Free Ebook: 7 Steps to Improving Your Emotional Intelligence

The concept of emotional intelligence has been growing over the past thirty years, with many new models and tools built to enhance the basic idea. However, the broader adoption of the concept is still limited because of the myths and misunderstandings. If you read articles on emotional intelligence, you will find a list of qualities of emotionally intelligent people, but how we develop those qualities is not addressed. There is a significant gap between emotional intelligence as an idea and as a practice. Even those who consider themselves to be practitioners of emotional intelligence cannot take full advantage of it because of these barriers. In this eBook, you will learn a 7-step process to putting emotional intelligence into practice.

You probably have heard people say, "he is hot-headed," "she is the jealous type," or "that's just the way I am." Judgments like these based on emotional patterns often imply that people are born with a particular emotional make-up, and we can do nothing to alter it. This belief is not true. Although we are all wired in a specific way, we have been expanding our emotional intelligence and competence during our entire life. We don't cry in public as a frustrated baby might, and we don't usually talk back to our boss like teenagers sometimes do. There may be exceptions, but the good news is that we all can enhance our emotional intelligence through intentional learning.

Many organizations use EQ assessments as tools in talent acquisition and development. While measuring is an excellent place to begin improvement, it is often used as a criterion to exclude people. For instance, what if someone lacks ambition? What can we do to stimulate it? What can we do to ensure that ambition becomes sustainable for that person? All of these fall into the territory of learning emotions and transforming rather than assessing emotions. So, if you consider yourself low in emotional intelligence or have a low EQ score, that does not mean something is wrong. On the contrary, you can improve your emotional competency as long as you give yourself permission for learning. If you want to improve your emotional intelligence, you must treat it as a learning domain instead of simply a trait you were born with.