10 Ways to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
Improving emotional intelligence (EI) involves developing skills that allow you to better understand, manage, and use emotions effectively in yourself and others.
These skills are extremely valuable to improve for every area of your life and to teach your kids if you have any.
We aren’t born knowing all of these skills, some we pick up over time, others we need to focus on and learn more about.
Here are some ways to enhance your emotional intelligence and how each approach contributes to your development:
1. Practice Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence.
Understanding your emotions allows you to recognise their impact on your behaviour and decisions, leading to more intentional and controlled responses.
Self-awareness is the understanding of your own thoughts, feelings and actions.
Knowing why you do what you do, how to manage it, what has caused it e.g trauma and so on.
Learning to be self-aware and applying those skills to everything you do will help you grow and improve your life.
How to Practice Self-Awareness
Regularly reflect on your emotions, thoughts, and behaviours through thought, mindfulness, journalling and meditation.
Each of those can help you learn more about your mental and emotional states.
Therapy can help you uncover more about the why and teach you techniques to be self-aware.
Check out these 15 mindfulness tips for beginners to get you started.
2. Manage Your Emotions
Managing your emotions doesn’t mean pushing them down and avoiding them.
Learning to manage your emotions is about knowing what you are feeling, processing the feelings and being in control instead of losing it all the time.
Knowing when to express what you are feeling, how to regulate your own emotions, deal with triggers and handle any situation is crucial for a healthier, calmer, happier life.
Managing emotions ensures that you respond to situations calmly and rationally, rather than being driven by impulsive emotional reactions.
This leads to better decision-making and healthier relationships.
How to Manage Your Emotions
Firstly, being self-aware and using the techniques in tip 1 will help you recognise the emotions.
Then learn techniques to regulate them such as deep breathing, box breathing, pausing before reaction, reframing negative thoughts etc.
How to Meet Yourself is a workbook that will step you through learning about yourself and these techniques
3. Learn a Variety of Social Skills
Good social skills allow you to build and maintain positive relationships, navigate social complexities, and influence others in a constructive way.
This is key to successful teamwork and leadership.
Different cultures, being neurodivergent, traumatic upbringings and experiences all impact our communication styles and social skills.
As someone in a blended, mixed race family, I have had to learn how to communicate in different languages but also that some cultures are extremely forward in ways that would be considered rude in my culture but not theirs.
This was a steep learning curve for both myself and family members in Vanuatu due to our differences but we were committed to learning about each other.
Learn social and communication skills relevant to the situations you are likely to be in.
If you are neurodivergent, I am not telling you that you need to adhere to neurotypical social skills.
In my experience, I found it significantly better to seek out people and situations like me, communicate our way and be myself instead of trying to be neurotypical.
That said, learning different communication styles, how others communicate and why they do that way, conflict resolution skills and observation skills help immensely.
As an example, in my family we prefer to dot point whatever is being discussed (especially via email/text).
It comes across as cold, informal or corporate to others but we find it useful as we can respond in kind to each point made and it reduces miscommunication or mixing up issues.
We also clearly state when we need time out or will be taking a break online and feel comfortable telling each other what has happened/how we were hurt by something and sometimes being quite blunt.
I prefer this style of communication but it doesn’t work for everyone so I needed to learn communication styles for other situations.
How to Learn Different Social Skills
First, it can be effective to learn which social skills will be most relevant to your life based on social situations, career, family, culture etc.
In general, conflict resolution, how to collaborate and how to empathise are effective everywhere.
You can learn these skills through classes, mentors or a therapist. There is absolutely no shame in seeking professional help.
We learn our social skills through our family, peers and experiences which means we are likely learning the skills essential to our survival, not always the best skills for the life we want.
Seek out the right resources to teach you the social skills you want or need to learn.
4. Cultivate Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience enables you to recover from setbacks and maintain a positive outlook, which is essential for managing emotions and staying effective under pressure.
It does not mean to push all the negative feelings aside.
Instead, learn to feel and process your feelings in a health way so you can thrive no matter what life throws at you.
How to Cultivate Emotional Resilience
Strengthen your ability to cope with stress and adversity through practices such as mindfulness, positive self-talk, and seeking support when needed.
I have 15 tips on building resilience.
Improving your self-confidence helps with emotional reslience, so try these 20 tips too.
5. Seek Feedback and Reflect
Feedback provides an external perspective on your emotional behavior, helping you identify blind spots and areas where you can grow.
Seeking feedback needs to be done carefully because not all feedback is relevant or useful.
Know who you can trust, who is honest, who has your best interests in heart and who is achieving what you want or living a life you want.
The feedback they give will be more relevant than others because it comes through a different lens.
Often, those close to you want you to stay a specific way or want to shape you in a way that suits them.
Their feedback will be given accordingly and might not be right for you.
Reflecting on any feedback, learning what feedback to use, accelerates your self-awareness and emotional development.
How to Seek Feedback and Reflect on it
Make a list of people you can trust to be honest with you and who have your best interests at heart.
This could be trusted friends, family, colleagues, mentors or a therapist for ecample.
Ask for their feedback about how you handle emotions, situations and anything else you want to learn about yourself.
Reflect on this feedback, journal about it, talk it through and look for areas of improvement then implement change in your life.
6. Practice Emotional Expression
Expressing emotions effectively helps others understand your needs and intentions, leading to more open and honest communication.
It also prevents misunderstandings and builds stronger connections.
Many of us were taught our feelings do not matter when we were kids (as evidenced by the recent trend of asking your kids to finish specific sentences from your childhood e.g. Children should be seen and…)
Learning to express your emotions in a healthy manner, communicate effectively and resolve issues are essential life skills.
How to Express Your Emotions
Learn to express your emotions clearly and appropriately, whether through words, body language, or other forms of communication.
A therapist, coach or mentor can help you learn the areas you need to focus on and specific skills for those emotions.
Practice them, seek feedback and continue to learn about yourself, your emotions and communicating.
7. Develop Patience and Tolerance
Patience and tolerance help you stay calm and composed, even when faced with difficult people or situations.
This reduces emotional reactivity and fosters more thoughtful and constructive responses.
Not all situations warrant your patience and tolerance though, so please also learn to be confident and when to apply patience vs calling someone/something out for what it is.
Some challenging situations improve with patience and tolerance, empathy and understanding, others need to be terminated.
Developing these skills, including when to apply them will put you well ahead of others.
How to Develop Patience and Tolerance
Practice patience in challenging situations and work on tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty.
Mindfulness and deep breathing exercises can help in stressful moments.
Read tips on letting go, which covers people, places and situations to help you learn when to practice patience and when to let go.
8. Observe Others’ Emotions
Observing others’ emotions sharpens your ability to read emotional cues, enhancing your empathy and social awareness.
This allows you to respond more appropriately in social interactions.
Learning to read cues on faces, in body language and tone is a great skill but can be difficult for some so go easy on yourself if you find it hard.
How to Observe Others’ Emotions
There are classes and therapy to help with learning this where you can role play too.
Pay attention to others’ body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions.
Try to interpret what they might be feeling and why.
Discuss with a professional or someone you trust who reads others well, in a way to learn, not a way where you are gossiping or judging.
9. Engage in Continuous Learning
Continuous learning deepens your understanding of emotional intelligence concepts and provides you with new tools and strategies to apply in real-life situations, ensuring ongoing improvement.
By consistently practising these strategies, you can significantly enhance your emotional intelligence, leading to better relationships, improved communication, and greater personal and professional success.
How to Engage in Continuous Learning
Read books, attend workshops, or take courses on emotional intelligence, communication, and psychology.
Learning about anything will develop skills and teach you things you can apply to every day life.
Read this article for tips on how to keep learning and what to learn.
10. Develop Empathy
Empathy helps you connect with others on a deeper level, improves communication, and fosters stronger, more trusting relationships.
It also enables you to respond more effectively to others’ needs.
Knowing how to empathise with others while also discerning when to protect your emotions will enable you to progress quickly through life.
Previous generations and a fair bit of toxic masculinity content online views empathy as a weakness when in reality it is a great strength.
It takes courage to empathise, be vulnerable and connect.
How to Develop Empathy
Practice active listening, try to see things from others’ perspectives, and respond with understanding and compassion.
Active listening is where you are listening to them completely to understand not to respond.
Most of the time when we listen to others we are planning in our heads how to respond instead of remaining present and truly listening to them to learn how they feel and what their perspective is.
One daily technique to help develop empathy is this exercise:
Empathy Expansion Practice
Every day, write down:
- A moment when you felt hurt by someone.
- A moment when you caused hurt to someone.
- How your actions in that moment could have affected another person’s emotional security.
- “What did I feel today that I usually suppress?”
- “What actions today showed empathy—or a lack of it?This helps you make direct connections between actions and emotional consequences.
This helps you make direct connections between actions and emotional consequences.
Resources
Here are all the articles and resources referenced:
15 mindfulness tips for beginners
How to Meet Yourself (book)
15 tips on building resilience
20 tips to build self-confidence
How to let go
How to improve your life with continuous learning