3 Steps You Can Take To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

What do you do when you emotionally overreact?

I always feel guilty. Guilty for saying things I don’t mean. Guilty for not saying words I should have. And guilty for doing something stupid.

It’s like one minute I am fine. The next minute something is boiling inside of me. Before I realize it, I am spitting out the nasty words or shutting down unable to reply.

“If only I could control my emotions better,” was always my sincere wish.

One day it got to the point that no amount of apology could fix the damage. My emotional reactions started creating a tension in my relationship with loved ones.

I knew I had to do something.

So, I turned to my go-to source of knowledge — book, articles, and everything I could find to help me figure out how to deal with emotions.

That’s how I came across the concept of “emotional intelligence.”

Surprisingly, the concept is relatively new. In 1993, Peter Salovey and John Mayer defined it in their paper, “Intelligence of Emotional Intelligence” as “the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.”

It looked like the skills of emotional intelligence was exactly what I needed to get better at!

And that’s how my journey of mastering emotional intelligence has started.

The definition gave insight that the emotional intelligence is a 3-step process:

1) monitor one’s own and other peoples’ emotions, in other words, RECOGNIZE.

2) discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately — UNDERSTAND.

3) use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior — MANAGE.

So what I needed to get better at was to recognize, understand and manage my emotions.

I used various techniques and strategies to master each step and want to share with you things that work for me, hoping they will work for you too.

Step 1. Recognize your emotions.

The process of recognizing emotions can be divided into two parts. One part is ongoing practice and the second is at the moment.

a. Create greater self-awareness.

I used to recognize that I was carried away by emotions only when the scene was over. It wasn’t helping much, except apologizing after the fact. I knew I needed to get better at recognizing when emotions are about to arise.

So I turned to the practice of mindfulness.

It might seem like every post written on the web mentions mindfulness. This word has become a hot trend nowadays. But it’s for good reasons.

Mindfulness is a non-negotiable first step to creating emotional awareness.

Tim Ferriss, a best-selling author who is also known for his highly popular business podcast “The Tim Ferriss Show”, noted that 80% of world-class performers he interviewed follow some sort of mindfulness practice. Either it’s meditation, conscious breathing or yoga, high performers incorporate mindfulness into a daily routine to bring clarity and focus to their busy lives.

Meditation is the most common practice and the one I started my mindfulness journey with. There are various types and techniques to follow but the most basic one is to sit and breathe.

It sounds like a simple thing to do. But I discovered first hand it was not.

In the beginning, my mind was wandering off immediately and I would catch myself lost in thoughts instead of focusing on breathing. It was very frustrating. I thought I wasn’t doing it right.

But the true value in meditation is not to focus on breathing. The true value is to notice when you are not.

Because the more you recognize when your mind is drifting away, the more aware you will become about your thoughts and feelings. Over time it will be easier to catch yourself when emotions arise and you will have a choice to do something about it.

If you are new to the mindfulness and meditation world, I recommend starting with a guided meditation. There are popular mediations apps, like Headspace and Calm. You can also find the free videos on YouTube from Tara Brach, a well-known meditation practitioner. They are a great first step in the mindfulness journey.

And it’s not about doing it right. It’s about developing greater awareness about your internal world.

While mindfulness helps to notice when things inside start to stir up, it’s very important to know what to do once you are in the moment of them taking over.

b. Label what you feel.

The best next step to break the grip of an intense emotion is to identify it.

After practicing meditation for some time, I became more aware of my emotional reactions, but when asked, “What is it that I feel?” I couldn’t put a finger to it. All I could answer was “I feel good” or “I feel bad” or “I feel weird.”

But good, bad and weird are not feelings. They are descriptions of them. Anger, frustration, joy, sadness, fear, anxiety, happiness are.

David Rock in his book “Your Brain at Work” mentions that studies have shown that people predicted that labeling emotions would make it worse, but the experiment showed the opposite. After participants were able to identify and label their emotions they reported a decreased effect of them.

When I started practicing labeling and went from “I feel weird” to “I feel angry” it helped me to ground myself. Instead of not knowing what’s going on, I was able to gain clarity and in some sense a control over what I was going through.

Changing the wording became the next important step.

Saying, “I feel angry” instead of “I am angry” seems like unimportant nuance, but it is not.

When you say, “I am angry,” you identify yourself as an angry person. But when you say, “I feel angry,” you acknowledge the feeling you have at that moment.

And feelings are fleeing. They have the tendency to pass.

I always was amazed that I can feel irritated in the morning, then joyful after my morning run, and excited to catch up with friends in the evening.

Labeling the feeling through “I feel …” helps to realize that it’s a feeling at the moment. It’s impermanent.

Because you feel feelings. You are not your feelings.

Step 2. Understand your emotions.

Becoming aware of the feelings and identifying them are good steps on taking control over emotional situations. But if you want to stop overreacting, you need to understand what drives your emotions. You need to dig deeper.

And to do that, you need to get curious.

You see, I’ve always blamed external factors for my overreactions. My friend said something snappy. A person on a train was rude. My colleague was irresponsible and dumped his work on me.

While it seemed like valid reasons to become anxious, angry or frustrated, I realized that out of 100 people not everyone would react the same way as I was. Why is that?

The reason is that everybody is triggered in different ways based on the values and beliefs they have, previous experiences they went through and the way they perceive each situation.

What I find enraging, someone else may find funny.

So for the answers, I needed to look within.

After labeling the emotion, I ask myself what made me feel this way. The first answer usually points to the external trigger. But I don’t stop on that answer. I ask myself again “why?”

The conversation in my head will go something like that.

“What do I feel now?” “I feel upset.”

“Why do I feel upset?” “Because my friend didn’t respond to my call and text message.”

“Why did it upset me that my friend didn’t respond back?” “Because I feel like he doesn’t care.”

“Why do I feel like he doesn’t care? What evidence do I have besides the text message?” “Ummm, none.”

So what upset me was not the event of my friend not texting me back, but my belief that he doesn’t care.

Asking, “Why I feel this way?” couple times in the row can bring a tremendous insight about your emotional world and uncover what really is the trigger of your reaction. Usually, it’s irrational thoughts and beliefs that have little to do with the event at hand.

And once you know the answer, you can start changing the ending.

Step 3. Manage your emotions.

The last step is the hardest. Your brain has already habituated the reaction to the common trigger. Your task is to change that habit and rewire your brain.

To do it, you will have to learn how to respond, rather than react.

In my example of getting upset with the friend for not texting back, I could react by cutting him off and deleting his number or responding by letting him know that I feel like he doesn’t care about me for not texting me back. Or the third option would be questioning where the belief of him not caring comes from.

But the power now is in my hands. And it’s quite a liberating and powerful feeling.

As Victor Frankl wrote in his remarkable book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Learning to respond will take practice. Just don’t be hard on yourself. If in the beginning all you do is just notice when your emotions arise, it’s already a big win. Changing them is a work in progress that requires a lot of practice and patience.

But don’t give up. Once you see how great it is to become in control of your emotions, your attitude and relationship with others will change too.

Emotional intelligence is a skill as any other, and it takes time to master it. But it’s a worthwhile effort. Because you are not only feeling in control, now you can enhance your relationships with others and improve the quality of your life.

So when next time you notice that you start emotionally reacting, label the feeling, ask yourself why you are feeling this way, and then choose to respond accordingly.