While your IQ and technical skills might have helped you earn high test scores, your emotional intelligence (aka “emotional quotient” or “EQ”) might be even more vital for establishing successful personal and professional relationships. The term, coined by researchers Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990, refers to the ability to understand and manage your emotions and recognize the emotions of others.
“It’s costly to struggle with poor emotional intelligence,” says psychotherapist Lauren Farina. According to her, low EQ can be a big liability to both individuals and organizations, “because we know that [it] disrupts communication, it disrupts relationships, it damages mental health. And all of those are huge factors when it comes to performance and motivation and productivity.”
The 4 pillars of emotional intelligence
There are generally four pillars of EQ:
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Social awareness
- Relationship management
These represent the intersection of your awareness and actions toward yourself and others. As the founder of Invited Psychotherapy and Coaching, Farina helps professionals level up their performance, motivation and emotional well-being. That often involves developing a healthy EQ, which is imperative for mental health, emotional well-being and career success.
“High EQ can help us to attune to and connect with our clients and colleagues in a way that optimizes that relationship for a mutually beneficial outcome,” she says. “On the other hand, many folks with an extremely high EQ, often referred to as empaths, struggle with taking too much responsibility for the feelings of others. This tendency makes us vulnerable to people-pleasing and codependency, making it difficult to be assertive and to set boundaries.”
Is your emotional intelligence an asset or a hindrance? Here are a few ways to assess and improve it, regardless of where you fall on the EQ spectrum.
1. Look at your relationships
Individuals who have a healthy level of emotional intelligence often enjoy strong personal and professional relationships, Farina says. They work well on a team and have solid people skills. “You can have difficult conversations,” she says. “You’re not afraid of confrontation, but you have those difficult conversations with respect and compassion.”
But those who struggle with poor or low emotional intelligence often experience a lot of conflict in their relationships. They might be prone to increased irritability, anger and resentment, which can manifest as constant venting in the workplace, Farina says. Other signs you might benefit from emotional intelligence-building practices include struggling to manage stress and regulate your emotions and jumping to defensiveness instead of giving and receiving feedback effectively.
“If you find yourself constantly venting or being negative or responding with sarcasm, you’ve probably got some unprocessed emotions that need identification and expression,” Farina says.
On the other hand, you might have a very high EQ if you struggle to set boundaries because you’re scared of letting other people down. “When we fail to set boundaries, we tend to grow more resentful of others,” Farina says. “I often tell my clients, ‘When we feel resentful, it’s because we’ve often failed to advocate for ourselves.’”
To strike a healthy balance, tune into how you’re feeling and learn to express yourself with respect and compassion. “It’s a matter of sort of observing, ‘What am I thinking? What am I feeling? And how are those thoughts and feelings driving my behaviors?’” Farina says. “That’s essentially what we mean when we talk about mindfulness practice, which is something I recommend to my clients a lot.”
2. Make meaning through your childhood experiences
According to psychotherapist Duygu Balan, who specializes in intergenerational trauma, early attachments promote emotional intelligence and influence how we connect to and talk to ourselves. They also predict whether we allow ourselves to feel our feelings or not, whether we think it is safe to be vulnerable and our ability to be in tune with somebody else’s emotions.
According to Balan, children who grow up in secure homes with parents who encourage them to name their emotions and who validate their emotions tend to have higher emotional intelligence. “They’re better able to feel their feelings, know what they are and… have better coping mechanisms,” she says.
“But the good news is that because secure attachment styles [aren’t] genetic, we can actually level up… through awareness-building,” she says. “We level up through making meaning through our childhood experiences and having safe relationship experiences, whether this is through therapy or community resources or members. But that’s how we can increase our understanding of ourselves. The more we do it, the more we heal.”
3. Write down your values and the characteristics of your authentic self
Therapist Priya Rednam-Waldo recommends starting from a place of self-awareness.
“We cannot know where we need to go without understanding where we are now and… some key points of how we got there,” says Rednam-Waldo, who coaches women and couples navigating the unique transition from pregnancy to postpartum. “It doesn’t have to be this huge unpacking of a lifetime of [experiences], but it is a deeply personal experience where we have to kind of be ready to take stock,” she says.
By identifying your values and whether or not you’re living them or not, you can figure out where you are in life and whether your EQ is working for you. This can feel really challenging, “because often that’s an indication… [that] we’re not maybe as emotionally intelligent as would be helpful for our lives if we aren’t quickly able to say, ‘Oh yeah, this is who I am, and this is what I believe,’” Rednam-Waldo says.
Keep in mind that boosting your EQ isn’t about changing yourself to fit a preconceived mold of what it means to be a great leader, team member, partner or parent. It’s about honoring who you are. “We can all have areas of improvement,” Rednam-Waldo says. “We can be ourselves and honor other people being themselves and still be really successful.”
4. Schedule a regular check-in with yourself
Set aside time, ideally daily, to identify your highs and lows. Jot down on paper or type in a notes app a few key events or points of the day and how you reacted emotionally. If you have a data-driven mind, you can even give the events a rating. Then, look for patterns over time. “The highs will be in a particular space and the lows will be in a particular space,” Rednam-Waldo says.
A recurring low could be a particular interaction with a team member at work that makes you feel misunderstood, which you can turn into an opportunity to realign your actions with your values and true authentic self.
5. Accept that improving your EQ is a dynamic journey—not a destination
The human experience is unpredictable and is filled with interactions both challenging and joyful. That means there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, and you might have to put different levels of effort into it over time, depending on the progress of your EQ. “As we feel stronger in our emotional intelligence, we won’t have to necessarily check in daily. Maybe we spread it out to monthly,” Rednam-Waldo says. “Maybe… it becomes a part of how we think about things or assess how things are working for us.”
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