Emotional Intelligence For The Next Decade: 9 Areas for Growth You Will Need to Address

We live in a time where uncertainty, toxicity and mental illness are everybody's normal environment. From political upheavals to rising suicide rates to global environmental damage it does not take a genius to work out that the 20’s will be rife with threats and cultural chaos.

If we are to navigate the cultural fallout, maintain and grow the global economy and stay sane we must address the individual issues of emotional fluency, emotional regulation and emotional intelligence in each of our lives.

In this article I have highlighted 9 areas of emotional intelligence I believe to be part of the whole picture. As you read through the 9 areas of growth ask yourself: Am I strong in this area?

My nine areas of competence for emotional intelligence: 

Body Regulation

Body regulation is a building block of emotional intelligence.

How do you know how you are feeling? Well, feedback from our bodies is a key determiner for our emotional intelligence. Accurate interpretation of sensory feedback from our body is harder than it sounds. Start with eating when you are hungry, going to sleep before you are tired (if you actually feel tired then your body needed to be asleep 30 minutes ago). Then progress to identifying physical sensations that tell you that you are stressed or angry. You will know if you score highly in body regulation when you are practised at noticing and naming sensations and delivering what your body needs when your body needs it. It sounds basic but it is amazing how many high achieving people have not mastered the skills of body regulation.

Self-knowing awareness

There are no short-cut processes for understanding yourself. Awareness in humans is built in layers with new insights being set on the foundations of previous ones. People who spend more time reflecting and who engage in effective communication about themselves develop better self-knowledge and tend to have higher levels of self-confidence.

Attuned communication

A wide vocabulary of feeling words coupled with mindfulness awareness encourages the ability to understand and express one’s own feelings. The practice of good listening to others and the habit of moving towards difficult conversations will set you up for developing effective communication. It's not about getting your point across it's about the sharing of meaning between people.

Emotional balance

It's not just the gut-wrenchingly hard emotions that are difficult for us its also the extremely positive ones. At both ends of the spectrum, our 21st-century psyches zone out so that we only experience life cognitively, or else we take away the edge with some kind of substance. When was the last time you saw someone lost in joy or ecstasy that was not chemically induced? How big is your capacity for the extreme emotions of life? And more importantly, how quickly can you re-establish emotional equilibrium?


Response flexibility

How flexible are you in your responses to life’s stressors?

In the moment of heightened stress when traffic, to-do lists and domestic bickering all collide the amount of flexibility in your response will determine how many options you have for handling your emotions. A flexible response will allow for the effective processing of high levels of cortisol and adrenaline with the minimum of negative impact on the environment and the people in it. Give yourself a high score for response flexibility if others around you report that you are good at handling stress.

Empathy

The markers for emotional intelligence when it comes to empathy are good listening skills and an ability to read non-verbal skills. Often it is others who can best report on someone’s levels of empathy. 

We have known for a long time that high levels of empathy are positive not just socially but also for reducing stress and anxiety. Empathy for self is statistically correlated with empathy for others. To improve in this area begin by taking a compassionate view of yourself. When you are naturally less judgemental of yourself it will spill out to others and in the meantime, you will feel a lot happier in your own skin.


Fear modulation

Can you dial down the amount of fear that you feel in situations?

As with response flexibility, knowing when you are afraid and having choices about what you do with your fear is a key marker of emotional intelligence. Obvious or overt fears often get labelled as phobias and can be treated but the more generalised or normalised fears are harder to spot. The better your relational world and the more self-aware you are the greater the chance of being able to name fear and know how to handle it constructively. It goes without saying that reducing fears has a hugely positive impact on our wellbeing.

Intuition

This is a trendy word that often gets lumped in with spiritual education. But scientists tell us that our gut instincts may have more biological validity than we thought. There have been cells responsible for intelligence found in the walls of our gut. In the real world intuition is a sense of knowing without a cognitive process behind it. Far from being woo-woo, this intelligence can promote all kinds of positive emotional results if we learn how to use it in everyday life.

Morality

Does morality really have any place in emotional intelligence in 2020? Well, according to research yes it does. As it turns out, morality is the thing we care about most when forming impressions of a person (see Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014). We are far more likely to trust and respect the neighbour who brought us a bottle of wine when we moved in than the co-worker who borrows our pens and doesn’t give them back. We all have an inbuilt morality antenna and we use it to decide who to let into our lives and who to keep out. If ever we needed to develop a high sense of trust through thorough personal morality, it was now!

More and more workplaces are finding that the ‘soft skills’ of emotional intelligence are vital to the health of teams and organisations. It starts with each of us developing our own aptitude for growing in our emotional intelligence. It also helps if we raise the bar for our colleagues and friends. If we are able to operate with high emotional intelligence and we expect the same from others then who knows, we may see a seed change in culture in the next decade as well as in our own lives.

I have developed a curriculum for mental agility and emotional resilience in my online training School. Stronger School is on-demand video training and downloadable resources that take you on a journey of improving your emotional intelligence.

For more reading on the topic of emotional intelligence download my free resource: 19 Life Hacks from my Coaching Black Book. The life hacks teach you specifically how to grow emotional intelligence and mental resilience.

Naomi Light