How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
- Nadine Jones
- Jun 3, 2017
- 5 min read
We don’t need to fix or dwell on the past to heal, we don’t live there anymore. Not focusing on the past but rather creating a beautiful vision of the future to move towards. How do we support each other to become strong role models for children to look up to? As the old saying goes “it takes a community to raise a child”. If we want strong resilient healthy and well children, we need to build that strong community, one person at a time.
To help community heal, both the people and the larger systems need to understand the impacts of trauma, on our brain and our DNA. We need to stops asking what’s wrong with you, and rather understand what happened in our brains. Looking at how this effects how we perceive and live in the world now, and how we move forward. Trauma has affected our ability to develop critical connections in our brain.
It is never too late to develop our brain and heal both the past and future generations at the same time.

Skills of a Health Brain can;
reliably perceive the world in a fairly objective way
problem solve and plan for the future in a flexible way
recognize and name their feelings
tolerate them long enough to learn from them and manage them in a health way
develop a stable sense of identity
believe in their own ability to succeed
form trusting relationships and learn to rely on those relationships for the support
All these things depend on a health well-regulated brain. A thinking brain and emotional brain that can work well together.
So how do we grow these Skills to create Healthy Brains?
Skills vs. Knowledge
Knowledge is information acquired through: Reading, watching, listening, touching, etc. Knowledge refers to understanding factual information and concepts. Knowledge can be transferred from one person to another or it can be self-acquired through observation and study.
Skills, however, refer to the ability to apply knowledge to specific situations. Skills are developed through practice. As an example, social skills are developed through interaction with people by observing, listening, and speaking with them. Trial and error is probably the best way to achieve skills mastery.
To make it simple, knowledge is academic and skills are practical. You can know all the rules of a sport, know all the teams and all players, know all the statistics, but this only makes you knowledgeable about this sport; it does not make you any good at it. To become good at a sport you must play it, practice its techniques, and improve your skills through experience. You don’t need to know all the teams or all the players to practice a sport and you can easily learn the rules as you play, through trial and error.
We can have all the Knowledge in the world about feeling however if we don’t start noticing our feelings and sensing them in our bodies, we are not practicing the skill of emotional Intelligence. Without practicing a skills we are only left with the knowledge of them.
Growing our Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence (EQ or EI) can be defined as the ability to understand, manage, and effectively express one's own feelings, as well as engage and navigate successfully with those of others.
It all starts with learning how to listen to your feelings. While it may not always be easy, developing the ability to tune in to your own emotions is the first and perhaps most important step. Stop pushing your feelings aside or stuffing them down.
Here are 10 Ways to Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence:
1. Don't interrupt or change the subject. If feelings are uncomfortable, we may want to avoid them by interrupting or distracting ourselves. Sit down at least twice a day and ask, "How am I feeling?" It may take a little time for the feelings to arise. Allow yourself that small space of time, uninterrupted.
2. Don't judge or edit your feelings too quickly. Try not to dismiss your feelings before you have a chance to think them through. Healthy emotions often rise and fall in a wave, rising, peaking, and fading naturally. Your aim should be not to cut off the wave before it peaks.
3. See if you can find connections between your feelings and other times you have felt the same way. When a difficult feeling arises, ask yourself, "When have I felt this feeling before?" Doing this may help you to realize if your current emotional state is reflective of the current situation, or of another time in your past.
4. Connect your feelings with your thoughts. When you feel something that strikes you as out of the ordinary, it is always useful to ask, "What do I think about that?" Often times, one of our feelings will contradict others. That's normal. Listening to your feelings is like listening to all the witnesses in a court case. Only by admitting all the evidence will you be able to reach the best verdict.
5. Listen to your body. A knot in your stomach while driving to work may be a clue that your job is a source of stress. A flutter of the heart when you pick up a girl you have just started to date may be a clue that this could be "the real thing." Listening to these sensations and the underlying feelings that they signal will allow you to process with your powers of reason.
6. If you don't know how you're feeling, ask someone else. People seldom realize that others are able to judge how they are feeling. Ask someone who knows you (and whom you trust) how you are coming across. You may find the answer both surprising and illuminating.
7. Tune in to your unconscious feelings. How can you become more aware of your unconscious feelings? Try free association. While in a relaxed state, allow your thoughts to roam freely and watch where they go. Analyze your dreams. Keep a notebook and pen at the side of your bed and jot down your dreams as soon as you wake up. Pay special attention to dreams that repeat or are charged with powerful emotion.
8. Ask yourself: How do I feel today? Start by rating your overall sense of well-being on a scale of 0 and 100 and write the scores down in a daily log book. If your feelings seem extreme one day, take a minute or two to think about any ideas or associations that seem to be connected with the feeling.
9. Write thoughts and feelings down. Research has shown that writing down your thoughts and feelings can help profoundly. A simple exercise like this could take only a few hours per week.
10. Know when enough is enough. There comes a time to stop looking inward; learn when its time to shift your focus outward. Studies have shown that encouraging people to dwell upon negative feelings can amplify these feelings. Emotional intelligence involves not only the ability to look within, but also to be present in the world around you.
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10 ways taken from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-mind-your-body/201201/10-ways-enhance-your-emotional-intelligence
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