Increasing Emotional Intelligence (EI)

"The emotions are of quite extraordinary importance in the total economy of living organisms and do not all deserve being put into opposition with 'intelligence.' They are, it seems, themselves a high order of intelligence." -

O. Hobart Mowrer

As most things in life, it can often be easy to simplify our emotions into two categories: good and bad. When we feel down, we try to change it. When we feel good, we cling to it. When we feel anything at all, we rationalize it because we’ve been told not to make decisions with our hearts, but rather with our heads.

One of the most powerful things you may learn in life is that you are not your emotions. Through mindfulness and meditation we can insert a brief gap between feelings like grief, anxiety and frustration as they arise in the mind, and - like a still blue sky allowing clouds to pass through - observe them from a place “outside” their often all-consuming grasp.

But emotions also serve as powerful indicators. They offer forms of communication often failed by language and logic alone, and they give way to some of the most beautiful and worthwhile experiences of being a human in the brief time we have on this little blue earth. Learning to understand and intelligently collaborate with all the complexities of our emotions - experiencing them fully, listening to their subtle messages, and engaging in a two-way dialogue without getting caught up in the storm - can bring us meaning, experiences and insights unavailable in logic alone.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the skill of recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions—both your own and those of the people around you. This ability is essential for building strong relationships, making thoughtful decisions, and maintaining emotional well-being.

Whether you believe you may or may not already have a high level of emotional intelligence, there are actually many very specific skills that make up emotional intelligence that anyone can work at strengthening over time.

Researchers John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey and David R. Caruso identified the following 4 branches as key components of emotional intelligence.

Perceiving Emotions

Perhaps you’ve been in a yoga class where a teacher prompted you to get still and just “notice” the sensations in your body. This is a practice in getting in tune with how experiences including emotions physically manifest in the body (see our previous post on how emotions work). While it can be easy to recognize a big feeling once you’ve reached the point of tears, an angry outburst, or all-out panic attack, practicing checking in with your body can help you to start to recognize the subtler sensations connected to your emotions - for example, a slight tightness in the chest or jaw - before they escalate. Think of it as sharpening your perceptual radar for the moments when the same sensations start to bubble up at the office, in traffic, or even in your relationship.

Perceiving emotions is also tied to picking up on cues from others and effectively expressing our own. A significant portion of communication is nonverbal, and learning how to detect and express our feelings artfully—both verbally and non-verbally—can improve how we connect with others, resolve conflicts, and navigate complex social dynamics.

Using Emotions

Salovey, Mayer and Caruso describe using emotions not just in terms of communication with others, but actually in the context of facilitating our own cognition - specifically when it comes to judgment, problem solving, and creativity.

For example, the prominence of certain emotions can often compel us to reprioritize our thinking or refocus our attention to attend to something more immediate. We can make better decisions when we understand how our emotions might be coloring our views, or even use an understanding of our different emotional states to see situations from a variety of points of view. Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, or parts work in therapy uses techniques to understand and find value in the information our emotions often provide.

Understanding Emotions

Our ability to understand our emotions does not end at our ability to label them as “happy” or “sad.” Instead, in describing the ability to understand emotions, Salovey, Mayer and Caruso identify the more complex facets of emotions such as the various relationships among them, contradictory feelings, and even the transitions between them.

Here are just a few thought starters to understand about your own:

You can have emotions about your emotions.

Yep, we call these secondary emotions. This often looks like feeling ashamed about feeling sad, or feeling angry at yourself for getting frustrated. They are learned judgments, can add to a spiral of negativity (or positivity), and now not only are you dealing with the consequences of the original emotion, but the added complexity of two or more at the same time!

More often than not we fail to recognize the fact that we’re experiencing an added layer on top of our primary emotions, or are unable to separate out each individual emotion from our overall positive or negative experience. The idea of noticing an emotion without judgment in yoga or mindfulness practice is a great example of a practice in which we learn to experience our primary emotions without getting swept up in secondary feelings about them - good or bad.

Emotions are fluid.

Yoga and meditation are also great places to witness the colorful journey of your emotions first-hand. For example, over the course of an hour you might feel tense, reflective, frustrated, connected, and then relieved. You might sigh, laugh, cry, feel weak, feel strong, or all of the above. So goes the course of a typical day, month or year of emotions in everyday life. While grief can often not see beyond grief, or when we are riding a high we can’t imagine how we ever allowed ourselves to get low, it is essential to recognize the impermanence of our feelings, and to accept that we will inevitably ebb and flow. Riding these waves without attachment and without getting lost in them can make life all the more full.

Emotions come in countless colors, shades, and combinations.

We only have so many words in the English (or any other) language to describe the ways in which we feel. Instead, you might think of the range of emotions like the vast palette of colors you can make by mixing, muting and intensifying a bunch of paint on a paper plate. In one respect, this helps us recognize that throughout our lives we will experience a variety of emotions that we just won’t have the words for. It doesn’t make them any more or less valid. But seeking and expanding the vocabulary we use to describe some of the more subtle or complex ways we feel can also be an incredibly valuable way to understand and communicate our feelings. Take a look at the color wheel pictured. Far from exhaustive, see if it helps you more finely explore emotions you may have previously generalized as simply “good” or “bad.”

Managing Emotions

Finally, increasing our ability to manage our emotions requires that we take all this information and thoughtfully apply judgment and practice to the situation at hand. Is this an emotion we want to allow, experience, engage in, or even elongate? Or is it one we should step back from, observe, and allow to pass quietly? Is an emotion creating an urge or an impulse that is destructive, such as yelling or shutting down? Or is it encouraging us to explore, open up, or more effectively communicate with those around us? With added context we realize that anger is not always a bad thing if it motivates us to action as in cases such as political protest or leaving an unhealthy relationship. Managing, working with, and even leveraging your emotions as assets takes a high level of both awareness and tact, but can account for some of the most subtle yet profound differences among success, relationships, and how we simply experience life.