You can’t change your IQ, but emotional intelligence? That’s a skill you can build. Get started today with strategies that fit how your personality actually works.
What’s Coming Up
- The 4 Components of Emotional Intelligence
- How to Increase Emotional Intelligence: 10 Strategies
- Developing Self-Awareness
- Exercising Self-Management
- Strengthening Social Awareness
- Improving Relationships
- Your Emotional Intelligence Journey Starts Now
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Further Reading
The 4 Components of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (sometimes referred to as EI or EQ) can be thought of as a table with four legs. Each leg supports the whole, and you need all of them for the structure to work.
According to psychologist Daniel Goleman, the four “legs” of emotional intelligence are:
- Self-Awareness: Recognizing your emotional patterns and triggers
- Self-Management: Managing your responses intentionally
- Social Awareness: Reading others’ emotional states
- Relationship Management: Using awareness to create healthy connections
Fortunately, these different components of emotional intelligence are not fixed capabilities, but rather skills that can be strengthened. In this article, we’ll break down each component and give you specific strategies to do just that.
These strategies work for most people, but your personality adds another layer. By considering your unique personality traits, you can better anticipate how each approach might feel for you and apply it in ways that align with your nature.
Ready to uncover the truth about who you really are? Take our free personality test and gain deep insights into your strengths, challenges, and more in just 10 minutes.
How to Increase Emotional Intelligence: 10 Strategies
Now that you know what emotional intelligence looks like, let’s build it.
The strategies that follow aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re practical tools that target each component of emotional intelligence – whether you need to learn how to recognize your emotional patterns, get better at managing your reactions, improve your sensitivity to what others are feeling, or strengthen your connections.
Developing Self-Awareness
Self-awareness – recognizing your emotional patterns, triggers, and states – is where all emotional intelligence begins. Without it, your emotions become invisible drivers that steer your choices and reactions without your conscious input.
When you’re emotionally aware, you catch your reactions before they become regrets. You understand why certain situations consistently stress you out or energize you. This awareness transforms emotions from mysterious forces into valuable data about your needs, boundaries, and values.
Building this awareness takes practice, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. The two strategies below give you concrete starting points.
Strategy #1: Create an Emotion-Body Map
This exercise helps you create a personal “body map” of where different emotions show up physically.
How to Do It:
For one week, notice where emotions live in your body. For example, you might become aware that:
- Anger tightens your jaw or shoulders
- Anxiety constricts your chest
- Joy creates lightness
- Disappointment settles in your stomach
Write these down or draw a simple body sketch with notes.
Why It Works:
Physical sensations arrive before conscious awareness, creating an early-warning system. When your shoulders tense during a meeting, you’ll recognize anger building and can address it before it escalates.
Introverted or Observant personalities may find this exercise especially valuable. Introverted types can channel their natural introspection into productive self-awareness, while Observant individuals will appreciate how tracking physical sensations grounds them in the here-and-now.
Strategy #2: Treat Yourself Like Your Own Best Friend
This exercise will hopefully become an ongoing practice – it involves giving yourself the same compassion you’d offer a friend.
How to Do It:
When noticing your emotions, catch any judgment that appears: “I shouldn’t feel jealous/anxious/angry.”
Then ask, “If my closest friend felt this way, what would I tell them?”
Apply that same understanding to yourself.
Why It Works:
This strategy creates self-awareness around the negative self-talk that often intensifies emotions and creates obstacles for peaceful resolution.
When you catch yourself thinking “I’m being ridiculous,” you can shift to “This makes sense given what happened.”
Feeling and Turbulent personalities especially need this practice. Feeling types often extend more compassion to others than themselves, while Turbulent types tend to have an inner critic that amplifies reactivity.
Exercising Self-Management
Self-awareness is powerful, but it’s only half the equation. Once you recognize what you’re feeling, the next skill is choosing how to respond. That’s where self-management comes in.
Self-management means guiding your emotional responses intentionally rather than letting them control you. We’re not talking about suppressing your emotions – think of it as creating space between what you feel and how you act on it.
Without emotional regulation, you’ll always be reactive rather than responsive. You might say things you regret, make impulsive decisions, or shut down when you need to stay engaged. Developing self-management skills lets you honor your emotions while acting in ways aligned with your values and goals.
The three strategies below give you different ways to create that space.
Strategy #3: Practice The STOP Framework
This is a memorable four-step intervention for taking control during emotional moments.
How to Do It:
When emotion surges, work through these steps:
- Stop what you’re doing
- Take three breaths (focus on slow exhales, which regulate your nervous system)
- Observe what you’re feeling without judgment (“I’m noticing frustration”)
- Proceed with intention
Why It Works:
Pausing for just a few seconds allows your prefrontal cortex to come back online before you fire off that angry email or snap at your child.
This isn’t an instant fix. If you catch yourself more often than you did last week, you’re making progress.
Judging types might set unrealistic expectations for mastering this immediately. Prospecting types may resist the structure – if that’s you, think of STOP as more of a flexible guideline than a rigid process.
Strategy #4: Check in with Your Values
This values-based approach to self-management filters your emotional response through your core values, encouraging you to act in ways that reflect your best self.
How to Do It:
Before responding to an emotional situation, ask: “What do I value most here – connection? Honesty? Respect?”
Then consider if your planned response honors that value.
Why It Works:
Feeling personalities may worry that this strategy overlooks their emotions. In truth, it helps you pause and consider whether your reactions reflect your deeper values. Intuitive types often find this exercise especially useful, since they tend to think in terms of meaning and long-term purpose rather than immediate conflict.
Strategy #5: Redirect Your Energy
Redirecting your energy involves physical movement when strong emotions hit.
How to Do It:
When anger, anxiety, or excitement surges, move your body consciously for 30–60 seconds. Stand up. Walk to a window. Do wall push-ups. Squeeze your hands.
The key word is ‘conscious.’ There’s a difference between anxiously bouncing your leg and deliberately stretching at your desk. One happens to you. The other is something you choose.
Why It Works:
Physical movement interrupts your emotional momentum and gives your thinking brain time to catch up. Unlike simply pausing, active movement channels the energy your body has already mobilized, creating space to choose your next move.
Extraverted personalities often find immediate relief in physical action, while Introverted types may need to pair movement with internal reflection.
Strengthening Social Awareness
While self-awareness and self-management focus inward, emotional intelligence also requires turning your attention outward.
Social awareness is your ability to tune into what others are feeling, even when they don’t directly tell you. It’s noticing when your partner seems withdrawn despite saying they’re fine, or sensing tension in a team meeting before it becomes a conflict.
Feeling types naturally tend to have a strong sense of social awareness. Thinking types, however, may need to more intentionally develop their skills to manage complex social dynamics with ease.
Without perceiving others’ emotions, you can’t respond effectively. Think of social awareness as the bridge between your internal emotional intelligence and meaningful connection with others.
The two strategies below work together to sharpen this skill.
Strategy #6: Practice Silent Observation
Choose one interaction per day to focus entirely on observing the other person.
How to Do It:
In a conversation, release your agenda to steer it. Notice when the other person’s energy shifts. Pay attention to what topics make them light up or shut down. Focus on their body language.
Why It Works:
When people feel truly heard, they open up. With no pressure to respond perfectly, you can simply observe and recognize patterns.
Thinking personality types, especially those with the Observant trait, tend to focus on literal words and often miss subtext. This practice helps them notice what’s beneath the surface.
Strategy #7: Ask Questions
Building upon silent observation, try limiting your interaction to questions. Instead of assuming you understand, invite deeper sharing.
How to Do It:
When you sense someone’s emotional state, ask rather than jump to conclusions. For example, asking “How are you feeling about this?” or “What’s coming up for you?” can invite deeper connections.
Watch your wording. “You seem stressed” can feel invasive. “You’ve been quiet today – everything okay?” creates space.
Then, listen without jumping to advice.
Why It Works:
Asking questions validates what you’re sensing and gives immediate feedback about your developing social awareness. It also gives the other person agency within the conversation.
Extraverted personalities often find questions easy but may quickly jump to advice-giving. Assertive types may not always sense when someone needs a check-in. These personality types may need to practice making space for others to share.
Improving Relationships
Perceiving others’ emotions is valuable, but emotional intelligence reaches its full potential when you use that awareness to strengthen relationships. That’s where relationship management comes in.
Relationship management brings together everything you’ve developed – self-awareness, self-leadership, and social awareness – and directs it toward building stronger, more authentic connections.
How you manage your own reactions in relationship to other people and their emotions determines the quality and depth of your connections.
The three strategies that follow give you practical ways to navigate the moments that matter most in relationships.
Strategy #8: “Name It to Tame It” in Conversation
Explicitly naming the emotion present in a tense moment can move a conversation along and prevent tension from intensifying.
How to Do It:
When conversations feel strained, pause and name what you’re noticing. You might say “I’m sensing some tension right now” or “This feels like it’s becoming heated.” This creates space for everyone to pause.
Why It Works:
Naming emotions defuses them and creates shared awareness. It gives everyone a chance to reset and shift from conflict to collaboration.
Intuitive personalities appreciate how this surfaces the energetic undercurrent they probably sensed. Prospecting types often find this strategy freeing – it creates flexibility in tense moments.
Strategy #9: Create a Repair Ritual
Create a predictable phrase or gesture that signals you want to reset after emotional reactivity.
In conflict management, repair doesn’t always require apologizing for your feelings. It does require acknowledging that you didn’t handle them as well as you would have liked.
How to Do It:
Develop a phrase that feels authentic, like “Can we restart?” or “I want to try that again” or “Give me a moment – I’m not handling this well.”
Use it when you’ve been reactive. Then share what’s going on: “I’m stressed about the deadline, but that wasn’t fair to you.”
Why It Works:
Repair removes the awkwardness of apologizing while allowing the conversation to move forward. It also builds respect, communicates transparency, and creates vulnerability that strengthens relationships over time.
Judging personalities might resist repair because it feels like admitting imperfection. Assertive types may not see the need. They often move past moments quickly and assume others do too. Just remember – repair strengthens relationships.
Strategy #10: Use the Boundary Statement Formula
Communicating boundaries can be hard. Using a set formula makes this necessary element of respectful communication easier.
How to Do It:
Use this formula: “I care about (fill in the blank), and I need (state your boundary).”
The “and” is critical. It maintains connection while setting limits. Using “but” would negate the first part.
This might sound like “I care about helping you, and I need to step back from this situation” or “I want to support your project, and I need to protect my evening time.”
Why It Works:
For Feeling types, communicating a boundary often feels more like conflict than emotional intelligence. But boundaries honor both your needs and the relationship. This formula prevents the false choice between those two things while helping you avoid resentment from over-giving or guilt from setting limits.
Thinking personalities may state boundaries with little thought for emotional impact. This formula helps them express limits with social awareness.
Your Emotional Intelligence Journey Starts Now
These strategies, which address all four components of emotional intelligence, give you an immediately applicable and practical foundation for growth.
You don’t have to master them all immediately. Every emotionally intelligent person you admire built their skills one awkward pause, one conscious breath, and one difficult conversation at a time.
Start with one strategy that resonates with you. Self-awareness practices might feel most accessible for some. Regulation strategies might be more urgent for others.
Whatever strategy you choose as your first step, you’ll be supporting your growth in all four areas.
With every moment of self-awareness, every pause before reacting, and every effort to truly understand others, you’re not just managing emotions – you’re shaping a more grounded, connected, and emotionally intelligent version of yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I train myself to be more emotionally intelligent?
Train yourself to be more emotionally intelligent by strengthening the four core components of EQ: self-awareness, self-leadership, social awareness, and relationship management. Once you can identify what you’re feeling, work on managing your responses. Build social awareness and be intentional with how you interact in relationships. The key is consistent practice – even small daily efforts compound over time.
How can you increase emotional intelligence in the workplace?
Emotional intelligence in the workplace can be enhanced by strengthening your self-awareness and self-leadership strategies. Practice the STOP framework before responding to tense situations, and check in with your values when making decisions.
What are the signs of lacking emotional intelligence?
Common signs of low emotional intelligence include difficulty managing strong emotions, frequently misreading social cues, struggling to maintain relationships due to conflicts, and either avoiding difficult conversations or handling them poorly. People lacking emotional intelligence often blame others for problems, dismiss others’ feelings, or seem unaware of how their behavior impacts those around them.
What are the characteristics of emotionally intelligent leaders?
Emotionally intelligent leaders demonstrate self-awareness about their strengths and weaknesses, regulate their emotions under pressure, and show genuine empathy for their team members. They communicate clearly and respectfully, handle conflicts constructively, and create psychologically safe environments where people feel valued and heard.