How to increase your emotional intelligence

You’re smart, and yet your emotional intelligence is not as good as you’d like. Want to get smarter emotionally? Here’s how.

Start with feelings.

The five basic feelings are mad, glad, bad, sad and afraid. You know this instinctually, but your language doesn’t yet reflect what you know intuitively. Which is limiting. You might say something like, “I feel frustrated,” not really knowing that the feeling behind frustration is anger. 

It’s both.

Emotional intelligence is both emotional and intelligent. Which may sound obvious. And yet I am often surprised to hear creative men who are highly emotional and genius-level intelligent who don’t put the two together. But if you are going to be emotionally intelligent, you will want to put them together, and employ both your emotions and your intelligence.

Want to get smarter emotionally?

You’re already smart enough. The real challenge is to engage your feelings more. And here’s why: you’re smart and creative and can solve problems better than most of your peers. But you aren’t being intentional about how you communicate your feelings. It doesn’t even occur to you to express feelings sometimes, because your natural default is to solve a problem.

For example:

You’re in a relationship in which your partner is more likely than you are to complain. And the complaining comes across to you as a bit of a waste of time. All that bitching. But consider this: unless you are willing to go into the feelings behind your partner’s bitching, you may well be losing out on intimacy. Why? Because your partner will take that bitching elsewhere, and become more distant from you.

Whereas...

If you are willing to go into those negative emotions with your partner, you will help the relationship and help yourself. Ask yourself: when my partner gets all negative on me, what are the feelings behind all that complaining? And then engage in those feelings, instead of writing off your partner as a complainer.

Key point:

When your tendency is to solve the problem or write someone off, engage with your feelings more.

Read more.

I can help you become more emotionally intelligent.