The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do to Build Emotional Intelligence
by Jennifer Guttman, PsyD Clinical Psychology.
The most important factor in attempting to cultivate emotional intelligence is the importance of listening and not talking. When people feel like they are having difficulty with a social skill, their insecurities bring on talking. So, when people are insecure about something, they tend to talk a lot. The most important thing when you're trying to learn a skill often is to just be quiet. Listening is a vital part of trying to learn about emotional intelligence.
When you're in a social situation, listening to what people are saying in order to understand their emotional experience helps develop a sense of compassion and empathy. This will allow you to better understand what it would be like to be in their shoes. A key part of emotional intelligence is being better able to understand life from their experience, as opposed to making assumptions that their experience is the same as your experience. None of our experiences are the same.
Developing emotional intelligence is developing more breadth of a word bank or a mood. A lot of people struggle with having enough words to describe moods. They have a limited word bank. If you're listening carefully enough, that might help develop a broader word bank to describe mood states. The broader the word bank you have to describe a mood, the more effective you will become in being able to ask targeted questions to people about how they feel. Listen, then move to mindful questions about how a person may be feeling.
It's important not to overwhelm people with questions, because people don't respond well to that. Instead, be mindful about the questions you ask by trying to relate to how they may be feeling. Try pulling the words you use in conversation from a bank of words that you've developed over time from listening.
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