)?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and reason about your own and others’ emotions. It is one’s ability to identify, understand, and manage their own emotions as well as those of others. It is often referred to as the “people skill” because emotional intelligence plays a huge role in our interactions with other people.
A high EQ helps you build relationships, reduce team stress, defuse conflict, and improve job satisfaction.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized the term in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter more than IQ, in which he laysout 5 components to Emotional Intelligence:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Regulation
- Motivation
- Empathy
- Social Skills
How much emotional intelligence you have has a significant effect on your success in several areas of your life, including your career. Since higher emotional intelligence correlates with improved job performance, it also correlates with higher annual income.
Emotional Quotient is also helpful outside the workplace. It’s tremendously important for managing relationships with friends, family, or significant others. Most conflicts between people can be prevented or handled healthily by using emotional intelligence to understand ourselves and the people around us.
Besides helping you build solid relationships and succeed at work or school, emotional intelligence can aid you in achieving your career and personal goals. EI can also help you connect with your feelings, turn intention into action, and make informed decisions about what matters most to you.
People with a high degree of emotional intelligence know what they feel, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can affect other people.
It’s never too late to build or improve emotional intelligence. To help you develop this vital skill, I will explain each of the five pillars of emotional intelligence separately and provide information on how you can improve each of them.
The 5 pillars you need for emotional intelligence and how you can improve them.
The more that you manage each of these 5 areas, the higher your emotional intelligence. Let’s look at each element in more detail and examine how you can strengthen each of them.
- Self-Awareness
It’s the ability to evaluate yourself socially and understand how your behavior is being perceived by others. If you are self-aware, you know how you’re feeling, acting, and how you appear. You likely have a firm grasp on your own strengths and weaknesses, which means that you know where and how you will be the most useful.
Self-awareness can also help you train yourself to think about your emotions productively.
How can you improve your self-awareness?
Connecting to your emotions is the key to understanding how emotion influences your thoughts and actions.
To build EI-and become emotionally healthy-you must reconnect to your core emotions, accept them, and become comfortable with them.
It requires self-reflection and interpretation, so if you’re self-aware, when you get upset, you might start to think about why you feel as you do and find that the feeling is momentary, misplaced, or a catalyst for positive action.
Doing this allows you to think of your emotions as part of a larger picture so you don’t become consumed by them. Knowing the reasoning behind your emotions can also give you a greater sense of control over them, improving self-efficiency.
When you have self-awareness, you may appear confident and receptive to constructive criticism.
Keep a journal. If you spend a few minutes each day writing down your thoughts, this can move you to a higher degree of understanding.
Slow down. When you experience anger or other strong emotions, slow down to examine why. No matter what the situation, you can always choose to react to it.
Get others’ opinions. We don’t always know our blind spots. Getting feedback from peers, friends, or family can always help.
- Self-Regulation
When you can put self-management into practice, you display an ability to redirect disruptive moods and impulses. Self-regulation means not allowing emotions to get the best of you. Negative emotions and impulsive behavior not only negatively affect those around you but can take a toll on your wellbeing too.
If you are highly self-regulated, you can make clear-headed decisions even if the world is falling apart around you. If you can self-manage, you can easily adapt because the discomfort that often comes from change won’t make you stumble.
How can you improve your self-regulation?
With the ability to manage stress and stay emotionally present, you can learn to receive upsetting information without letting it override your thoughts and self-control. You will make choices that allow you to control impulsive feelings and behaviors and manage your emotions in healthy ways.
Part of the reason it can be hard to control urges is that when the part of your brain responsible for emotions is triggered, it releases chemicals that make it harder to think clearly. When you are feeling worked up, simply taking a deep breath will feed your brain oxygen to minimize that effect and help you keep your cool.
Hold yourself accountable. If you tend to blame others when something goes wrong, stop. Make a commitment to admit to your mistakes and to face the consequences, whatever they are.
Practice being calm. Practice deep-breathing exercises to calm yourself. Try to write down all the negative things you want to say, and then rip it up and throw it away. Expressing these emotions on paper is better than telling them aloud to others. These techniques help you challenge your reactions to ensure that they are fair.
- Motivation
Internal motivation is the ability to make yourself work with little to no pressure from others. Some sources of internal motivation include curiosity, a desire to fulfill your potential, and a desire to see your vision come to life. This means you have more control over your productivity because your motivation is self-generated.
Emotionally intelligent people stay motivated, even when things aren’t going their way.
Motivated people can overcome setbacks, be tenacious in the face of missing targets or goals.
Typically, highly motivated people feel like they are making a difference in the world or have a job that works with their strengths.
How can you improve your motivation?
When you lose your drive, find a mentor who cares about your development and won’t judge while you talk him through what’s behind that disheartenment. Be aware that highly ambitious people aren’t necessary emotionally intelligent. Running people over to meet your own goals will only work against you.
Re-examine why you’re doing your job. It’s easy to forget what you really love about your career. Take time to remember why you wanted this job in the first place.
Be hopeful and find something good. Motivated people are usually optimistic, no matter what problems they face. Adopting this mindset might take practice, but it’s well worth the effort.
There’s almost always something positive if you look for it.
- Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand how others feel and put yourself “in someone else’s shoes.” If you are highly empathetic, you are good at intuiting their feelings; you are also likely to feel pain when you see others in pain and pleasure when you perceive others’ pleasure, allowing you to connect with others emotionally.
Empathy is about understanding other people’s points of view, challenges, and strengths.
How can you improve your empathy?
Increasing your empathy is as easy as asking more questions to understand how other people are feeling. Acknowledging others’ emotions can also validate those emotions.
- Put yourself in someone’s position
- Pay attention to body language
- Respond to feelings
- Social Awareness
Social awareness is the ability to pick up on social cues and communicate well with others. Socially aware people are often good listeners who can quickly figure out what’s important to the people they speak with.
Social awareness is a powerful tool that can lead you to fit in, thrive, and potentially become a powerful leader.
Social skills help emotionally intelligent people win other people over quickly.
How can you improve your social skills?
Social skills are particularly important during difficult conversations. Before giving constructive criticism, explain that you share your thoughts because you want to help-not judge or blame.
- Learn conflict resolution. See conflict as an opportunity to grow closer to others
- Improve your communication skills
- Become aware of how effectively you use nonverbal communication
- Learn how to praise others
Mindfulness is the practice of purposely focusing your attention on the present moment. This practice is an ally of emotional and social awareness.
Why is emotional intelligence important?
Each day you must make decisions, and most of them are influenced in some way by your emotions. We often make choices based on gut feelings. If you have high emotional intelligence, you can understand the emotions of others, manage, and convey your own, form healthy relationships and solve problems efficiently.
Emotional intelligence matters because you need to work successfully with others to create value in the modern economy truly. When a team has high emotional intelligence, the workplace is welcoming, creating happier, more productive employees.
Knowing your emotional intelligence and how it corresponds with your career helps navigate the world of work.
What areas in our lives are affected by emotional intelligence?
- School or work
High emotional intelligence can help you navigate the social complexities of the workplace, lead, and motivate others, and excel in your career.
- Your physical health
If you are unable to manage your emotions, you are probably not managing your stress either. This fact can lead to serious health problems. If you don’t manage your emotions, your emotions will manage you.
- Your mental health
Uncontrolled emotions and stress can also impact your mental health, making you vulnerable to anxiety and depression. Restrictive emotions (fear, anger, frustration, confusion, sadness, worry) can drag us down; these negative emotions can erode our physical and mental health over time.
- Your relationships
By understanding your emotions and how to control them, you are better equipped to express how you feel and understand how others are feeling. This allows you to communicate more effectively and forge strong relationships, both at work and in your personal life.
- Your social intelligence
Being in tune with your emotions serves a social purpose, connecting you to other people and the world around you. Social Intelligence enables you to reduce stress, balance your nervous system through social communication, and feel loved and happy.
Final thoughts
Emotional intelligence is your ability to identify and manage your emotions, pick up on the emotions of others and manage them; and in doing so, build trust and grow influence.
Although emotional intelligence seems to come naturally to some, our brain’s plasticity means we can increase our emotional intelligence if we’re willing to put in the work.
Take the time to work on self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Working on these areas will help you excel.
You need to channel your emotions to drive things and people forward rather than getting carried away yourself. As a middle-aged woman, you need to constantly pursue self-improvement and harness your potential to achieve bigger goals in your workplace and personal life.