Let’s begin with what emotional intelligence is. Emotional Intelligence and/or emotional quotient are typically described and evaluated as a combination of the five segments: Self-Awareness, Empathy, Self-Regulation, Motivation, and Social Skills. Another way to put this is that emotional intelligence is based on your perspective, how you process, and your desires in life.
The road to happiness is paved with emotional intelligence. The first segment mentioned was Self-Awareness. You literally cannot know if you are happy or not unless you have Self-Awareness. So, this is an excellent place to start your path to higher emotional intelligence.
When teaching someone something new it is often easier to start with talking about the opposite of what you want to teach them. I am going to do that now. The reason why most people do not have self-awareness is that they take a lot of the finer points of living for granted. They literally do very enjoyable things without the ability to enjoy them because they are not self-aware. Accordingly, the first step and as stated in the title of this blog, an easy way to increase emotional intelligence is to begin becoming more self-aware by practicing the following breathing technique (there many other techniques which will work also).
Simply breathe in for the count of 3 (counting can be at any cadence – not necessarily seconds), hold your breath for the count of 3, and breathe out for the count of three. While doing this breathing technique, pay attention to how nice the air entering and leaving your body feels. You can heighten the enjoyment by reminding yourself that 99% of the time “I have nothing to worry about, because I get to choose what I worry about.” This is a sobering fact that helps our nervous system calm down, for many people immediately.
If you follow the step by step breathing and thought technique outlined above, you have already begun to increase your self-awareness and your emotional intelligence! Congratulations! Celebrate that! Fortunately, this is one of those things that the more you do it, the better you feel! So, Enjoy!