A successful relationship is a product of creating and keeping a constant and healthy connection with other people. Those who are reaping the successes of life, happiness, love, and contentment manage to keep healthy relationships with others personally and professionally. However, there are those of us who are only good at the start, but find it hard to keep the relationship intact and growing. Eventually, the relationship fails and falters.
In building a relationship, individuals should know how to nurture the bond or connection like how a fragile plant should be taken cared of. One of the main reasons for a breakdown in relationships is because of the lack in emotional intelligence.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
How do we understand emotional intelligence in a relationship? This is a skill or ability of individuals to acknowledge, manage, and communicate our emotions effectively as well as recognizing the emotions of other people. Having good emotional intelligence skills will increase a person’s emotional awareness and a strong emotional foundation which helps develop good relationships.
Possessing the skill of emotional intelligence in relationships guarantees a longer lasting bond with the people close to you or those you work with. However, this should both be learned and applied at the same time.
Learning without attempting to change or alter the way the relationship is managed is futile. If you wish to achieve successful relationships with those around you, below are the fundamental skills in developing emotional intelligence. But the basic thing to do is to connect to the core of your emotions before you can aptly convey your emotions and understand other people’s feelings as well.
Five Emotional Intelligence Skills
The ability to show emotional intelligence requires five important skills that every individual should apply in building and keeping healthy relationships. The first skill is the ability to manage stress. Though stress is a normal part of life, negative stress weakens your emotions and distracts rational thinking.
Stress is especially rampant at work. Bad or broken communication lines with colleagues leads to poor relationship-building. It becomes imperative to identify when stress levels start to get out of hand and manage stress situations before it damages the relationship.
The second skill is the ability to recognize and manage our emotions. Our life experiences and daily encounters with people and situations affect our emotions. In order to communicate well with the people we deal with, we have to be on guard with our emotions, learn to recognize them, and know how these feelings affect our actions and our relationships with others. Emotional awareness helps us understand our needs and motivations apart from having good communication.
The ability to communicate nonverbally is the third important skill we must learn and enhance. This type of communication is more powerful than mere words. Emotions and messages are conveyed through our body language, so this skill is highly visual. Communicate properly through appropriate use of facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, body movements, and our voice to maintain a strong relationship.
The fourth skill is the ability to use humor and play in the relationship. Good humor lifts up a distressing situation in a relationship, and gives us a feeling of relief from a challenging experience. Individuals are able to iron out some differences through humor and playfulness, taking relationship problems lightly.
The last skill is the ability to resolve conflicts in the relationship. Our affiliations with people in personal and professional aspects do not always run smooth. Demonstrate emotional intelligence during conflicts by properly responding to and facing any dispute or disagreements with others. Understand the fact that conflicts are inevitable but manageable. And when proper emotional intelligence is applied in dealing with it, conflicts would turn out to be productive and helpful in strengthening work relationships.
Advantages of Emotional Intelligence in Relationships
Manifesting proper emotional intelligence in building relationships brings about many advantageous results for the individuals and the connection they are creating. Professional relationships are strengthened because there is understanding and open communication among coworkers.
This makes it easy for team members to iron out any glitches at work and even mend wounded feelings. Good and healthy work relationships create a blissful and healthy work environment as well so individuals are more comfortable working with each other.
