What’s Your Emotional Intelligence?

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You think intelligence—you think IQ test, which is meant to measure math, logic and verbal skills. But it turns out there’s another kind of intelligence that’s vital to your brain health and the wellbeing of those close to you: Emotional intelligence (EI). There are many measures of EI. Simply, it’s your ability to relate and interact with others. This may seem like a natural skill, but it’s worth looking into exactly what emotional intelligence entails. After all, the quality of our social relationships are essential to maintaining our health and beauty.

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First, you have to become familiar with your own feelings, so you can use them to make decisions you’re comfortable with.

Emotions can be messy, so managing your emotional life without getting caught up with anxiety or anger is extremely important. If you continue to be aware of how you truly feel, pursuing your goals despite setbacks will become easier.

As you become successful in attaining your personal goals, having emotional intelligence  means you can handle other people’s feelings with harmony. This requires such skill because your family, friends and coworkers will often have different feelings and ideas that may challenge you to reframe your goals. We often need to strike a balance between fulfilling our needs and the needs of those around us. We need to have an idea of how our behaviors and actions will affect those around us.

Having empathy is a large part of having a good sense of emotional intelligence. In general, it’s your ability to read other people’s emotions without them having to explicitly telling you what they’re feeling. So much of communication depends on being about to read body language and other cues.

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