Emotional intelligence is the development of such skills as understanding both one's own feelings and the emotions of others. Thanks to this, we can effectively manage the reaction to the feelings of others and, thus, be more productive in our work. The main task in developing emotional intelligence is not to suppress or ignore difficult emotions or feelings, but to intelligently control them.

Emotional intelligence is what separates successful leaders from everyone else. more productive in hiring new employees, better motivating colleagues, efficient in the service sector. But emotional intelligence is important at any stage of your career, especially if you want to achieve a high level of accountability for your work. And in other aspects of life, EI allows you to be happier, healthier and strengthen relationships. So how do you improve emotional intelligence and make it work for you?

1. Develop emotional self-awareness

Emotions can cause a person to behave in unusual and often unproductive ways, and self-awareness will improve your ability to understand and interpret your own emotions, moods, and inner motives. This practice will help you recognize the emotional states of other people and understand what is behind their words and actions. In short, if you don't understand your own motivations and behaviors, you won't understand others either.

What to do for this:

• Speak three phrases every day that begin with the words “I feel…” through this technique, you will gradually learn to accurately identify your emotions and increase self-awareness.
• Take time each day to experience the emotion - articulate how you feel and why.
• Remind yourself that emotions are fickle and short-lived, and therefore cannot be the basis for communication and decision making.
• Reflect on how negative emotions—frustration, rejection, anger, or jealousy—affect your colleagues and clients.
• Identify your fears and desires. This will help you better understand what worries you and drives you.
• Check how you react to stress. Do you get frustrated every time something doesn't go the way you planned?

2. Emotional self-control

It is important to develop the ability to control impulsive reactions and emotions that negatively affect your potential and leadership. This is the next step after the development of self-awareness. In short, self-control is the ability to rise above pathetic explanations, jealousy, relapses, and not let your emotions control you. Through self-control, you will think before you act and build a reputation as a reliable member of any team.

Self-control techniques:

• Do not allow yourself to join one side or the other during office dramas and conflicts.
• If the situation is emotionally difficult and charged, step back for a while, do not make a decision right away. Analyze your emotions.
• Accept the fact that life is volatile and frustration and disappointment are part of any job. And the professional response to them is brainstorming and strategy development, not complaints and suspension from work.
• Don't join the blame game, don't point fingers at everyone and everything around you. Except for yourself: learn and accept your mistakes.
• Stay focused on yourself and the things you can control, not on things that are out of your control.
• Find ways to respond to emotions that don't involve spontaneous reactions or bad language.

3. Develop the ability to show empathy

Empathy is a natural path in the development of emotional self-awareness. It allows you to move away from your personal experience and see and understand the problem from the perspective of another person. By developing empathy, you show your ability to treat people with respect, kindness, dignity, and professionalism. Empathetic people are good at recognizing the feelings of others, even if they are not obvious.

How to develop empathy:

• Live by the golden rule - treat others the way you want to be treated.
• It is easy to maintain your point of view, guided by this feeling, put yourself in the place of another person and look at the situation from his position.
• Develop the ability to listen and reflect on what your interlocutor said.
• At least once a day, ask how the person is feeling, for example, on a scale of 0 to 10. This will encourage others to express their emotions and understand them better.
• Acknowledge other people's anxieties and feelings - let them know that you see their source and realize the value of their point of view.

4. Work on your motivation

Motivation is passion and enthusiasm in your work and career that cannot be explained by money or status, it is what helps you realize your internal goals and do it with enviable perseverance.

How to improve motivation:

• In any difficult situation, and even in case of failure, try to find at least one good thing.
• Record the moment when you think and speak in a negative way. Stop doing this, pause and once again “roll through” all your thoughts and words in your mind. Change them to positive ones, even if you have to pretend at first.
• It's easy to forget what you really love about your job. Take the time to remember and articulate that, and the main reason why you want to excel in what you do.
• Remember that people are attracted to positive, energetic and inspiring people. If you increase motivation, you will get more attention from colleagues, top managers and clients.
• Set yourself inspiring yet achievable goals. Make a list of what needs to be done to achieve them. Reward yourself when you reach key goals.

5. Improve your communication skills

An important aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability to interact well with other people, but this does not mean that introverts or shy people have low EI. Communication skills can take many forms, not only being friendly, but also listening, persuading, verbal and non-verbal communication skills. Leaders with high emotional intelligence are often very good at communicating, resolving conflicts and sharing their vision with the team - they set an example of behavior and values ​​that others can follow.

How to improve communication skills:

• Study conflicts and their solutions, this will help in difficult situations with colleagues, customers or suppliers.
• Learn to praise others, so you inspire the team and make it loyal.
• Try to understand the person you are talking to. You can't have just one approach that works for everyone at work.

School of Yuri Okunev

Greetings to all readers of my blog. With you Yuri Okunev.

What personal quality do you think you need to have in your arsenal to become a good leader? Honesty? persistence? discipline? Yes, it should be. But first of all, the leader must have a powerful emotional intelligence. Today we will talk about how to develop emotional intelligence.

In the article, we have discussed what IQ is and how to increase its level.
Knowing your aikyu is, of course, good. It is even better to have a fairly high level of intelligence. However, this does not guarantee success.

Life shows that people with fairly high aikyu rates often work as janitors, drivers, and ordinary workers. And, conversely, to become, say, the president of the United States, it is not at all necessary to have an outrageous IQ.

If we analyze who is in the MENTA organization (a closed society that includes the most intelligent people from all over the planet), then the conclusion suggests itself that it is possible to have a fairly high level of intelligence and, nevertheless, live your whole life "with a hole in your pocket."

So what's the deal? It turns out that IQ does not provide objective data on the level of success and wealth of an individual?

The Secret of Leadership

In the mid-1990s, US psychologists D. Goleman and L. Gardner asked just such a question. Then the concept of "emotional intelligence" (EQ) was introduced.

Until now, it was believed that emotions are some kind of uncontrollable substance, under the influence of which a person loses his mind. In his book "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman/urlspan] takes the opposite view. Emotions, the author says, can and should be controlled.

To do this, you need to learn to understand your feelings and get out of their sphere of influence. This will allow:

• Conquer your own fears and experiences;
• Understand the motives of other people's actions;
• Influence those around you.

A leader does not have to be highly intelligent. Due to emotional superiority, he will be able to surround himself with smart and gifted people and use their genius. This determines the effectiveness of actions.

Four spheres of influence

Emotional intelligence is divided into four components:

• Understanding yourself;
• Self-discipline, the ability to restrain negative emotions;
• Understanding others;
• Interaction with others.

To develop emotional intelligence, you need to master each of these steps to a sufficient degree. Let's analyze each of them in more detail.

Understanding yourself

Feelings come and go. There are negative emotions and there are positive ones. Sadness, joy, fear, anxiety, boredom - all this is a figment of our imagination. And yet, they can help us, or they can interfere with our daily activities.

In the book of psychologist V. Sinelnikov "Love your sickness" describes in detail what negative emotions are and where they come from. Every negative emotion has a sub-goal, a positive intention.

For example, for the emotion of anger, such an intention would be the desire to change the world for the better. It is important to realize why, for what purpose this emotion arises, and to learn how to achieve the same goal in a more positive way. By the way, in the same book you can find information about what kind of chronic diseases this or that negative emotion or experience can lead to if you do not work with it in time.

Without learning to understand ourselves and the nature of our feelings, we will never be able to understand the motivation of the actions of the people around us: work colleagues, friends and those who are dear to us.

self-discipline

Have you ever interacted with a person who has a stony and impenetrable face? How does it feel? Perhaps, we are equally uncomfortable, both in the company of an interlocutor who is not at all emotional, and too emotional when emotions reach the level of falsehood and lies.

The necessary level of emotions - a polite smile, friendly intonations in the voice - must be present in official communication. Well, in a friendly close circle, living emotions - joy, surprise, interest - are part of the exchange of information with each other.

The ability to control one's facial expressions, intonation, and gestures is a privilege of people with a well-developed emotional intelligence. People who are good at this skill are respected in any team and become an example to follow.

Understanding others

Everything is clear here. If you want to understand others, be able to listen and understand. Pay attention to the interlocutor. To be able to guess the train of thought by the smallest movements of facial expressions and intonation.

But that is not all. Non-verbal methods of communication carry a significant amount of information about whether a person is telling the truth or lying, whether he feels hostility or distrust during a conversation.

Goleman introduces the concept of empathy - conscious attention to the behavior of the interlocutor. Thanks to developed empathy, the leader can:

• Maintain authority in the eyes of others;
• To achieve trust and location to itself;
• Always know what employees think, be able to talk to a person in time and find out additional information;
• Remove obviously dangerous people from your environment.

Interaction with others

Mastering all the previous steps - recognizing one's own and other people's feelings, mastering the methods of self-control - allows you to exercise influence on others.

Emotionally developed people always become leaders. They know how to rally a team around them, inspire with an idea, and resolve emerging conflicts. Even in an ordinary company of friends, such people can always be seen. They are usually in the spotlight: they poison jokes, give an assessment to others, their voice always stands out from the crowd.

The job of a leader is to lead. It is important to choose and put into practice the right policy of interaction with others. Goleman considers six basic management models.

Four resonant (constructive):

• Democratic;
• Educational;
• idealistic;
• Friendly.

And two dissonant (destructive):

• authoritarian;
• Ambitious.

In general, many books by domestic authors are devoted to ways of interacting with others, ways of resolving conflicts and methods of communicating with unpleasant people. For example, I like books by psychologist N. Kozlov with a detailed analysis of each life situation. In particular, you can read his "Book for those who like to live" - ​​this is about how to show emotional intelligence in everyday life and personal relationships and the book "17 Moments of Success: Leadership Strategies" - for those whose work is related to the field of management.

Take the test

At the moment, the problem of emotional intelligence is mainly dealt with by Western psychologists, and therefore tests to determine the level of EQ (there are more than forty of them) are mostly in English. Of the Russian versions, we can offer the MSCEIT 2.0 test, edited by E. Sergienko and I. Vetrova, the most accurate and objective Russian-language test. You can go through it yourself here.

Work on yourself

Perhaps you are waiting for a list of exercises from me, after completing which at home, you will immediately ascend to the pedestal of emotional intelligence? There are no such exercises.

The fact is that the development of emotional intelligence is a long-term process of constant work on oneself, self-improvement and discipline.

1. Read books, study video courses on practical psychology, positive thinking, introspection. Something that can be gleaned from Eastern philosophy. You can read the book of the same V. Sinelnikov “A stress reliever. How to become the master of your life, containing a series of tips for mastering empathy and effective communication.
2. Go in for sports. Active movements perform the function of dynamic meditation. When performing exercises, attention switches to the correct functioning of the muscles, while the brain is completely freed. It often happens that the solution to the most difficult issues comes by itself during or after training.
3. . Planning makes the brain constantly work, get rid of internal complexes, barriers and fears.
4. Study the typology of personalities, body language, the art of rhetoric - everything that helps to communicate effectively. Learn to listen to who you are talking to.
5. Try to analyze your emotions. When faced with another problem, place a piece of paper and a pen in front of you. Divide the sheet in half. On the left side, write the solutions to the problem that emotions suggest to you, on the right side, write what the mind says. Even before you finish writing, the right decision will come.

Afterword

That's all for today. When developing emotional intelligence, do not forget to devote time to logic. This service will help you Brinapps, which provides a set of simple and highly effective simulators that are accessible to children and interesting for adults.

I hope that the article was useful for you. Write comments, leave feedback. Subscribe to blog news.

Goodbye. Yours, Yuri Okunev.

We want ourselves and our children to be successful and happy. But we often forget that it is impossible to put an equal sign between these concepts. You can be successful, but at the same time constantly feel unhappy. Or you can constantly experience difficulties in your studies or career, but treat them not as a tragedy, but as a step forward.

Why are emotions so important?

Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

Charles Swindoll, writer

The modern world is full of stressful situations that are difficult to handle even for adults, not to mention children. They do not understand and do not know what emotions they experience at one time or another, how to manage them, therefore they have a distorted idea of ​​what is happening. This leads to neurosis, apathy and other depressive states.

Exaggerated demands of teachers, instilling in a small personality the importance of victory and superiority (many want to be the parents of winners) - all this is too heavy a load for fragile children's shoulders. The heavier this burden, the more important it is to deal with the feelings and experiences of the child.

Already in adulthood, we see that people who cannot control their emotions have trouble in all areas of life, including in their careers.

When a person is overwhelmed by negative emotions and cannot objectively evaluate his feelings, desires and opportunities, a devastating effect is guaranteed.

Relations with others deteriorate, a person withdraws into himself, loses faith in himself, his strength or his professionalism, becomes irritable, becomes even more confused in his feelings. And then the question arises: “What level of emotional intelligence does he have?”

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is responsible for recognizing and correctly interpreting emotions. It is he who gives a person psychological flexibility and the ability to effectively interact with the outside world.

That is why the concept of "emotional intelligence" was first voiced in relation to career building and self-realization. However, psychologists immediately caught the infantile subtext in this, because the fundamental development of the personality occurs precisely in childhood.

For a child, the development of EQ is an opportunity to create a streamlined and understandable system of perception that will allow you to effectively interact with people around you, perceive criticism correctly, recognize the feelings of adults and peers and adequately respond to them.

Aggression, apathy, poor sleep, absent-mindedness, inability to establish contacts with peers and other disturbing manifestations in the child's behavior are obvious signals that indicate the need to develop emotional intelligence.

How to develop emotional intelligence from childhood?

The most important thing in the life of any child is parental love. Love your child, show him tenderness and care. Tactile communication between mother and child does not lose its significance for children older than infancy.

Love makes every person feel secure and confident. This is a reliable foundation for the development of a successful personality.

In addition, it is very important to create the right associations with different emotions. Show your child with a real example what joy is. Maybe it's the smell of the cake? Maybe ringing a bell? What about friendship? Do you associate friendship with hugs? If not, then what does it look like in your imagination?

Create a colorful and vibrant world around your child, in which every feeling and sensation has its own color, aroma and taste. So you will not only open the doors to the world of emotions for the child, but also get closer to him, further strengthen the trust between you.

A similar method works for . Do not just read, but play fairy tales, tell children magical stories through a game or a small performance. Play a scene in front of them, use tactile sensations, aroma oils, appropriate intonation - this will allow the child to feel the whole gamut of sincere emotions that a magical story evokes.

Each of these methods is well described in our book Monsiki. What are emotions and how to deal with them. Ours, because we created it together with my son Gleb, based on our own experience. It can be safely called a detailed guide for parents, where one of the most effective methods for developing EQ is shown through interaction with fairy-tale heroes Monsic. Each of them represents a certain emotion and has skills that will help children understand these emotions and deal with them with various difficulties. Monsics are kind fairy-tale creatures, and a fairy tale is best perceived by a child.

Working on emotional intelligence in childhood is the key to successful development and well-being in the future.

Most likely, such a child, as an adult, will be able to avoid most of the psychological problems that modern society confronts us today.

Children are more receptive to everything new, their psyche is like plasticine - flexible and ingenuous. But what will be molded from this plasticine often depends only on adults. So let's start with ourselves.

Simple EQ Exercises

The EQ development methodology is simple and straightforward, but requires care and regular practice. Here are the most simple and effective exercises.

Mindfulness exercises

emotional diary

To learn to be aware of yourself here and now, write down every three hours the emotion that you are experiencing at the moment. At the end of the day, isolate the prevailing emotion and think about what needs to be worked on.

After a couple of weeks, you will learn to feel in real time without any difficulties.

This exercise will be made more effective by a kind of check - an analysis of the physical state when experiencing a certain emotion. This practice is also good for improving health.

Stop!

How often are our actions accompanied by ? We do not think about what we are doing, but simply perform some familiar, regular manipulations. Exercise "Stop!" is to abruptly stop any action in order to get rid of inertia and allow yourself to think about the situation. Only in this way can you feel yourself here and now, begin to control your reality.

Self-Esteem Exercises

What a luck!

Teach yourself to think positively, reacting even to unpleasant events with the phrase: “What luck!”. Such a reaction will come as a surprise to others, but this fact will also benefit you, because then you will find even more advantages in the situation. To enhance the effect, you can use the phrase: "It's so great, because ...". Why? Think about it.

Sell ​​your flaw

An effective technique that allows you to interpret even the negative aspects of a person in a positive way. Tell the audience about your shortcoming in other words, give it a different color. For example, can caution be considered cowardice, and courage recklessness? But it all depends on which side you look at. The synthon approach relies on a positive approach to development. He says: you have no flaws, you have features.

You need to develop your strengths and work on your weaknesses.

With this approach, you can sell any of your shortcomings. For example, sell insecurity. Tell the audience honestly and truthfully how you, having this quality, before taking an important step, consider all options for events, look at various solutions, and only then take the most beneficial step for you.

Motivation Exercises

Openness to new

To develop this valuable quality in yourself, you can use a simple but very effective exercise, which is to find as many uses for the most ordinary things as possible. Let it be a regular towel, an old bucket, or just a piece of cardboard. Come up with as many options as you can use these things. It is not only interesting, but also fun. Therefore, practice this exercise with your family and children. They will have a great time and work on their imagination and ingenuity.

Two random words

Open any book or magazine, randomly select any two words from the text and try to find something in common between them. Compare them, analyze, reflect and make relationships. It's efficient and fun.

An exercise to increase adaptability

Finally - the well-known Elevator Pitch method - the presentation of your business project in 30-60 seconds. Imagine that you are your own business project. Start presenting yourself as brightly as possible, while remaining honest with yourself.

To get started, use this template:

1. Profession.
2. Hobby.
3. How do I change the world for the better?

Each of these exercises will help you become better emotionally and psychologically. However, do not take emotional intelligence as a universal key to success. Life is quite multifaceted. Therefore, improve your mind, body, soul and love yourself. After all, the only thing we have control over in this world is ourselves.

The magnitude of emotional intelligence, abbreviated as EQ in the specialized literature, determines how much a person understands, understands them, can recreate, manage them, and therefore apply them to solve tasks. A person with a well-developed emotional intelligence can significantly reduce the impact of negative emotions on their lives. The development of emotional intelligence contributes to the recognition of negative influences from the outside, a calm understanding of the situation and a normal, balanced reaction to it. A person who is emotionally developed lets go of negative emotions, does not experience them again and again, thereby destroying his psyche in particular and life in general.

To understand in more detail what benefits the development of emotional intelligence provides, you can use the diagram below:

If you want to easily find a common language even with unfamiliar people, be friendly and open, and therefore pleasant in communication, if your goal is to achieve maximum success in any business, then you just need to work on developing your own EI.

How to develop emotional intelligence

1. Recognize emotions and identify critical moments.

Lose control over your own behavior, explode because of someone else's words, lose your calmness from scratch? Ah, how familiar! Each person has a certain boiling point caused by a situation that leads to a loss of self-control - the so-called emotional trigger. People who know how to recognize them, and therefore accept them, can stop in time and not succumb to destructive emotions.

How to learn such control? Analyze your emotions, fix them on paper, highlight your own emotional triggers.

2. Repeat mentally over and over again those situations that lead to emotional breakdowns.

Constant scrolling in the head of this or that situation helps to find the right solution and not react as violently as it could happen in real life. When considering a case that could lead to an emotional breakdown, come up with a different course of action than your usual one. This exercise will allow you to correctly accept the emotional trigger. This means that you will get a chance to act differently when a real explosive situation occurs.

3.Load up your brain.

Anyone can control their mind and. As soon as you feel anger rising, switch to something else, such as solving complex math problems. Agree, it’s hard to get angry and nervous when you multiply three-digit numbers in your head!

Whether you solve the problem correctly or not does not matter. The main thing is that you tried, used your brain to its fullest and did not let your emotions defeat you.

4. Move away from reality into memories.

If in a difficult moment it is difficult for you to concentrate, then use a different technique: abstract from what is happening and immerse yourself in pleasant memories. Surely there is something in your life that puts a smile on your face. It could be your favorite song or a book you recently read. Remember them, quote your favorite lines to yourself. Such thoughts will help to avoid an emotional breakdown, as they will switch your brain to a different situation.

The main thing is not to perceive this technique as a cowardly escape from reality. This is done for your benefit.

5. Before sending an angry letter to the addressee, reread what you have written.

Thus, you will take at least a few minutes of time out, once again experience what you experienced when writing, you will be able to rethink the overflowing emotions. You take a break - and it's wonderful. You have a chance to change your mind, to fix everything. If, after reading, you still want to send the letter, ask a friend or loved one to read it. Listen to advice from the outside and think twice about whether to offend the addressee. Learn to keep your emotions in check!

Research confirms that all people think differently. A rather neutral message can actually cause aggression on the part of the recipient. To understand how the addressee will react to your letter, remember the character of the person to whom you are writing. Correct the message so as not to offend your addressee.

6. Get away from the immediate answer.

Modern life sometimes requires lightning-fast decisions from us. But often you can not force events and take a minute to think. Do you need a clear answer? Avoid having to respond right away. Say that you will return to this conversation and take a break to think. This will allow you to understand what is really important, and not let emotions prevail over reason.

7.Respect the interlocutor in any situation.

Remember that, in any situation, you need to remain a well-mannered, educated person, express your thoughts clearly and clearly, avoiding profanity. This will characterize you as a serious, solid person who is a pleasure to deal with. Emotions may rage in your soul, but you should not show them. To curb them, it is better to think over your vocabulary in advance and highlight those words that are better not to say out loud.

Once you make the decision to be calm and composed in any situation, you will take a big step towards curbing your emotions and developing emotional intelligence.