5 Books on Emotional Intelligence That’ll Make You Better With People in No Time
Start with #2 if you are on the fence.
Author Dushka Zapata shared a personal story on Quora —
I came home last night after an intensely booked week of business travel and described to Boyfriend something about work that was irritating me. “I understand how that can be hard” he said. “But really you are just tired. I suggest looking at that again after a night of sleeping in your own bed.”
The next morning I felt like my gripe had vanished.
Emotional Intelligence is a person’s ability to identify feelings and that layer of feelings beneath feelings: their own and those of others.
Emotions are chemical reactions in the brain. Those can easily change the way you think and behave. And if you are going through a difficult time, managing emotions becomes even more complicated.
Your emotions end up controlling you. And you end up hurting people close to you. Ultimately, you are the one who gets hurt. You start overthinking and living inside your head.
When you get in your head, you’re dead.
— Tony Robbins
When I was younger, I had occasions when I let my anger run me. I’d hurt friends with my words and regret that. Through books, courses, and guidance, I started a journey to become a better person.
And here are five books that can help you become more emotionally intelligent.
1. Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ by Dr. Daniel Goleman
This book can help you understand your feelings and well-being.
It shows how you need to improve your emotional intelligence using four key elements.
- Self Awareness: Understand your feelings
- Self Management: Manage your feelings
- Social Awareness: Learn to read other people’s feelings
- Social Skills: Handle other people’s feelings.
Dr. Goleman became familiar with the term emotional intelligence after studying the earlier work of Peter Salovey and John Mayer. It’s a great starting point and a good book for your collection.
2. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
This is my favorite book on emotional intelligence.
It showed me the value of showing interest in others, smiling, listening, and being kind.
The world doesn’t revolve around a single person. When you start appreciating the social aspects of life, life becomes more beautiful.
3. The Language Of Emotional Intelligence: The Five Essential Tools For Building Powerful And Effective Relationships by Dr. Jeanne Segal & Dr. Jaelline Jaffe
This book comes with 5 actionable steps that you can use to improve your emotional intelligence. They are —
- Elastic: Stress-busting to build emotionally intelligent muscles
- Glue: Why emotional communication attracts & preserves relationships
- Pulley: Nonverbal communication
- Ladder: How playfulness invigorates communication
- Velvet Hammer: How conflict resolution builds trust in relationships
From this book, you can check if you are teachable or trainable? Rigid or flexible? And so much more. All of these steps will help you understand yourself better and take action accordingly.
4. Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart Of Parenting by Dr. John M. Gottman and Joan Declaire
Throughout your life, you go through many emotionally complex situations that leave you confused.
What should you do? How to react to a situation like that?
Our schooling system doesn’t teach us that as schools focus on developing intelligence. But without emotional intelligence, it’s hard to have a fulfilling life.
This book shows how parents can play a strong role in building the emotional intelligence of a child. They can —
- Be aware of a child’s emotions
- Recognize expression as an opportunity to teach and be close
- Listen with empathy and validate a child’s feelings
- Identify emotions in words a child would understand
- Help a child react in appropriate ways to solve a problem
5. At The Heart Of Leadership: How to Get Results With Emotional Intelligence by Joshua Freedman
Emotional intelligence is one of the most important skills in the workplace.
Often, your problems at work will affect your personal life. Or your hard work at work will go unnoticed. Someday, you’d find it difficult to manage stakeholders. This book can help you with all of that and more.
Joshua Freedman is one of the few people in the world with proven experience in raising organizational performance. He outlines actionable steps that you can use to get better every day.
Final Thoughts — Emotional Intelligence Books You Must Read
Without emotional intelligence, you struggle at managing complex problems. But with that, many of your problems automatically go away.
A cousin of mine once complimented me out of the blue. He made a huge mistake and others were reacting pretty badly to it. After he hesitantly shared that with me, I didn’t judge him and kept listening to him. He then said,
“You’ve become a changed man. It’s so easy to talk to you.”
His problem eventually got solved. The guy needed a listener and I listened.
I didn’t react because it seemed like an honest & one-off mistake that can be ignored. Thanks to his compliment, I realized I was on the right track to becoming more emotionally intelligent.
You can too if you start with these books.
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