Stay Cool and Manage Stress

• Ease in forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships and in ‘fitting in’ to group situations.
• A better understanding one's own psychological state, which can include managing stress effectively and being less likely to suffer from depression.

There is no correlation between IQ and EQ scores.

IQ has no connection with how people understand and deal with their emotions and the emotions of others (EQ). 

You simply can’t predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is.

Having a deep understanding of yourself provides you with more accurate perceptions of how you are coming across to others. 

To increase your self-awareness, make an effort to reflect on your strengths, developmental opportunities, triggers, values, and the like so that you are intimately familiar with what makes you tick. 

Weighing feedback can help you guard against blind spots. It can assist you in recognizing if your behaviors are having the effects you are intending.

If they aren't, you can adjust your actions or apologize accordingly (or mindfully choose not to do either).

• Be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses
• Acknowledge any stress or anxiety you’re feeling and resolve it before moving forward
• Don’t take everything personally, and strive to accept other’s actions as a reflection of them instead of you
• Be proactive, not reactive
• Be sensitive to emotional signals (tone of voice, body language, eye contact to understand your counterpart).

The best way to talk to strangers is to ask for their opinion on a matter. People love expressing their views. We can then focus our attention on what they say and use it to discover further what they think.

Asking open-ended questions is the key to developing this type of communication.

The more challenging we find it to talk to strangers, the more we will grow in that area when we take action, and the easier it will become.

When we challenge ourselves and move out of our comfort zone, we experience personal growth.

• Decreased stress: you learn to manage your triggers.
• Better communication in relationships: it helps you to tolerate and manage difficult emotions and then find more productive ways to work through difficulties.
• Decreased anxiety: you train your mind to stop fearing its own emotional reactions.
• You stick with your goals: you learn to deal with emotions like anxiety, shame, regret.
• Increased self-awareness: you learn to build a better relationship with your emotions.

• Emotional clarity: Taking the time to deliberately reflect on our emotions, to observe and label them.
• Emotional myth-busting: Eliminating myths and misconceptions floating around people’s minds about emotions. 
• Emotional tolerance: Learning to resist short-term gratification and instead invest in long-term values.

• Emotional empathy: “You feel awful? Then I feel awful too!”
• Cognitive empathy: “I understand that you are feeling awful. That must suck.”
• Compassion: “You feel awful? I feel for you. How can I help?”

Compassion is what we focus on for emotional intelligence.

It's the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions, to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships, and to manage your own and others’ emotions.

Use plain language. The more fluent you are with real emotional language, the more clearly you will be able to think about how you’re feeling.

Get used to the idea of emotional complexity. When we feel upset, we're not feeling one single emotion. We are usually experiencing a blend of many emotions.

Training ourselves to look for and see this emotional complexity is key to better understanding ourselves when we’re upset and moving on in a healthy way.