5 Ways Emotional Intelligence Can Be The Catalyst For Lasting Personal Growth.

As Mental Health America defines it, emotional intelligence refers to “...the ability to manage both your own emotions and understand the emotions of people around you.” There are multiple aspects of emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, empathy, social skills, motivation, and the ability to self-regulate your emotions. Combined, these make you a well-rounded person, capable of navigating the (sometimes) murky waters of life.

If you’re looking to make a change and experience lasting personal growth, start by harnessing emotional intelligence. Here are five ways that emotional intelligence can be the catalyst for lasting personal growth:

Helps You Identify Your Emotions

One of the most impactful results of emotional intelligence is the ability to identify your emotions when faced with or in certain situations. Here’s an example: Let’s say that you go out to dinner with your friends and they pressure you into having a drink, despite knowing it’s not something you typically enjoy.

While it started small, their teasing progressed to the point of insults. After dinner, you feel ashamed for not having stood up for yourself.

In a situation like this, reflecting on your emotions may lead to you realizing the need to set boundaries. Or, you may realize that you need to make a change when it comes to standing your ground and not being bothered by not giving in to someone else’s demands.

After all, you don’t deserve to feel bad simply because you didn’t do something someone else wanted! It’s just one example, but identifying how you feel after certain experiences can provide a blueprint for lasting change.

Fosters Better Communication

By proxy, once you understand your emotions, you can better communicate your needs, wants, and concerns with those around you. Using the example above, after identifying your feelings, you decide to communicate them with the friend who teased you. Instead of glossing over the crux of the problem, you could explain that the teasing makes you doubt yourself or your choices, and as such, you want support from them more than anything else.

Open communication is a necessary foundation of any healthy relationship. Sometimes, people may not realize the totality of their words or actions until it’s brought up to them. By identifying your emotions, you can communicate a line that won’t be crossed moving forward. This helps increase confidence and self-awareness, too, because you’re likely to identify similar patterns of behaviour moving forward, whether it’s with the same friend group or not.

Builds Resilience

When you’re setting out to make a change, you need to have resilience because regardless of how much you try not to, you will face roadblocks, self-doubt, and challenges. Resilience is what lets you pick yourself back up and come back from feeling defeated.

For example, let’s say you lose control of your emotions one day. Since emotional intelligence is supposed to help you regulate your emotions, you feel bad about letting them get the better of you and the consequences of that, such as hurting someone’s feelings or ruining what should have been an enjoyable day or event.

However, remember, as said earlier, emotional intelligence is supposed to help you regulate your emotions. In other words, it’s okay if you mess up once in a while.

When you realize that you made a misstep, learning from your actions and taking time to work through how it made you feel can lead to the strengthening of emotional intelligence. In short, you realized you did something wrong and you are actively choosing, not only to bounce back from it but not make the same choice moving forward. That’s the action of resilience and it lets you carry forward without harbouring too much self-blame that would, otherwise, lead to avoidance.

Promotes You To Take Action

With resilience comes the desire to take action, which is why emotional intelligence is often a huge catalyst for lasting personal growth.

When you understand how situations and actions make you feel, you also realize when it’s time to shake things up. If you are feeling restless about the state of your life, what can you be doing differently to welcome positive change? How do your actions make you feel? If they make you feel uncomfortable, what can you do differently? If you want to better your life, what are your goals to make it possible?

Emotional intelligence forces you to look at your life through a microscope. Anything you don’t like, you have the power to change.

Strengthens Relationships

While your personal growth journey will be your own, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t require a strong support system. As with anything, you will need people to turn to who can support you, inspire you, and provide honest feedback, even if that feedback is difficult to hear.

Since emotional intelligence makes it easier to understand and process your own emotions, it makes it easier for you to understand the emotions of others, as well. This makes you a more empathetic person, which is ultimately what strengthens relationships.

Empathy is what allows you to not only understand others, but provide them with support, guidance, compassion, and love – all things that will be returned to you upon practice. The more two people understand and relate to one another, the more genuine the relationship will become. Empathy is essentially trust-building, and it’s the foundation for all the strongest relationships.

If you want to create lasting change, surrounding yourself with people who genuinely want what’s best for you can be one of the best motivators.

At the end of the day, emotional intelligence lets you look inward. Once you do, you can set boundaries, create goals, build resilience, and strengthen relationships. All of these will benefit your life moving forward.