How to Build Emotional Intelligence
How to Build Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is an important yet often-overlooked soft skill that can supercharge personal and professional relationships alike—and Kin can help you build it.
The importance of emotional intelligence, often called ‘EQ’, or emotional quotient, is regularly understated during discussions in the modern workplace and beyond. However, this crucial set of competencies plays a vital role in both personal and professional success.
In fact, McKinsey & Co. have found that demand for high emotional intelligence in employees will grow across all industries between 2016 and 2030 by as much as 26 percent1—with 57% of managers saying their best employees are likely to have high emotional intelligence.2
Because of this, this article will explore EQ and how to build it, with short guides that explain how new technologies like Kin can make expanding EQ easier than before.
But what is Emotional Intelligence, exactly?
Emotional intelligence refers to someone’s capacity to recognize, understand, and manage their own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. It encompasses a range of skills that contribute to effective decision-making, improved well-being, and stronger interpersonal relationships.
Coined by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer, and later popularized by Daniel Goleman (another psychologist), EI is essentially a measure of how well someone understands emotion in themselves and others, and how well they can use this information to act in ways that meet everyone’s needs.
The Key Components of Emotional Intelligence
To make it clearer, EI’s key components are often broken down into the 4 types of Emotional Intelligence, or the 5 aspects. As we feel the 4 cover the 5, we’ve listed the 4 types here as chronological steps:
1. Self-awareness: This first step involves someone watching and recognizing their own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. As we’ve discussed before here, people’s honesty with themselves and others is important at work, and this is one reason why—it’s the only way to be truly emotionally intelligent.
2. Self-management: Once someone is aware of their emotions, they then must learn to manage them effectively. This includes self-regulation, controlling impulsive feelings, and developing self-control and adaptability. In short, it's about understanding how the feelings discovered through self-awareness affect thoughts and behaviors and developing self-confidence by planning around them.
3. Social awareness: With the self mastered, next is the ability to recognize, understand, and empathize with emotions in others. It involves picking up on emotional cues (including nonverbal cues), recognizing the dynamics in a group, and understanding that others may feel and need different things.
4. Relationship management: Finally, all of the previous areas combine into someone’s ability to communicate with, influence, coach, and mentor others. When someone learns to not only recognize others’ emotional needs, but to tend to them alongside their own, they become adept at ensuring everyone around them feels understood and comfortable. This is why EQ is featured as a prominent skill in our discussion on conflict management.
Emotional Intelligence in Action
In real life, Emotional Intelligence is important because a high EQ provides a self-understanding that can make someone more able to handle not just stressful situations, but day-to-day life. This is because EQ allows someone to understand what subconscious impulses they have in a given situation, and how to plan for them.
What’s more, being able to extend this understanding to others not only makes it easier to navigate conflict and forge relationships—but it also makes it easier to predict these things, too.
Consider this example: A manager knows they are annoyed when people don’t communicate their problems, and notices two usually-talkative co-workers not working together as much, with increasingly curt conversations. Due to their EQ, the manager recognizes a conflict may be brewing, and knows to be aware of their own feelings as they speak with each team member privately to find the source of the conflict.
A manager with low Emotional Intelligence may have allowed themselves to get outwardly angry with their co-workers, decided not to intervene at all, or perhaps even not notice the conflict at all.
Similarly, if a high-EQ employee notices their co-workers becoming quiet and unmotivated around them, they would put aside their own dislike of unmotivated individuals, and talk to their co-workers. Upon finding out their own results-focused approach is putting pressure on others, the employee might work with their co-workers to find a communal workflow which everyone likes.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that research shows why emotional intelligence is so important. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that EQ is a strong predictor of job satisfaction and performance. Effective leaders often demonstrate high EQ, as they can navigate complex social dynamics and inspire their teams. In personal relationships, individuals with high emotional intelligence are often better at problem-solving and maintaining healthy connections with co-workers, friends, and family.3
On the other hand, low emotional intelligence can lead to difficulties in both personal and professional life. It can lead to poor teamwork, increased conflict, and even contribute to mental health issues like burnout which we discussed more in another article here.
So, How is Emotional Intelligence Built?
Luckily, Emotional Intelligence can be developed—and here are the promised examples of how:
Practice self-reflection: Set aside time each day to reflect on what was felt throughout the day, and why. Journaling can be an excellent tool for this purpose, as it provides a log of emotional states, which can reveal patterns that expand emotional awareness by showing what triggers certain emotional states. This understanding is exactly what emotional maturity is.
Remember to celebrate achievements, question the origin and validity of opinions, and that the best mindset to have is that failure is part of the learning process—like we discuss here.
Apps like Day One or Reflectly can provide guided prompts and mood tracking to support your self-assessment journey. Alternatively, Kin's interactive journal can use its advanced memory to help identify patterns over time, as daily experiences and emotions are discussed.
Develop Empathy: Empathy is the ability to understand and share another’s feelings, and can be built by trying to imagine why someone might feel a certain way, and what it is like for them to feel that way.
This isn’t just so they can be better countered in disagreements, but so that their thoughts and beliefs can be respected and planned for.
Ask them if anything is unclear, and remember that Active listening—fully concentrating on hearing, understanding, and responding thoughtfully to others—is crucial here.
Similarly emotional regulation is important. Take time to identify and understand personal feelings, so that the conversation is damaged by impulsive action.
Empathy can be practiced through role-playing exercises, and by using apps like Empathy Library (which offers stories and resources to broaden your perspective) or Mood Meter (which can help you label and understand your emotions). Kin can also help by suggesting scenarios and guiding you through empathy-building exercises, and providing personalized feedback after.Manage stress effectively: As we discussed during our look at work-life balance, high stress levels can cloud thought processes like emotion regulation, so managing them is essential.
Outside of a healthy work-life balance, apps like Headspace or Calm offer guided meditations and breathing exercises to reduce stress.
For a more personalized approach, specific triggers can be discussed with Kin, which will then suggest specific techniques, and remind you to practice them regularly.Enhance social skills: Any personal or professional social situation will teach new interpersonal skills, but for a challenge, consider situations that require teamwork and communication. These will make group dynamics clearer and easier to understand, which makes recognizing emotions in others easier.
These events can be found at local clubs, or on apps like Meetup. With Kin you can role-play common scenarios and get feedback, which is less awkward than asking people in person for feedback.Read: Though unexpected, reading both fiction and non-fiction books and articles exposes the viewpoints and thought processes of different people.
While this can reveal new tips on EQ-building, it can also improve empathy by creating an understanding of these new viewpoints.
Apps like Goodreads are useful for finding book recommendations and tracking reading progress. Similarly, Kin can suggest books based on individual emotional intelligence goals, and engage in discussions about character emotions and motivations to deepen understanding.
What about Emotional Intelligence Tests?
As people seek to improve their Emotional Intelligence, they often turn to Emotional intelligence tests. These psychometric assessments typically involve a questionnaire or series of scenarios designed to measure various aspects of emotional intelligence.
The tests can be valuable tools for assessing EQ levels and identifying required improvement, but it’s important to choose reputable ones based on scientific research among the many available.
Even then, these tests are not psychiatrists. They are just springboards providing some broad points—and either way, the real work lies in being committed to ongoing emotional learning and growth, and consistently applying EQ-expanding strategies like those above.
How Kin Can Help
Speaking of those strategies, they all referenced Kin.
Kin is our personal AI assistant, which can be used to build Emotional Intelligence through its uniquely advanced memory and empathetic conversation style.
From the conversations its users have with it over time, Kin can track their emotional patterns, relationships with friends, family and coworkers, and their lifestyle. It will then provide personalized insights, roleplay suggestions, and suggestions on self-awareness, conflict resolution, and emotional regulation, for celebration and improvement alike.
Think a new conflict might be brewing between co-workers? Feeling unable to understand a friend’s viewpoint? Unsure of what a family member is feeling? Kin can help build confidence in tackling these things (and more).
For further support, Kin has a customizable tone, can offer daily check-in reminders, and even has an interactive journaling system it can tailor to personal history and goals.
This all makes Kin a powerful tool for dynamically growing Emotional Intelligence—but we understand that it needs a lot of personal data to do this. So, we made Kin protective of and transparent with data, which is further explained here.
Fundamentally, Kin processes and stores everything possible on a user’s devices, and only shares data with approved locations. All of this data Kin has on a user can be viewed and deleted by them in a few taps.
Not even we can read the data Kin has, while it has it. Kin is about our users, not corporate greed.
If that sounds useful, we suggest you start a conversation with Kin to test your emotional intelligence. Here’s what to ask Kin:
“Help me test my emotional intelligence”
Conclusion
An emotionally intelligent person is not just skilled at managing their own emotions, but also adept at navigating the complex emotional landscapes of others. They excel in social situations, demonstrating strong interpersonal skills, and an ability to read and respond to the emotional tenor of a group.
Small, consistent efforts are key to developing this skill. Start by incorporating some of the strategies mentioned above, and reflect on your progress regularly. Don't be afraid to seek support from others, like Kin, along the way.
As Artificial Intelligence continues to expand in the workplace which we discussed here, emotional intelligence stands out as a uniquely human attribute—but still one you can develop more efficiently with AI help.
So, whether you're a student, a professional, or simply someone looking to enhance your personal relationships, developing your emotional intelligence is one of the most powerful things you can do—and Kin makes it easier.
Bughin, J.; Hazan, E.; Lund, S.; Dahlström, P.; Wiesinger, A. and Subramaniam, A. 2018. “Skill shift: Automation and the future of the workforce”. mckinsey.com. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/skill-shift-automation-and-the-future-of-the-workforce [Accessed 10/07/24]
Anon 2019. “EQ: The Great White Whale of Leadership Development”. www.lhh.com. Available at: https://www.lhh.com/us/en/insights/eq-the-great-white-whale-of-leadership-development/ [Accessed 10/07/24]
Kleine, A.; Rudolph, C.W.; Zacher, H. 2019. “Thriving at work: A meta‐analysis”. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40(9-10), pp.973–999. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2375 [Accessed 10/07/24]