7 proven strategies to grow your emotional intelligence

Answering a tricky question in a classroom or debugging a complex coding problem in a corporate setting—intelligent people always attract eyeballs. Mugging up four textbooks or an endless number of coding formulas is not the key ingredient of intelligence. We often measure people’s intelligence quotient before engaging in any conversation with them. What actually decides this intelligence quotient? Not everyone under the sky is born intelligent, but how do they evolve themselves so that people start identifying them as someone interesting to talk with? Here are 7 ways you can become one of them by nurturing your emotional intelligence.

For anyone, knowing everything with great in-depth detail is a utopian concept. In a realistic setup, no one knows everything. But it takes courage and smartness to admit it without any hesitation and to be flexible enough to work on the unknown. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the less intelligent you are, the more you overestimate your cognitive abilities. It takes a level of maturity and emotional intelligence to be aware of one’s own knowledge deficiencies. People with a great IQ know that if they don't know certain things, they always have the option to learn—instead of shutting the door. That makes them intellectually humble.

A study carried out on Turkish schoolchildren suggests that situational comedy is a byproduct of a higher level of general knowledge and verbal reasoning. Telling jokes to demonstrate cleverness and attract potential mates is an age-old idea, and it has scientific backing as well—it takes both cognitive and emotional ability to process and produce humor. But humor is a culture-sensitive concept; the sign of intelligent people is that they know where and how to use the right line without offending others.

It often happens that someone else's statement ruins your whole day, and even after trying, you can’t stop thinking about it—it’s a sign of weak self-control. People with higher emotional intelligence do not let the actions of others bother them so much that it starts affecting their daily activities. They try to identify their own behavioral patterns and work on them instead of wasting time thinking about others' mistakes. Focusing on one goal at a time helps, as trying to change too many things at once can become overwhelming, and one may end up losing their focus.

Learning from other people’s mistakes is a great way to sharpen emotional intelligence without exhausting your own mental peace. People with higher IQs try to surround themselves with intellectually advanced individuals, and observing them helps expand their knowledge and understanding of any matter. Human beings are like open books—what one can learn just by observing is equivalent to any self-help book available on the market.

Our brain has the tendency to become comfortable with easy, repetitive patterns. It is necessary to challenge these patterns through different activities like crosswords, Sudoku, riddles, or logic puzzles, which help build a problem-solving mindset using analytical skills. Accepting something just at face value does not always lead us to the best solutions; analyzing those problems through multiple layers provides clarity to oneself and to others as well.

One of the key methods to identify smart people is that they are open to new creative ideas and constructive feedback. They know how to agree to disagreements and how to reach a stable conclusion. Conflict situations are inevitable in any setup—be it school, college, the office, or even your house. Escaping those situations is one option, but if you want to reach a position where people appreciate your emotional intelligence, you have to start practicing how to listen to everyone and reach the best possible solution with smartness.

To quote George R.R. Martin, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies." One can learn about anything in the world while sitting in their room if they develop a reading habit over time. It can be anything—stories, documentation of the past, future predictions, anything. Investing money and time in good reading materials is always a great investment one can make in themselves if they want to work on their IQ level.