Increase Your Emotional Intelligence: Ten Ways to Become More Like Dolphins

Emotional intelligence or EQ is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage our own behavior, navigate various social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results. The good news is that we can all practice new emotionally intelligent behaviors or remember to use the ones we’ve developed. In this way, we can respond to people, circumstances and our surroundings from a grounded, balanced and centered place.

We can learn a little about high EQ from dolphins and perhaps strive to be a little more like them. According to an article by Joshua Foer on National Geographic.com, dolphins process information in different places in the brain than primates and “also have an extremely well developed and defined paralimbic system for processing emotions.” He credits this dolphin brain which has evolved for over 55 after splitting from mammal lineage with being essential to the “intimate social and emotional bonds that exist within dolphin communities.” If emotional intelligence can keep dolphins embedded in a complex social network then perhaps it can also help people feel less isolated, more balanced, positive and kind.

1. Identify your feelings accurately.

It would make sense that emotionally intelligent people would be able to accurately identify the feelings they are having as they occur, or perhaps be more willing to take the time to reflect on personal interactions or significant experiences that aren’t initially understood. Sometimes, emotions aren’t easy to pin down and it can take some good open ended questions to dig a little deeper. You may have had this experience when you noticed you got upset over a little thing and when you asked yourself why you over reacted you were able to see that it was something else entirely that was triggering your emotion. It takes emotional intelligence to feel and name the difference between emotions like anger and disappointment, or sadness and grief. Knowing how you feel and what the truest cause of the feeling was can help you find more appropriate ways to deal with it.

2. Stay curious about other people.

Change can be difficult for everyone. A person with emotional intelligence has recognized that fear of change will keep them stuck. They understand that life requires continual adaptations and they stay flexible with their goals and plans. They peek around the corner into the future and consider that the way they think and hope things will turn out may not be the reality that actually arrives and so they often have a “workaround” in mind or a plan B. They stay focused on the new possibilities that are arriving with the change.

4. Learn from and let go of mistakes.

We have all failed at something in our lives. We’ve all made mistakes; big ones and little ones. The way we relate to those mistakes is related to our level of emotional intelligence. We have to find the balance between keeping the mistake on auto-play in our minds, which could render us unable to take any risks again, and forgetting completely that we made the mistake which would most likely assure that we would repeat it. Often, our failures occur when we are trying to accomplish something out of our reach. It takes emotional intelligence to know when a failure is teaching us that we need to keep applying effort and try again, or to learn that we need assistance in that area from someone else.

5. Don’t be easily offended.

We all have triggers, situations where we find ourselves vulnerable to the words and actions of others. If you have a high level of emotional intelligence, it is much easier to not react when someone does or says something that is offensive or off putting to you. You can allow others to make jokes about you without losing your cool, but you do know when to stand up to bullies. You also don’t drag the past along with you by holding grudges over upsetting events and circumstances that happened long ago. You realize that holding on will only cause you to relive the stress and so you let go for the sake of your own health and well being.

6. Recognize that done is better than perfect.

Emotionally intelligent people understand that trying to attain perfection is not a healthy or worthwhile goal. Perfection keeps people focused on the aspects of their activities that don’t meet their unrealistic expectations. That kind of focus can stop us in our tracks, leaving us to lament why we even tried in the first place. It is more intelligent to stay more focused on what you did achieve, what did work, what you did learn by your attempt. Instead of the despair brought about by striving for perfection, you will have the excitement of what’s possible for you in the future.

7. Refuse to react to or take on other people’s stuff.

We can’t avoid sometimes having to deal with difficult people and situations. High EQ individuals keep their feelings and frustrations in check. They stay rational and reasonable as they consider the other person’s standpoint. They don’t use words or actions to escalate the chaos. More importantly, they can recognize the toxicity in the person and not take it personally. They can hold on to compassion at the same time and look for common ground and solutions to help repair the division or drama.

8. Take time out of the matrix.

Remembering to enjoy the beauty of “real life” is a sign of emotional intelligence. Many people are more than tethered to their computers and phones. When they aren’t absorbed in them, they are thinking about what they might be missing or wondering who is trying to contact them or waiting for a response to the text they sent. When these activities take over a person’s life and the mind and body become stressed from information overload. Those with a high EQ can leave their phones behind, go out in nature, take a walk, have a dinner with friends with no phones at the table, or have limits on their time with technology, remembering to keep it real.

9. Recognize and stop your own negative self talk.

There are times when the things we say to ourselves are meaner than most things other people would ever say to us. Emotionally intelligent people have the ability to observe their thoughts from a distance and notice the ones that are perceiving worry, problems or fatalistic thinking. Our brains are wired to alert us to dangers and then it’s up to us to analyze the thoughts and the facts rationally. They can more easily let go of the problems they can’t do anything about in the moment and focus on taking actions toward resolving the issue as opposed to recycling it over and over, adding more stress to their system each time. Positive thoughts and solutions are interjected into the thought stream helping to find solutions.

10. Own your own happiness.

People with high EQ know that the level of their happiness is set by them not by events or others. They guard their own sense of pleasure and satisfaction from the opinions of others. They allow themselves to take pride in their own accomplishments, even when others are overly critical or cruel. This isn’t to say that judgments from others don’t sting, they just know to take the opinion’s of others lightly. Happiness and well being are generated from inside out, not outside in. Emotionally intelligent people have a high regard for happiness and an intrinsic understanding that it’s a do it yourself project.

Where in your life could you use a little EQ boost? Can you recognize the places in your life where your emotional intelligence is working well?