Building Great Relationships Using Emotional Intelligence

The best things in life – success, happiness, love – depend on our ability to create and maintain great relationships. Most of us do a good job with relationships at the start, only to stumble down the road. Why do relationships develop such challenging problems?

Oftentimes, relationship problems are due to a breakdown in the skills of emotional intelligence. Fortunately, it’s never too late to develop these skills and raise your emotional intelligence abilities. Once you’ve learned the five key emotional intelligence skills, you’ll be able to create and sustain secure, successful, long-lasting relationships.

How does emotional intelligence help our relationships?
Many people put their best foot forward in a new work setting or when looking to attract a mate, but stumble while trying to maintain their relationships over the long term. That’s because keeping a relationship healthy and fulfilling requires a unique skill set that many of us don’t have. This skill set is known as emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, control, and effectively communicate our own emotions, and to recognize the emotions of other people. When our emotional intelligence skills are well developed, we have a solid emotional foundation that helps us build strong relationships and communicate clearly.

What is your current emotional intelligence skill level?
Your emotional intelligence is your set of key relationship skills or abilities that help you establish strong relationships and deal with relationship problems. Find your emotional intelligence skill level by answering usually, sometimes, or rarely to the questions in this quick relationship quiz.

Test your emotional intelligence :

• Do you feel connected when talking to most people? Or are you easily distracted?
  
• Are you comfortable with pauses? Do you feel at ease when no one is speaking?
  
• Do you sense when someone feels troubled before being told?
  
• Do you judge or criticize some of your emotions or feelings?
  
• Do you pay attention to your gut feelings when making important decisions?
  
• Do you immediately notice when you become stressed?
  
• Do you know how to quickly calm yourself down when you’re stressed?
  
• Do you laugh, play, or kid around with others?
  
• Do you use humor to negotiate rough spots?
  
• Can you easily deal with differences and disagreements?

Answering usually to most of the questions indicates that you have a good start toward emotionally intelligent communication in your relationships. If your answers were primarily sometimes or rarely, you may need some help developing your relationship skills.