How To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

You need to increase your emotional intelligence in order to not let your emotions take you out.

I’m sure you’ve heard of IQ, which is intellectual intelligence. But what about EQ, your emotional intelligence? In my opinion, your EQ is way more important than your IQ because what you lack in talent you can easily make up for in hard work. However it is going to be really hard for you to work if you don’t have really good emotional intelligence.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in a positive way to reduce stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and diffuse conflict. Having a really good strong emotional intelligence can help you in all areas of your life, not just in business, such as your personal relationships, personal goals, physical health, mental health, etc.  Therefore, you really want to make this part of your daily life.

4 Key Attributes To Emotional Intelligence

#1 Self-awareness. First you need to actually recognize your own emotions and behavior first, and know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Once you have that self-awareness, then you can move on to stage II.

#2 Self-management. Once you’re aware of what’s going on, you can actually learn to control the impulse of feelings and your emotions in a healthy way.  

#3 Social awareness. This is recognizing other people’s emotions, behavior, etc.

#4 Social management. This is knowing how to effectively communicate with others, manage conflict, develop your relationship, etc. We’re primarily going to focus on steps one and two as solo entrepreneurs.

Now that you know that you can’t let your emotions get the best of you, you can’t let your emotions take you out. How do you actually control and learn how to manage these crazy emotions that we all have? With these 17 tips on how to increase your emotional intelligence so that your emotions don’t take you out of the game.

Tips To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

#1 Have an accountability partner. You want to be able to have someone that you can count on, can trust, can tell them exactly what you’re planning to do so that they can actually hold you accountable. That person hopefully will make sure that you’re actually holding up to your end of the bargain and you’re actually going to do what you said.

#2 Have integrity. You want to be a person of your word and someone that’s committed. The definition of commitment is doing what you said you would do long after the mood you set it in has left you. If you tell someone you are going to do something, do it, and one way to really get better at this is to stop saying the word try.  We all say the word try as an excuse to try to get out of things. Just make the decision if you are going to do it or not, and then stay true to your word.

#3 Plan and organize your schedule. If you maintain a schedule and stick to it, you’re not going to have the opportunity to procrastinate because you are going to have a schedule. You are going to know I have to do this thing at this time and it’s not going to let you procrastinate. Before I go to bed every single night, I look at my schedule for the next day.  Every Sunday, I plan my schedule for the entire week. I am planning weeks in advance and even months in advance sometimes depending on what I have going on in my life and in my business. Those are the very minimum of the planning and organizing of your schedule that you want to start doing honestly.

#4 Eliminate excuses. We all do it, and we all need to stop it. We need to stop the whining and the complaining. Determine what is really going on in your life. If something is not working, work to fix it, don’t just sit there and complain about it. Move forward and just remember at the end of the day, if you just do one small thing for your business every single day, you’re moving in the right direction.  

#5 Eliminate distractions. There are so many things vying for our attention these days, especially with social media and everything going on in technology. Therefore you need to start eliminating any kind of distractions. Start thinking of things that are holding you back from achieving what you want to achieve in your business and then start eliminating those distractions.  

#6 Have urgency. See our entire blog post on why you need to have a sense of urgency!

#7 Have determination. Michael Jordan was actually cut from his high school basketball team, did that stop him? No! He continued to practice, he continued work on his skill, and he obviously went on to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Sarah Blakely of Spanks was told no a million times before finally she found someone that was willing to take a chance on her. She’s the first female billionaire under the age of 40. Therefore, you need to have determination. Determination is going to help increase your emotional intelligence.  

#8 Pray. In order to have the most self-control, God in my opinion is the only one that can really help. Proverbs 25-28 says like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control, and we know that through Philippians 4:13. We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, so I truly believe that with prayer, you can do all things. God can help you! It’s not easy to do it on your own and it’s impossible to do it on your own. Thus you need God to be able to help you really have the most self-control.

#9 Understand your true identity. God created you for a reason and for a purpose. Your identity is in him, it’s not in what you do, it’s not in what someone has said about you.  This is going to help you not let what others think about you and what others say about you bother you. One of the biggest problems I see is that people do things because they’re worried about what other people are going to think. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about what I’m doing, I only care about what God thinks. Therefore it’s really important that you understand your true identity and who you are. When someone criticizes you, you’re not going to take offense to it. You are going to just brush it off!

#10 Remove the option to think.  A lot of us spend way too much time thinking. Well, your brain is not always your best friend. If you think about things for too long, your emotions can start to come up. Thus I like to literally remove the option of thinking. This means if you don’t have time to actually think about something – whether you want to do it or you don’t want to do it – you will automatically just do it because you know it needs to get done.  

#11 Take time to reflect. It’s really important that you understand yourself and really take the time to reflect and learn about who you. Whether you do that by writing in your journal, taking personality quizzes, and behavioral assessment tests or asking a therapist and friends. Anything to learn more about who you are and who God designed you to be. Start to learn more about yourself, have self-awareness, understand what motivates you, and what are your emotional triggers. Then learn how to start controlling those things.

#12 Learn to pause. My grandmother always said make sure you think before you speak, and that goes the same for thinking before you act. We all have a choice at the end of the day – to choose whether we are going to overreact to a situation or to stay calm in a situation. Learn to pause, take a breather, think about the situation, and have an open mind. Have the mindset that there’s other possibilities and other things that you can do.

#13 Have a positive attitude. I always try to look at the glass half full, not half empty. I always think that there is another way and always try to think outside the box. If there’s a problem, there’s always going to be some kind of solution. So instead of getting defensive if someone criticizes you, ask yourself what you can learn from this. That’s one way to stay positive and I always say everything is always better with a smile. Put a smile on your face to try to have a positive attitude and that’s definitely going to help you increase your emotional intelligence.  

#14 Eliminate fear. If you can eliminate fear, that’s definitely going to help you start to control your emotion because a lot of our emotion is fear-based. Read more of our tips to overcome your fear here.

#15 Exercise. Exercising helps to get your adrenaline and endorphins up, which is definitely going to help your emotional state overall. Even people that are typically very down or very depressed, one of the things they recommend that they do is to literally start physically moving their bodies because there is a chemical reaction that takes place in your body when you start to do physical activity. It literally helps to elevate your mood, so start to exercise! It is going to help you feel stronger, it’s going to help you build your confidence, which is all in turn going to help you with your emotional intelligence.

#16 Get outside of your comfort zone. The more that you do it, the more you’re going to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I know it sounds weird – how can you be comfortable with being uncomfortable? It’s like anything in life – the more you do it, the more comfortable you’re going to be with it. In order to succeed in your business, I always recommend getting outside of your comfort zone. You are going to have to whether it’s you pitching buyers and you’re nervous about it, you’re scared about doing a YouTube video for the first time, etc. Getting outside of my comfort zone will help you to have a higher emotional intelligence because your emotions are going to try to to stop you. However, you want to control that and get past that and do what you need to do.

#17 Practice. Like anything in life, it takes practice to learn how to have a high emotional intelligence. It is like any skill, so practice and time is what it takes! Just keep practicing over and over again and you will become better. It’s important at the end of the day that we remain proactive instead of reactive. You don’t always want to be on the reactive or always want to be on the defense. You want to be on the offense and anticipating what’s coming up in your business and what you need to do so that you can better be prepared and better control things going forward. This will leave your being less stressed, more motivated, more energized, and you get more things done.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes, “quitting is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” so at the end of the day – just don’t quit.  

How do you increase your emotional intelligence and not let your emotions take you out? Let us know below! And for more weekly fashion biz tips, join our Fearless Fashionpreneur Facebook Page!

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