The Learnable Skills of Emotional Intelligence

1. Identify what you’re feeling rather than blindly letting your emotions run roughshod and do damage.
2. Understanding why you feel something allows you to be in control rather than being controlled by your emotions. Understanding also means you can consciously resolve the reasons causing the strong emotion.
3. Tolerate uncertainty and learn to be calm through the unexpected, because unpredictability is more common than stability.
4. Take time to think about decisions and/or actions, rather than behaving rashly out of a sense of personal expectation or entitlement.
5. Have a realistically optimistic way of explaining events to yourself, rather than assuming the worst in difficult situations.
6. Look at problems from all angles rather than just a black and white desperation of control. There is always a third option.
7. Consider all the factors that may be at work in any given situation, and don’t base decisions off of assumptions about what you demand is the right and only way.
8. Recognize and understand the emotions of others. Sometimes they are speaking more from pain than from truth.
9. Build a social support through well-maintained relationships. Enjoy those relationships realistically, using grace rather than perfection as the standard for friendship.
10. Know your own strengths and use those strengths to cope with adversity and thrive in life through taking personal responsibility for change.

–Dr Karen Reivich and Shayne Mason Vincent, MSW