Emotional intelligence, also known as EI is a person’s ability to recognize and understand emotions and the effect that these emotions have on thinking and behavior. Having high emotional intelligence can help you better understand yourself and understand others. It also increases your chances for achieving your goals, reaching out to others and finding more success in your life.

Strong emotional intelligence is a powerful tool and something that can take you far both in your personal and your professional lives. Some people are born with or naturally develop more emotional intelligence than others. However, the good news is there are ways that you can actually increase your emotional intelligence and things that you can do to make yourself more emotionally sound and aware of those around you.

Here are some of the key ways to increase your emotional intelligence through applicable steps.

• Reflect on Your Emotions

Before you can start being more emotionally in tune with others, you need to be more emotionally in tune with yourself. There are a number of ways that you can do this, but the first step is to start reflecting on yourself and your own emotions.

You need to understand how you emotionally react to others and to situations around you, so that you can start becoming more mindful of your emotions and start building more control. Think about different situations in your life that typically elicit some sort of emotional response. Perhaps this is being blamed for something you didn’t do, getting in trouble with your boss or just getting cut off by another driver.

Write down how you react to emotionally-charged situations such as this and then you can start maintaining more control over how your emotions come out in your life.

• Figure Out How Others See You

One of the key components of emotional intelligence is understanding not only who we are to ourselves but who we are to other people. It is really difficult to understand or comprehend what others think of you. What is the best way to find out?

Just ask those around you for there perceptions on you.

It can be hard to hear but it is important that you ask people to be honest about how they see you and how they see your emotional intelligence. One of the best ways to do this is to ask them to think back to an emotional situation between the two of you. Ask them how you dealt with them at the time and whether or not they felt you were understanding or sensitive to their feelings or emotions.

This is one of the best ways to start seeing yourself like others see you and to start understanding what type of image you are putting out in the world.

• Start Being More Observant of Your Emotions

Looking at the past is a great way to see where you have been in terms of your emotional intelligence. However, you also need to spend some time focusing on the present as well. Start being more observant of your emotions and how they are impacting your life. Reflect on what others have told you and what you have gathered about yourself from your past and start seeing how you react to the world around you.

A great way to really keep tabs on your current emotional state is to write down every time you have an emotional response to something. What happened? What caused your emotional response? What type of emotion did you emit? Was it an appropriate emotion or not? What do you think you did right? What could you have done better?

Write it all down and see how you start to change your emotional reactions once you are more aware of your surroundings.

So, what do you do after you’ve mastered being more emotionally observant in your everyday life? That will be discussed in Part 2.