Your emotional intelligence is more important than your IQ and this is why

Instead of trying to be the biggest brain in the room, try having the biggest heart for a change.

by: E.B. Johnson

When it comes to being a leader we often find that our emotional intelligence is more important than our intellectual intelligence. It’s easy to understand why once you come to realize that our emotional intelligence is directly related to both our ability to communicate, and our ability to be understood by those around us. It’s the key to better relationships, but it’s also the key to self-actualization.

The greater our emotional intelligence, the more power we have over our emotions and our reactions to the world around us. Embracing this emotional knowledge makes us better communicators, but it also cultivates an incredible level of self-awareness that transforms us from the inside out. The more aware we become of ourselves, the more aware we become of the world and in that is a great power.

Being better means raising your EQ.

For a long time, we’ve lived in a tough world that has brutalized people over and over again on every plane imaginable. Being alive was hard and business was even harder. In order to survive you had to be tough, and you had to develop a “dog-eat-dog” mentality. This edge doesn’t cut it anymore, though. Leadership today looks different, and it requires different things. It’s not just enough to be smart. You need to have emotional intelligence too, and that’s an all-together different tool to sharpen.

Emotional intelligence (emotional quotient, or EQ) is the ability to identify, manage or otherwise valuate your emotions in such as a way to make them beneficial. When you have a high emotional intelligence, you are able to use your thoughts to reshape and alleviate experiences like stress and anxiety; but you are also able to communicate more effectively and better achieve your life goals.

Our EQ is crucial, but so many of us have abandoned nurturing this skill-set in our pursuit of greater intellectual knowledge. While the days of power-smarts might have served our parents, it will no longer serve in today’s society world of social change and social justice. Today, your emotional intelligence is what makes the difference in your success or your failure. If you want to thrive as a leader — be it in business or in life — you need to work on lifting your EQ the right way.

Why EQ is more important than IQ.

If you’re seeking to become a leader in today’s world, then you have to foster your emotional intelligence before you seek to force your intellectual intelligence. No one cares how smart you are if you can’t relate to them, their emotions and their needs. Intelligence alone can’t feed your empathy, understanding and compassion.

Ability to connect

Perhaps the most important aspect of a high EQ is our ability to meaningfully socialize. When we have a greater understanding of our emotions, it also lends a greater understanding of the emotions of others. This ability to understand others and be understood yourself is powerful. It leads to better and more efficient communication skills and makes us more effective leaders and change makers in this rapidly changing world.

Ability to disconnect

While the ability to connect outwardly with others is important, so too is the ability to disconnect with our own obsessive internal monologue. This happens on a couple of different fronts. First, you have to focus on the ability to recognize your own thoughts, and the power they hold over you. Detaching from the useless ones, you then need to find the ability to break off from your own story long enough to see the story (and the pain) of those around you. Compassion is key in cultivating EQ, but it asks us to step outside of ourselves.

Gaining more control

Though it occurs in a more roundabout way, increasing our emotional intelligence helps us to gain more control over our environments. EQ lends itself to our self-actualization, which then allows us to stand up for ourselves when it comes to life and relationships. When you know who you are and you can control your thoughts and your reactions, it becomes easier to take action and create a life that is authentically yours from the ground up.

Recognizing self

The greater your emotional intelligence, the deeper your knowledge of self becomes. When you know who you are, you don’t just know who you are. You also know the depth of your own strengths and weaknesses — as well as how they can benefit you and the journey of self-transformation. Knowing yourself is a powerful thing and (once done) is something that cannot be taken away from you. It’s an undeniable victory and one that has the power to take us to the pinnacle of happiness.

Conquering achievement

If your life is centered around the idea of high-achievement, then emotional intelligence is the only way you can hope to get there. Our EQ unlocks our high-achievement potential by unlocking the full realization and actualization of self. It’s changing the way we see ourselves, but it’s also changing the way we see the world and how we choose to react with it. When you increase your EQ, you increase your ability to connect and your ability to see reality for what you want it to be.

Leading with change

Emotional intelligence — at its core — requires us to change and helps us to transform slowly and from the inside out. That’s why it becomes such a powerful tool when we’re looking to become leaders who can truly create change in the world. If you want to truly change the world, you have to connect with people, and that requires empathy, but it also requires understanding. When we lift up our emotional intelligence, we make it possible to inspire and lead with change.

Unstoppable resilience

Believe it or not, emotional intelligence also makes you more resilient in this life. The process of claiming your EQ requires you to become self-aware, but it also requires that you learn how to reshape and control your thoughts, emotions and reactions. The more skilled you become at controlling these 3 aspects, the less you are bothered by the hardships and adversity of life — as you are better able to detach and reconnect where your energy is better utilized.

Warning signs of low emotional intelligence.

Think your emotional intelligence could benefit from a boost? Look for these signs of low emotional intelligence in order to identify the areas of awareness you could take action in.

Continual outbursts

Is your life filled with emotional or angry outbursts? Do you constantly find yourself angry, throwing things, or collapsing into tears? This inability to regulate your emotions (and therefore your thoughts and behaviors) is a common sign that your EQ could use some work. The more self-aware you become, the more you will be able to control these outbursts and build more effective relationships.

Playing a blame game

Do you look for someone to blame when things go wrong? Or when you make a mistake? Playing the blame game shows that you haven’t yet taken the time to get really familiar with who you are or what you want. When you’re confident in yourself, you have no problem stepping up to the plate and taking accountability for the things you got wrong. That’s because you know how to control things like embarrassment or shame, and you know they hold little real power over your life.

Regular arguments

Consider the relationships in your life. If you’re always butting heads with the people that you love, or find that you’re constantly in confrontation with your coworkers — it’s a sign that there’s a major disconnect in the way you listen and communicate your needs. By getting focused on raising your emotional awareness, you can avoid these conflicts and make your life an easier and more peaceful experience.

Emotional disregard (for others)

A total lack of empathy is a major red flag, and it’s also a sign of critically low emotional intelligence. Without empathy, it’s impossible to truly understand where another person is coming from. In order for us to connect on a meaningful level (and to express ourselves effectively) we must look for the emotions of others and seek to both respect and understand them.

Eroded coping skills

How do you cope when things get tough in your life? Do you lash out? Collapse into a catatonic state of depression? Do your emotions rule the roost when hardship and adversity come knocking? When your coping skills have eroded, this is often a sign that you’re also dealing with a lowered emotional intelligence or awareness. The more control you gain over your thoughts and emotional reactions, the better you become able to withstand the adversity of life.

Constant miscommunication

Miscommunication is one of the most common signs of a low EQ. This occurs when we have a seeming inability to express ourselves, or we find that we struggle to be understood by those around us. Both things can be remedied by becoming more familiar with both how we operate, and how those around us operate as well. Constant miscommunication is frustrating, but correctable, with a little introspection and a commitment to greater understanding.

How to cultivate greater emotional intelligence.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to increase your EQ. You can take action today to improve the way you connect with others, and the way you connect with self. These tools to hand, you’ll be better equipped to self-actualize and transform the way you both build your life and lead those who look up to you.

1. Focus on self-awareness

Self-awareness is the first step in cultivating an emotional intelligence that can serve us in business and in life. To build self-awareness is to build a presence in body and a presence in your thoughts. It requires us to recognize both our thoughts and our emotions as they take place, while also identifying the reactions they elicit and the feedback we find ourselves dealing with. It’s all about controlling your thoughts and recognizing them for what they are (and the value they bring or don’t bring to your life).

You can begin this process gradually and with one focused day at a time. Get yourself a plain journal and then set out to identify all your thoughts in a day. Don’t limit them. Don’t banish them. Don’t avoid them. Just let your thoughts come to you and make a note of the big ones that make you feel emotional (either good or bad).

The more you engage in this practice (and go back to review your progress) the more you will come to see your thoughts from a detached place of viewing. As familiar situations arise, you will even begin to predict your thoughts — thereby making it easier to identify any limiting thoughts or patterns that are making your life more challenging. As your perspective becomes more omnipotent, you’ll begin to trace out ways you can better control not only your thoughts, but your circumstances too.

2. Learn to moderate moods

Moderating your emotions and your moods is another important step on your journey to increasing your emotional intelligence. Our moods and our emotions are where our reactions stem from, which is the behavior we put out in the word in order to receive feedback from others. The better you become at moderating these moods and reactions, the easier you become to relate to and open up to — an invaluable quality to have in life and in business.

Once you are able to identify your thoughts, watch how they shape your emotions and the moods that you find yourself in throughout a day. An emotion is a short-term feeling, which is usually spawned by a specific event (being given an unexpected gift, or being punched in the face) while a mood is a more general state of being that lasts for a longer period of time.

Watch how your thoughts throughout the day shape both your mood and your emotions. Experiment as well with reshaping those thoughts, then watch how it correlates too with your emotions. The better you become at identifying these patterns, the more efficiently you will be able to moderate your moods and thereby control them before they have the opportunity to control you.

3. Control the reaction

After building up a base of self-awareness and identifying your moods, you can begin to control your reactions in a powerful way. This isn’t to say you manipulate your emotions, or even that you avoid or suppress them. It means learning how to see your reactions for what they are and reshaping them to harness them for good in your life and your relationships.

When you learn how to control your reactions, you gain a removed control over the feedback you get from your environment. Unchecked or maladaptive emotional reactions bring back negative reactions from the people around us. When we control our reactions, we limit these instances of negative feedback which can then increase our positive outlook on the world.

It’s all a part of increasing our emotional intelligence. We aren’t just seeking to know our emotions. We’re seeking to understand them in ways that allow us to use them for greater benefit in our lives and our work. Once we are able to see our thoughts and our feelings for what they are, we have to take action to limit the negative effects and bolster the positive effects. Control the reaction and you’ll control — to an extent — the way people see and relate to you.

4. Find the power to listen

It might sound like emotional intelligence is all about the inward journey, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re truly seeking to increase your EQ, you have to also extend yourself to others — learning how to listen as much as you speak. It is through this listening that we truly connect and also allow others to connect with us. Think it’s all about telling your story to them? Think again.

To increase your emotional intelligence, you must find the power to listen more often than you speak. Through listening, you can cultivate greater empathy and make people more comfortable and trusting of who you are.

At the end of the day, all any of us want to do is to be seen and heard. We get enough blank stares and apathetic head nods from everyone else; we don’t need them from our leaders. Get excited about learning and get excited about seeing the world from a different perspective other than your own. Find the power to listen to others before you demand they listen to you, and you’ll unlock the power of greater emotional intelligence.

5. Create positive communication

Communication is a crucial part of the puzzle when it comes to raising our emotional intelligence. EQ, after all, is all about understanding the human condition and why we do the things that we do. It’s compassion and understanding at its most artful, and it’s one of the most powerful forces for transformation in our lives. Learning to communicate honestly and positively opens up avenues of connection we never imagined.

Create more positive communication channels that allow those around you to both understand you and open up to you. Be approachable and sociable, but use your empathy as well. Listening isn’t enough. You need to try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand exactly where they’re coming from.

Be supportive in the feedback you give and always avoid any unnecessary negativity. Make it clear that you work hard to come from a place of non-judgement and respect at all times. Don’t wall yourself up or shut down when the going gets touch. Create more positive channels of communication and you will notice a dramatic shift in your life and the way people both see you and hear you. You too will notice a dramatic different in the way you understand them too.

Putting it all together…

In business and in life we can often lose ourselves in the race for intellectual knowledge. The more we know, the more effective we are to lead. But what of our emotional intelligence? Well, it is this intelligence which allows us to cultivate self-awareness and connection with others. For this reason, our EQ is more important than our IQ, but we have to consciously cultivate it each and every day.

Focus on building self-awareness first and foremost, and use this awareness to get present in both your body and your thoughts. Detach from that thinking which no longer serves you, or those thoughts which bring no value to your life. Next, move on to managing your emotions. The better we become at recognizing and managing our emotions, the better we become at understanding those same emotions in other people. Once you can control your thoughts and emotions, you’ll have the power to control your reactions. Move beyond this to find the power to listen to others, while opening up more positive and efficient channels of communication for those you love. The harder we work to raise our emotional intelligence, the more effective we become as leaders, workers, and even as friends. Pull yourself out of the dark and wake up to your and authentic potential.