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Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is the ability to understand the emotions and thoughts of others as well as oneself, and then to use this understanding to guide behavior. In other words, someone with a high EQ is able to work out the motivations and feelings of others and then use this to guide their actions towards the best outcome. In many ways, EQ is actually a more useful measure than IQ when it comes to predicting career performance and general life satisfaction.
But how do you go about measuring such an abstract concept? Well that all depends on who you ask and in fact there are three separate ‘models’ of EQ each with their own views on the subject. Read on to learn more about each…

The Ability Model
The ability model comes from psychologists Salovey and Mayer who describe EQ purely in terms of ‘ability’. In this case, it is the ability to ‘perceive and integrate emotion’ and the ‘capacity to reason about emotion’ all with the end goal of enhancing personal growth. It also encompasses the ability to manage emotion – i.e. not fly off the handle at the slightest provocation and to know how to calm others down.
Ability model-based tests are the most similar to IQ tests but in some cases, the answer is more subjective, though guided by ‘social norms’.

The Mixed Model
The mixed model introduced by Daniel Goleman, suggests that EQ encompasses a vast array of separate skills and competencies but also focuses mostly on leadership. These skills and abilities can generally be broken down into the following items:
Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Social skill
Empathy
Motivation
Whether or not ‘motivation’ can be considered an aspect of emotional intelligence, however, is a contentious point. Thus the validity of the Mixed Model is called into question but it remains perhaps the most popular interpretation among businesses due to the focus on leadership skills.

The Trait Model
The Trait Model from Konstantinos Vasilis Petrides is one that views EQ more as a series of ‘traits’ rather than abilities. This subtle difference suggests a less trainable set of abilities. In fact, this model goes as far as to suggest that EI itself is a personality trait and should be assessed within larger personality frameworks.
The Trait Model is measured via self-report which may make it unreliable but it has given birth to one of the more popular EQ tests: the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire.
The moral of the story is that no theory of EQ is perfect, so you need to use your own EQ when assessing your ability and that of others.

Our ‘EQ’ is a crucial measurement of our ability to understand ourselves and others and to identify and regulate emotion. In turn, this can predict our career success, our relationships and more so it is a highly valuable asset.
Emotional intelligence appears to correlate with IQ and it is generally thought that you can ‘train’ your emotional intelligence by learning to better understand the motivations and actions of others.
But while emotional intelligence can certainly be broken down into a series of learnable abilities, it is also strongly linked to our personalities and to neurological processes. In many ways, our capacity for understanding emotions and controlling our own is biological. Read on and we’ll look at how all this works…

Emotions
Our emotions are generally regulated by neurotransmitters and hormones that our body releases in response to a range of different stimuli. A good example is when the body releases endorphins or ‘feel good hormones’ that act as antidepressants and which help us to combat pain and stress. These are produced when we think about people we love, when we’re very happy and when we exercise. Meanwhile, we produce cortisol – the stress hormone – when we think about things that make us anxious or when we wake up to our alarm. We produce norepinephrine when we’re scared, melatonin when we’re tired and dopamine when we’re focused and motivated. Ultimately, these chemicals tell our brain how we should feel about certain things, whether we should remember them and how our body should respond.
But everyone has different levels of these chemicals meaning some people are naturally ‘happier’ than others. The good news is that tools like cognitive behavioral therapy can teach us to control our reactions to things by seeing them in a different way. This is the first step towards better emotional intelligence.

Empathy
Empathy it seems is controlled by ‘mirror neurons’ which fire in the brain when we see other people. When we see someone get rejected by their crush on TV, our mirror neurons fire and we feel sad. Likewise, when we see someone smiling at us, our mirror neurons fire and we produce serotonin and feel happier. This is what gives us empathy and it’s largely what makes possible many of our social interactions.
At the same time, when you see someone smile you will tend to automatically copy that gesture and smile yourself. This, in turn, can lead to something called ‘facial feedback’ which basically means we produce neurotransmitters that are in keeping with the expression we are pulling.
So if you want to feel better, just try smiling!

– Scott Blessing

Neuro-linguistic Programming – Can it Help My Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is highly sought after as it provides the ability to interpret the emotions of others, to navigate them and to control one’s own emotions too. Ultimately a high EQ will help you to become more persuasive, more popular and more confident in social settings – which are all things most of us want to improve.
For this reason, there are many tools and techniques available that promise to help us better understand and work with others. But which of them can really help improve your EQ and enhance your ‘social skill’? Let’s take a look at something called ‘Neuro-linguistic Programming’ and whether it is a useful tool.

What is Neuro-linguistic Programming?
Neuro-linguistic Programming, or NLP, is a framework that was originally devised to be used therapeutically and for self-growth. The central concept behind it was to ‘model’ the techniques of the most successful individuals and to learn how to talk and think like them.
The result is something of a ‘mish-mash’ of different techniques and strategies, though they all broadly involve the use of language and visualization to try and understand the thoughts and motivations of others and to try and influence them either for therapeutic reasons or for sales. While NLP is very popular among businesses and especially those working in sales, it is considered by the scientific community to be ‘pseudoscience’ and has been accused of having a ‘quasi-cult-like’ following.

Useful Aspects
With regards to NLP then, it is important to have a critical eye but this doesn’t mean that you should throw the baby out with the bathwater – there are some useful skills here to be learned.
One example of a useful tool that comes from NLP is what’s called the ‘Meta Model’. This teaches us to look precisely at language use and to try to find underlying assumptions and generalizations. For instance, someone might say ‘it’s not so easy to get everyone to like you’ – which contains some interesting omissions. Your question might then be to ask ‘not so easy as what?’ or ‘do you want everyone to like you?’.
The Milton Model meanwhile builds on this and describes the intentional omission of information in your statements. Here you load your statements with assumptions and presuppositions, which in turn can help you to influence the beliefs of others.
In conclusion, NLP is an interesting subject for study. Some of it must be taken with a pinch of salt but it certainly does offer value in some regards and is worth reading up on.

– Scott Blessing

The term ‘Emotional intelligence’ refers to your ability to understand the motivations of others, to understand your own emotions and motivations and to communicate these things effectively. While a lot of emphases is placed on the importance of ‘IQ’, it is actually EQ that is in many ways more useful in day-to-day life as it is what enables you to communicate and get on well with others, as well as to influence those around you and work well as part of a team. It is critical for a successful career and also integral to any successful relationship – romantic or otherwise.
But how do you increase EQ? There are a few methods but here we are going to examine one of the most straightforward: mindfulness.

What is Mindfulness?
For the uninitiated, mindfulness is a form of meditation that is taught as part of ‘CBT’ or ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’. This is currently one of the most popular psychotherapeutic approaches for treating a range of mental health disorders such as anxiety, phobias, and depression.
The general idea behind CBT is that our emotions and behaviors are controlled by our thoughts. If you are experiencing anxiety for instance then, there is a good chance that this is being created by ruminations and thoughts that are causing you to become anxious. A phobia of heights meanwhile might be caused by thoughts like ‘I’m going to fall’.
In order to help patients to identify such thought processes, CBT teaches ‘mindfulness’ as a form of self-reflection. This involves sitting quietly and simply ‘observing’ the contents of your own thoughts as they pass by. Unlike other forms of meditation, you are not trying to ‘quiet’ your thoughts, instead, you are just noting them and reflecting on them.
The next step is then to try and alter those thoughts by challenging their assumptions and using positive affirmations, ultimately resulting in healthier behavior.

How This Can Help Train EQ
So what has all this got to do with EQ? Well basically, emotional intelligence boils down to your ability to observe the thoughts and feelings of others and then to act accordingly. At the same time, it also incorporates the ability to manage your own emotions.
And all of this can be aided by listening to your own thoughts. When you are aware of your own thought processes you will not only be more aware of how your own mind works (and how to influence your feelings) but you will also have more insight for how the minds of other people work. Learn mindfulness and you will be one step closer to mastering emotional intelligence.

– Scott Blessing

The art of persuasion is a highly useful skill. In business, it is what you can use to get a promotion, to make a sale or to encourage a particular business decision. At home, it is what you can use to watch what you want on television or to encourage your partner to move to another part of the country.
In short, we are forced to work with people all the time and if you don’t want to be constantly making compromises, then it can be highly useful to learn how to persuade.
Here we will look at a few tips that can help you to more effectively accomplish this:

Be Personal
If you are making a sale to someone that you don’t know, then making it personal can help a great deal. Introduce yourself and then make sure to keep saying that person’s name so that they feel like they don’t want to ‘let you down’.

Make Them Obligated
The urge to reciprocate is an incredibly powerful aspect of human behavior. In other words, if someone does something nice for you then you will be overcome with the desire to do something nice back. In fact, studies show that when you give someone money, they will almost always give you back significantly more just to feel equal again.
To use this in a business context, you might decide to give someone a freebie or to offer them a cup of tea when they come into your store. In your personal life, you can really get creative!

Appeal to Authorities
People trust authority figures and if you can appeal to statistics, studies or authorities then it will lend weight to your argument. So don’t tell someone your product is great – tell them it is great according to studies. Likewise building on established facts is also a good strategy. Find something you can both agree on and then showing how that belief supports your argument is a strategy that often works well.

Stay Quiet
Just as people have an urge to reciprocate, they also have an urge to fill silences. If you can make your point or your offer and then remain quiet, you’ll find that the other person often feels compelled to say something – and to break the tension they will often say what you want to hear. In any standoff, the person to speak first is usually the person who loses!

– Scott Blessing

One of the key components of emotional intelligence is the ability to control your own emotions – particularly negative emotions such as stress and anger. If you are unable to prevent yourself from panicking or from flying off the handle in a temper, then you will find that you struggle to interact with others in a positive way. This can harm your relationships and your career and it’s very unpleasant to live with.
If you’re the kind of person who struggles to control their emotions though, then the good news is that there are plenty of things you can do to start handling them more effectively. Here we will look at some of the best strategies for controlling anger and anxiety so that you can better control your reactions and succeed in social interactions…

Breathing
The first and most important thing to do when you feel yourself getting worked up is to try and breathe steadily and deeply. When you get anxious, this causes your autonomic nervous system to trigger the fight or flight response, in turn releasing neurochemicals that cause your body to get ‘worked up’ like norepinephrine, cortisol, and glutamate.
By breathing steadily though, you can cause your parasympathetic nervous system to kick in which in turn has the opposite effect of putting you into a ‘rest and digest’ state, producing relaxing hormones that calm you back down.

Cognitive Restructuring
Cognitive restructuring means looking at the thought patterns that are causing you to get angry and then replacing them with more relaxing and calming thoughts. If you find yourself getting angry at other drivers on the road, try reminding yourself that ‘staying calm means you win’.

Use Biofeedback
If you find yourself struggling regularly with getting worked up and anxious, then it may pay to utilize biofeedback techniques. What this means, is that you will be monitoring your own biology to give you an indication of your mood. The easiest way to do this is with a heart rate monitor that will tell you roughly how stressed or angry you are at any given time.
By regularly measuring your heart rate you can then start to learn when you begin getting stressed, what causes it and what it feels like. At the same time, you can practice bringing your heart rate back down with breathing techniques. Eventually, you won’t need the heart rate monitor at all because you will have developed an awareness of your own body and mind – a very key aspect of EQ.

– Scott Blessing

A Quick Introduction to Psychology – The Bits You Can Actually Use
Ask any psychology student what the most annoying comment they get is when they tell people what they’re studying and they will probably say that it’s ‘oh, that must mean you can read my mind!’. Doesn’t sound annoying? Try hearing it 500 times…
And the fact of the matter is that psychology is mostly a matter of learning biology, sociology, and statistics. It’s not actually terribly fascinating a lot of the time and you certainly can’t use it to pull off Jedi mind tricks.
But there are some bits you can use to your advantage and that is worth knowing. Read on and we’ll go over a few of the things that the topic teaches you that you can actually use to your advantage…

Attention
A practical demonstration that happens at some point on most psychology classes is the video of the gorilla walking into the room and waving. The attendees of the lecture are asked to watch the people in the video throw and catch a ball between them and as a result, they completely fail to see the large gorilla walk right into the middle and wave.
What this demonstrates is just how important our attention is. For the most part, we can only pay attention to one thing at a time and if we are thinking about or watching something else, then we can miss remarkably obvious things happening right in front of our eyes! Attention is a ‘bottleneck’ and this is the foundation of all magic tricks.

Defense Mechanisms
When you learn about Freud, things get really weird and you hear about all kinds of strange and largely outdated ideas. But Freud isn’t completely outdated. In fact, he’s the guy responsible for our idea of an ‘unconscious’ aspect of the mind and he’s also the guy whose theories help cops catch criminals.
And the defense mechanisms are actually very useful: this is something you see people using all the time and it pays to learn to spot them. Reaction formation, for instance, is what happens when someone acts emphatically as though they believe the opposite of what they really feel.

Cognitive Biases
A cognitive bias is an error of thinking that we all make. An example is our tendency to search for confirmation of our existing beliefs rather than to try and disprove them. Being away from these biases can help you to avoid errors in judgment and to predict errors others might make.

CBT
CBT is ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’ or basically the art of being aware of your own thoughts and learning to alter them. This is the key to changing your own behavior and that of others!

– Scott Blessing

Did you know that a large percentage of communication is unspoken? In fact, according to some sources, nonverbal communication accounts for anywhere between 93%-55%. While exact numbers vary, what everyone seems to agree on is that unspoken communication is even more important than what you actually say during any given interaction.
As one of the key aspects of emotional intelligence is the ability to understand the feelings and motivations of others then, reading body language can play an important part. You do it all the time unconsciously, so let’s take a look at how you can start to do it consciously.

Some Basics
There are many different examples of individual body language elements that can be interpreted to guess what someone is thinking or feeling. Let’s start with a few of these to get the ball rolling:

Arms folded – someone with their arms folded is displaying a very ‘closed off’ body language, suggesting that they aren’t interested in what’s being said or that they don’t agree with it

Foot direction – the direction that someone’s foot points in when they’re standing or sitting can tell you what they’re really interested in. If their feet are pointed towards the door, it may be that they want to leave. The same often goes for the angle of their body.
Finger pointing to the temple – if someone is resting on their hand and their finger is pointing at their temple however, this suggests they are interested in what you have to say.

Mirroring – if you see two people whose body language mirrors each other, then this suggests that they have the rapport and like one another

Touching – when a man touches another man to pat him on the back or shoulder, this is often a sign of dominance and marks the initiator as the ‘alpha’

Context and Grouping
The mistake that many people will make when reading body language though, is to look at these individual signs in isolation and to forget the context. For instance, you might think that someone who has their arms crossed is ‘closed’ and uninterested in what you have to say but if it is cold they may in fact just be doing it to stay warm. On the other hand, if they are holding a glass of wine, this can prevent them from crossing their arms though they may also be creating a barrier with that arm by holding it in front of themselves.
Successful reading of body language then requires you to observe clusters of signals and to consider the context.

– Scott Blessing