Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence

Learn about the relatively recent emergence of emotional intelligence as a unique field of inquiry and the three leading theories used to describe and understand EQ. With your emotion journal, you'll start building your EQ Skills Tracker, a running library of what you learn about your own emotions and a to-do list for future learning.

Measuring your IQ is straightforward, and the standardization of scores on the overall test and subtests are well established. But quantifying your EQ is a much newer and more complex endeavor. How can you measure your EQ and what will those results really tell you? Learn about the four most highly regarded EQ assessment tools and how they each rate with respect to validity and reliability.

Although you've experienced emotions every day of your life, learning to manage them requires an understanding of how emotions are generated. Learn about the steps in this process and resulting feedback cycles as described in the Modal Model of Emotions. Does this model explain your "good" and "bad" emotions? You'll be surprised.

Do your emotions affect your physical body or do changes in your physical body cause your emotions? Learn which parts of your central and peripheral nervous systems contribute to the experiences we recognize as emotions. But if we really want to improve our EQ, we must also look at our cognition.

You probably already realize that your EQ affects your most intimate relationships - your ability to choose appropriate partners and develop long-term satisfying and productive relationships. But the impact of your EQ doesn't stop there. Learn how your emotions affect every aspect of your life, including your professional and social relationships, cognition, decision-making, and physical health.

When speaking to someone in person, you pick up clues as to that individual's emotional state from the words used, the tone of voice, posture, and facial expressions. But what about self-perception? How good are you at perceiving and identifying your own emotions? Learn the EQ skills that can help you improve your understanding of yourself.

What are the primary emotions and their associated thoughts and behaviors - emotions found across all cultures, languages, and income and educational levels? Learn how to perceive and correctly identify emotions and their triggers, and to explore the complex relationships between emotions we classify as positive and negative.

All of us have felt at times that our emotions were in charge and we were just helplessly along for the ride. Maybe we've hyper-reacted from a place of anger and fear. Or we've made poor decisions while riding a wave of euphoria. It doesn't have to be that way. Learn about antecedent-focused and response-focused emotion regulation strategies and how to employ them for your own benefit.

As the famous joke goes, no one has ever become calm because another person ordered them to "Calm down!" But are there real ways we can influence another person's emotions and consequent behaviors? Although we can never access anyone else's cognition, the EQ skills we use in our communication and interaction with others can be powerfully influential.

Research has shown that while genetic makeup does play a role in our EQ, it also is significantly impacted by how we were parented and socialized as a young child. But even if childhood was not ideal and our parents modeled very poor EQ skills, see how it is always possible to improve EQ now through purposeful training.

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is now taught in more than 30,000 schools across the U.S. because research has revealed a close relationship between emotions and learning. However, "a close relationship" is not the same as cause and effect. Explore several of the most popular SEL programs and their goals and strengths - and learn why outcomes are so difficult to measure.

We've all been in certain social situations we wish we could just forget: that awkward first date, the floundering job interview, the performance review that took us completely by surprise. Learn how to use your EQ to improve your social intelligence and strengthen social relationships in every aspect of your life.

The quality of your baby-caregiver relationship does affect your EQ skills and later relationships. But regardless of previous attachment styles, EQ training can teach you how to successfully express and perceive emotions - two necessary skills for successful adult intimate relationships. Learn how to understand your "habits of heart" and make appropriate adjustments to meet your goals.

We are all aware that conflict exists between individuals or distinct social groups that see each other as "different." Conflict is part of life, and groups of people are always going to disagree on some issues. But emotional and social intelligence skills can help us find common ground, address, and even solve many of our personal and community issues.

EQ skills can have a positive impact in any group of people working together toward a common goal. In addition to helping personal interaction among workplace teams, EQ skills have been shown to facilitate creativity, excitement, and enthusiasm in employees and leadership alike.

Since 1995, work stress in the U.S. has increased 300 percent, with the most significant issues being depersonalization and disconnection. In many cases the use of EQ skills such as somatic quieting and improved concentration and focus can help. But could "love" be the newest way to lessen workplace stress?

While companies spent $31 billion on leadership-training programs in just one recent year, more than 60 percent of respondents to the Global Human Capital Survey reported that such programs yielded only "some" value at best. Learn how EQ skills training is helping many business leaders better accomplish their long-term goals.

Being aware of EQ skills in all aspects of workplace culture can lead to greater workforce engagement with employees who feel seen, heard, and valued. But actively managing workforce culture isn't just a "feel good" for employees. Explore why companies that proactively manage their culture experience average 10-year revenue growth 516 percent higher than those who do not.

Learn about the nervous and hormonal systems that cause our physiological responses to stress, and how they are related to chronic disease. Research shows that improving our EQ skills can help mediate these reactions in the body, possibly leading to both a safer stress response and better health overall.

Heightened emotional experience - a common characteristic of anxiety and depression - could potentially be helped by EQ skills. Learn how Dialectical Behavior Therapy and the relatively new Emotion Regulation Therapy address certain common elements and skill deficiencies in a variety of "distress disorders," regardless of specific diagnosis.

If you've ever tried to change a significant behavior - quit smoking, lose weight, be more patient with your co-workers - you know how very difficult it can be. But you'll be ahead of the game if you consider the role your emotions play in your behavioral choices and motivation. Learn how to improve your self-efficacy and develop a plan of "SMART" goals.

Medical professionals have long known that a patient's emotions play a key role in accepting and managing a diagnosis of chronic disease. But recent research reveals additional relationships between EQ and health-oriented behaviors. Explore the specific ways in which EQ can affect the management of two widespread chronic health problems: alcohol-use disorders and cardiovascular disease.

Have you ever left a medical appointment feeling angry, frustrated, or even insulted? Whether it was the content of the meeting or the personalities involved that caused your frustration, you can learn how to improve your healthcare interactions by better understanding and monitoring your emotions - and those of your healthcare provider.

Does technology help or hurt our EQ? On the one hand, we all know the difficulty of accurately perceiving emotions when communicating by email, text, or other electronic platforms. But surprising advances in facial recognition, physiological response monitoring, and other software offer exciting and helpful futuristic options in the quest to improve our EQ.