Now the topic of emotional intelligence has become extremely popular. In the information space are increasingly talking about the importance of emotions not only for family and love relationships, but also to interact with colleagues, customers and subordinates, as well as for decision-making and effective management. Emotional intelligence in recent times is considered as one of the most sought after skills of a person of the XXI century.

In connection with the growing relevance of this topic may be a logical question: how can I develop my emotional intelligence?

Here should start with the fact that emotional intelligence should be viewed as three interrelated but distinct skills:

1) the Ability to recognize, evaluate and convey (to Express) your emotions.

2) the Ability to manage your emotions.

3) the Ability to recognize and understand emotions of other people. br>

For each of these skills can be picked up by a separate set of exercises, but, of course, exercising in one thing, you will increase your overall level of emotional intelligence. To start, in my opinion, first skill. Because not being able to understand their own emotions, you will not be able to control them and you will be hard to understand other people's emotions.

First skill is directly related to emotional awareness – the ability to be sensitive to his emotional state, the ability to differentiate their emotions (i.e. to distinguish some emotions from others). So here are techniques of self-observation. To begin, I recommend creating your "map of emotions". Take a list of 20-30 different emotions for each of them to recall and describe several situations in which you experienced the emotion data. This exercise helps to clearly distinguish between different emotions in your personal experience, to distinguish one experience from another.

Another tool for the development of this skill is "diary of emotions". Write down a situation which during the day aroused your strong emotion, and then describe their feelings and rate their intensity on a ten-point scale. You will be surprised, but sometimes we feel not what, in our opinion, "we must" feel in this situation.

skill two is the management of emotions. For its development there are plenty of techniques and exercises proposed for each specific emotional state. But the General principle is to ensure that you'll roll in the sequence "emotion - response" two element - "awareness" and "choice". That is, first, the management of emotions is impossible without the first skill - understanding and verbalization of emotions. And secondly, we don't just automatically react based on the current economic condition, but consciously choose your reaction. For example, you got angry at the child because he spilled tea on the carpet, you are tired and angry. The emotion of anger "pushes" you to the automatic reaction "to shout or to punish." But when you make in the moment awareness, you can choose your reaction, for example, not to shout and to talk and ask the child to help you clean up, and anger to cope using breathing exercises. Using this technique, you cease to be hostages of their emotions. When you "lay" a strong emotion, say to yourself: "Stop!". Ask yourself, what happens, how I feel, and to select the most adequate for the given conditions way of responding.
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Third skill - the ability to understand other people's emotions. Here you can explore a number of books (e.g., books by Paul Ekman), but, in my opinion, much more important is constant practice. Ride the bus or subway and try to guess what feeling each passenger. Communicating with a person and try to understand what emotions he is experiencing and what causes these emotions. Confirm or refute your emotions, asking, for example: "are You sad right now?". If you make a mistake, analyze why it happened. Letting every person you meet becomes your teacher in the development of emotional intelligence.