The Only Skill You Need to Master Emotional Intelligence

Written By Caroline Smith

Humans are built to form social connections, but dealing with the emotional nature of humans can be a big barrier, especially if you have struggled with your emotional intelligence for a long time like I once did.

This episode explores what EQ is, why it’s important for human connection, and the one key skill you need to learn in order to improve your EQ in your personal and work life. I discuss the science and psychology of emotions, and my personal experience as an autistic woman who has struggled with emotional intelligence for most of my life. I even reveal a bonus tip that I think might change how we approach solving the issue of low EQ.

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Transcript:

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

In today’s podcast episode, we’ll explore the crucial skills you need to improve your emotional intelligence (EQ) especially if you naturally struggle with social and communication skills like I once did, and I’ll tell you how can condense all of those skills into just one key skill that is really easy to remember.

Full transparency: I have struggled with my emotional intelligence for a large part of my life — actually for most of my life at the time I’m sitting down to record this — and if you’re a regular listener of mine, you probably already know why that is.

But for the new listeners, I am on the autism spectrum, which in simple terms means I kind of have an innate form of social ineptness and social awkwardness, both of which do not make a good recipe for high emotional intelligence.

So in my case, I did feel emotions, but I was just clueless on how exactly I should express my emotions in a way that others would understand.

And every time I would venture out of my comfort zone in my younger years to try and develop those skills, it just felt very weird and foreign to me and honestly it looked and sounded weird to others, because it was obvious that it was very unnatural to me.

In fact, it took me years of observing and practicing to correct this behavior and really start to those social and emotional connections in my brain that were not natural for me.

I said all of that to say I am in no way and expert on EQ whatsoever, but if you are someone who struggles in this area not because you’re being intentionally malicious but because you’re just socially awkward or maybe even autistic like me, I think my perspective can be more relevant and useful to you.

And even if that’s not your situation, you can still learn something from the video, so don’t click off just yet!

So let’s just get into it, and I’m actually going to start by revealing the one key skill that this episode is titled after: Treat others the way you want to be treated. I have my church’s Sunday school class to thank for that lesson.

That’s it. Sounds really simple right? But how exactly do you do that when you have struggled in that area for your entire life or if you have been deprived of that kind of emotional connection for a long time?

And that is what the rest of this episode is going to be about.

Let’s start by defining what EQ is and explaining why it’s so important in our lives.

EQ is the ability to manage both your own emotions and understand the emotions of people around you. Daniel Goldman, who is the psychologist and science journalist known as the father of EQ expounds on this definition using what he calls the 4 domains of emotional intelligence, and those are self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and skilled relationship, which is a combination and the implementation of the previously mentioned domains.

  1. Self-awareness is the ability to understand your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and there are two types of self-awareness: internal and external.

    Internal self-awareness is about understanding how your own feelings and thoughts impact your behavior.

    For instance, I have always been a very sensitive person, which I know can make me take things personally like jokes even when they are harmless from the other person’s perspective.

    So every time a social interaction happens when someone makes a lighthearted joke about me or a comment about something I said or did, I have pause for like 1 second, and start repeating in my head, “Let it go.”

    Just over and over again, because I don’t always know when someone is just playing or trying to hurt my feelings, but I know that if I overreact right off the bat, it’s going completely change the nature of the interaction and if I keep thinking about it, it’s going to ruin my mood.

    External self-awareness is about understanding how your behavior and emotions are perceived by others.

    For example, is the way you’re behaving or what you’re talking about making people uncomfortable or comfortable; invalidated or validated; etc.

    Side note: If you want to know the 5 ways to tell if someone is uncomfortable with what you’re doing, make sure you check out my article 5 Major Signs That You Are Socially Awkward, which I will link to in the description of this episode.

    So that’s internal and external self-awareness, and it’s important to find a balance between the two, otherwise you risk ruining the social interaction. So like if you’re overly worried about internal self-awareness, which is to say you’re only worried about your own feelings, you make the interaction all about you which people don’t like.

    But on the other hand, if you’re overly worried about appeasing everyone else — which has to do with external self-awareness — you end up tolerating disrespect, which is obviously not good for you and your feelings.

    So continuing with my previous example of being hypersensitive, sometimes I find myself being almost too nice so that I won’t be seen as sensitive, and that comes with its own problems, too.

    Leave a like and comment if you can relate to being overly nice and forgiving so that you’re not seen as being too sensitive.

  2. Self-management involves handling your distressing emotions in effective ways so that they don’t cripple you and they don’t get in the way of what you’re doing, and yet attuning to them when you need to so that you can learn from them.

    So if you get angry or sad, you have to learn how to regulate your emotions and not act out in an inappropriate way and instead, manage them in a more productive way.

    Self-management is what keeps us from taking someone’s life, spreading dangerous rumors about people, getting revenge, all of those immoral behaviors that we’re all capable of, but should not do.

  3. Empathy involves knowing what someone else is feeling. This can be done by using social cues and considering the context of a situation.

    So can you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand things from their point of view? Even if you think they are wrong about a situation, can you at least understand it from their perspective?

  4. Skilled relationship is the ultimate goal of EQ, and it’s achieved by combining self-awareness, self-management, and empathy in ways that lead you to have healthy relationships with your friends, family, coworkers, and others, because it’s really no good to you if you can’t use that knowledge to create changes.

    And at the crux of skilled relationship is that one key skills I mentioned earlier: Treat others the way you want to be treated. And I’ll get to the the specifics of how you can do that later on.

But before that, I want to delve into the importance of emotional intelligence in our daily lives.

To understand the importance of EQ, we really need to understand the emotional and social nature of the human brain.

According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2723854/, emotions are biologically wired within us to help us stay alive. They encourage behaviors in us that are important for our survival and well-being, and that includes both positive and negative emotions.

Guilt pushes us to apologize to people who we’ve hurt.

Anger helps us to defend ourselves and those we love if necessary.

Fear tells we need to run away from danger.

Sadness and grief helps us to cope with loss and cling to those who are still in our lives.

Loneliness gives us an incentive to seek community.

Even a healthy amount of jealousy is an important signal that a relationship might be at risk, and that’s not just in romantic relationships; that could be sibling relationships, friendships, parent-child relationships, and more.

And the positive emotions like happiness, love, hope, peace, amusement, and others give us a reason to keep living.

Not only do emotions help us to create and repair relationships that give us strong social networks, and make decisions in life-threatening situations, but they more importantly allow us to keep our incredibly vulnerable offspring alive.

Let’s have a little scientific nerd-out moment here about babies because as someone who loves babies and hopes to be a mom very soon if possible, I just love hearing about them:

Compared to most mammals, which are animals that give live birth, humans have a long period of maturation, because our brains are so complex, and out of all primates, we have the longest period of infant dependency.

And that’s because human babies are born an estimated 12 months too early to accommodate for our upright walking stance and our shorter torsos, according to evolutionary scientists.

For all you moms out there, that means babies should technically be in the womb for about 24 months, which is kind of crazy to think about, but the reason they come out early is because if they were to stay in the womb for that long, you literally would not be able to walk, which is not great for survival.

So thank evolution for that, or thank God, or if you’re like me, thank both of them because I think it’s possible that God created us using evolution.

But anyway, because of the fact that humans are born being so physically and emotionally vulnerable, women/mothers really have to overcompensate in emotional attunement and emotional intelligence, otherwise the baby will not survive.

Or if it does survive but it doesn’t get the emotional connection it needs from the mother and from the surrounding community, it is going to have some serious issues down the line.

And I mean major issues, like lack of emotional regulation, poor quality relationships, attachment disorders, a lot of mental and emotional wounds that are really hard to heal once your brain is fully formed.

So emotions are essential to our survival from the time we enter the world — just as much as food, water, and sunlight, but where does emotional intelligence come into play?

Well as you probably know from experience, emotions need to be regulated from the time we are born, otherwise, they can cause us to do all sorts of things that sabotage relationships and even endanger ourselves and others, and that’s where EQ comes into play.

For example, just because something makes us happy right now in the moment doesn’t mean it’s good for us, and just because someone makes us jealous or angry does not mean it’s smart for us act on how we feel in the moment.

EQ helps us stop, think, and make a reasonable decision.

If you’ve ever interacted with someone who is condescending, abrasive, dismissive of your feelings, whether it’s because they just lack self-awareness or they are completely self-aware and are just using emotional intelligence to be manipulative, the outcomes or low EQ are terrible either way.

If the psychology wasn’t enough for you, here are a few interesting facts about the positive affects of EQ in our daily personal and professional lives:

  • A study done on 505 adolescents to measure the relationship between EQ and social anxiety showed a positive relationship between EQ and subjective well-being, and likewise showed a negative relationship between EQ, stress, and social anxiety.

  • In an in-depth analysis of 104 peer-reviewed articles about EQ, leadership, and teams, it was found that emotionally intelligent leaders improve both behaviors and business results and have a positive impact on work team performance and team members’ attitudes about work.

  • A meta-analysis of six studies involving a total of 603 participants found a significant correlation between emotional intelligence and satisfaction in romantic relationships.

  • According to Talent Smart EQ, people with high emotional intelligence make an average of $29,000 per year more than people with low emotional intelligence suggesting that being socially skilled and emotionally intelligent is correlated with higher wages. Unless you’re a scam artist or something who manipulates emotions to make money, but that’s a different story.

So now we know the importance of emotions and regulating them with emotional intelligence, but what are the specific ways we can go about implementing that golden rule?

I’ll break it down into 3 steps:

1. Understand Your Own Emotions

Here are some ways you can work to understand your own emotions about your social awkwardness:

  • Practice self-reflection

    When you’re in the midst of or in the aftermath of a situation in which you feel angry, disrespected, sad, or any other type of negative emotion, do some self-reflection the understand why you feel that way, if you should be feeling that way, and whether how you’re feeling is your fault or the other person’s fault.

  • Think before you speak/act

    When you’re dealing with people, especially ones that you care deeply about, I’ve learned that it’s best to be quick to listen and slow to speak. So before you say or do something that you know will cause more emotional damage to a relationship, think about what response would give you the best results.

  • Know your strengths and weaknesses

    It’s good to know your strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies in terms of socializing so that you know how to conduct yourself in social situations.

  • Learn from your past experiences

    If a situation has happened in your past that ended poorly and you left it feeling unhappy at how you handled it, you don’t have to obsess about it, but you should take some time to learn what went wrong and how you would’ve preferred the situation to go.

2. Understand Other People’s Emotions

Here are some ways you can work to understand your other people’s reactions to your social awkwardness:

  • Pay attention to how others behave around you

    If you study how people tend to behave around you, you’ll begin to notice patterns that you can fix.

    For example, say when you meet new people, you have a habit of not talking enough to the point that awkward silence become the norm for you, and you notice this often causes people to awkwardly walk away from you. You know that you might need help with your conversational skills.

  • Exercise empathy

    When you notice that you made someone feel awkward or uncomfortable, try to put yourself in their shoes so you can understand how they may be feeling.

    For instance, if you said a joke or just anything that obviously offended someone, take a moment to view the situation from the other person’s perspective and then apologize.

  • Respect the other person’s feelings

    Mutual respect of people’s feelings is the backbone of any relationship, so have some respect for how people are feeling in response to something you may have unintentionally said or done.

    Showing respect for someone can come in the form of many different ways. Some situations may require an apology, and others may require you to make the first move in an interaction if other’s are weary of talking to you because of your social awkwardness.

3. Turn Your Emotional Intelligence Into Action

  • As I mentioned before, knowledge without action is useless, and it’s important to realize that this journey of improving your EQ is not an overnight process, because what you’re effectively doing is rewiring your brain to do something it’s not used to doing, which is a big task, but not an impossible task.

    Big changes like this happen with the small decisions you make everyday towards that goal.

    The good news is that even if you didn’t grow up being treated with the type of emotional intelligence and attunement that we all need, you know deep down how you wished people treated you in the past, because you know how it feels to be treated poorly, and you can look at your situation and see the negative effects of low EQ, and you’re smart enough to know that doing those same patterns over and over again is not going to get you the results you want.

    And that’s where the key point comes in: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Or treat others the way you wish you had been treated.

  • If you happen to be an introverted woman who struggles with emotional intelligence and social awkwardness in general, I’ve got some resources that you might find useful: You can grab my Free Audio Guide on 3 Simple Ways to Start a Conversation with Just About Anyone which you can listen to in under 6 minutes, and if you need a more tailored and extensive approach to becoming a socially confident introvert without having to act like an extrovert, you might enjoy enrolling in my self-paced online course, Communicate with Quiet Confidence, which I will also link to in the description.

4. BONUS. Play with Babies?

I’ve got a bonus proposition for you that I think could be useful for both men and women, and I want to share with you a very meaningful story about how this manifested itself in my life.

So because of my experience being on the autism spectrum, emotional intelligence and general social skills were not something that came easy to me for the first 23/24 years of my life.

But a really big catalyst to me improving my social and relational skills was in 2017 when I was 19 years old. That was the year my first ever nephew was born.

In hindsight, I had never really had an extended, close interaction with a baby before, so I didn’t really know what to expect, especially considering my previous struggles with communication and social interactions.

I think a lot of people probably find themselves in a similar situation because there are less and less babies being born nowadays, so it’s not uncommon for people to go an entire decade without holding a baby.

But anyway, for 18 years, I was used to being very disconnected with the emotional and social side of my brain, and I really hadn’t made any strides to change that because I guess I just wasn’t desperate enough for a change yet, until I got to hold my nephew for the first time.

If you’ve ever held a baby before — especially a newborn baby — you know that’s it’s really difficult to keep your walls up and stay emotionless, because you can really see them looking for any sign of love and safety and security in your face and in your physical touch and the softness of your voice.

It’s the purest form of love from a human that you’ll ever get.

And the great thing about babies is that unlike kids and even adults, they’ve got a lot of second chances to give, because it’s not like they can just run away or decide they don’t want to interact with you anymore.

They’re helpless, so they’re going to sit there until you can figure it because there is very few alternatives.

So when I was playing with and holding my nephew, I basically had a judgement-free, bully-free environment to connect with my emotions, which is something I didn’t have growing up.

Because if you say or do something that is awkward or off-putting in school or in adulthood, they can laugh at you, make fun of you, talk about you, shun you, bully you, and make you never want to try again.

But a baby is not going to do that. It’s going to smile at you when you smile, it’s going to coo at you when you talk to him or her, and yes it might cry if you’re not doing something right, but that’s the worst that can happen!

Like I said, there’s not going to be any bullying or shunning or anything like that if you can just really work on being in tune with your emotions.

So that’s why I think playing with babies can potentially give you a boost in your confidence as far as being emotionally attune. Of course interacting with adults is a little different than interacting with a baby, but at the core of it, babies and adults alike are just trying to create relationships in which they feel secure.

What do you think? If you’ve made it this far in the episode, leave a comment and tell me if you think about my bonus point that babies could be the cure for low emotional intelligence, or if you think that’s far-fetched.

If you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment on whichever platform you’re watching on, and share this podcast with a friend. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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