How to Improve Emotional Intelligence (EQ): A Guide for Men
Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is more than just a buzzword—it’s a vital skill that influences every aspect of our lives, from personal relationships, to academic achievement, to professional success.
Although emotional intelligence is often overlooked for men, it’s especially important because it empowers them to break free from traditional stereotypes and engage more deeply with their own emotions and the emotions of others.
In this post, we'll explore what emotional intelligence means and its benefits and briefly examine its origins. I'll also offer some practical tips for improving your emotional intelligence.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
EQ is not fixed; with conscious effort and practice, anyone can develop and enhance their emotional intelligence.
Men are just as capable as women of developing emotional intelligence and have just as much responsibility to do so.
Working towards improving your EQ will benefit virtually every aspect and relationship in your life.
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence, often referred to as EQ (Emotional Quotient), is the ability to understand, manage, and effectively express one's own emotions, as well as to understand and influence the emotions of others. EQ is paramount for personal and professional success because it significantly influences our interactions with others, ability to handle stress, decision-making, and ability to navigate complex social situations.
A higher EQ enhances one's ability to recognize, understand, and express emotions within oneself and others. It's a competency that enables more thoughtful, empathetic interactions, allowing a person to listen and respond with understanding rather than simply reacting. Men (or anyone) with high EQ are better equipped to manage their emotions appropriately without resorting to avoidance or being overwhelmed.
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.”
EQ: a brief history
While the history of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) can be traced back to the early 20th century, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the term “emotional intelligence” was first coined and began to gain prominence.
The roots of emotional intelligence lie in the study of social intelligence, a concept introduced by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. He defined social intelligence as the ability to understand and manage people and to act wisely in human relations.
In the 1940s, David Wechsler, a psychologist known for developing intelligence tests, suggested that non-cognitive aspects, such as affective or emotional abilities, are crucial to overall intelligence.
In the 1970s, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences further expanded on the idea that traditional IQ tests failed to capture a full range of human intelligence.
The term "Emotional Intelligence" was first introduced by psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer in 1990. They defined it as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”
The concept of emotional intelligence was popularized in 1995 by Daniel Goleman in his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Goleman's work brought the idea of emotional intelligence into the mainstream, highlighting its importance in leadership, workplace success, and personal relationships.
Since the 2000s, emotional intelligence has been extensively studied and applied in various fields, including business, education, and psychology. EQ is now recognized as a critical factor in leadership,mental health, and personal well-being.
Key components of emotional intelligence
The components of emotional intelligence are interconnected. Collectively, they contribute to your ability to understand and manage your emotions and effectively navigate social complexities and relationships.
Developing the following skills can lead to greater personal and professional success and improved mental health and well-being.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness means recognizing and understanding your emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values, and motivations. It starts with picking up on and understanding what you feel, your limitations, and how you process thoughts and emotions. Over time, this insight can help you understand why you think or feel a certain way.
In the context of EQ, self-awareness encompasses:
Emotional awareness —The ability to recognize and understand your own emotions. This involves knowing how your emotions affect your thoughts and behavior and how they can impact others. Yes, you do have emotions! In fact, you have a range of emotions – even if you’ve spent most of your life trying to hide or ignore them.
Self-assessment — Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, values, and motivations. It also includes recognizing how your emotions influence your performance and decision-making.
Self-regulation
Being able to self-regulate allows you to acknowledge an emotional experience and to choose your response. Feeling angry is a normal part of the human experience. Being able to feel anger and not let it explode, rather than having a different outlet or learning to let things go, is an example of self-regulation. Other aspects of self-regulation include:
Emotional control — The ability to manage and regulate your emotions, especially in stressful situations. This involves controlling impulsive feelings and behaviors, staying calm, and thinking before acting.
Adaptability — The capacity to adapt to changing circumstances by managing your emotions appropriately. This includes staying flexible and responding constructively to change.
Resilience — The ability to recover quickly from setbacks or difficulties, maintaining emotional balance and focus in challenging situations.
Motivation
Motivation is a deeply personal journey driven by the desire to achieve goals that resonate with our innermost values and aspirations rather than for external rewards. It's about maintaining a positive attitude, even when faced with daunting challenges.
Men often have a high drive towards their goals, but many lose motivation throughout their lives. EQ helps to keep men connected to their goals and maintain motivation through a deeper understanding of their personal 'why.'
Key aspects of the broader component of motivation include:
Intrinsic motivation — Being driven by internal values and goals rather than external rewards. This includes a passion for work, a solid drive to achieve, and a commitment to personal or professional growth.
Optimism — The ability to maintain a positive outlook, even when facing challenges. This involves seeing setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow rather than as failures.
Empathy
Understanding and empathizing with the emotional experiences of others allows you to build strong relationships and respond to social dynamics effectively.
Many men were not brought up practicing or being taught empathy. Because of this, you might feel uncomfortable talking about your emotions or listening to another man talk about his. Developing empathy will deepen every relationship you have and open doors for more effective communication and understanding.
When we talk about empathy within the context of EQ, we are generally referring to:
Emotional understanding —The ability to recognize and understand the emotions of others. This includes "reading" emotional cues like body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions.
Compassion — The capacity to care about others' feelings and perspectives and to respond with kindness and concern.
Social skills
Talking, listening and relating to other people are what we do most days at work and in our personal lives. EQ enhances your skills and abilities in all arenas of interaction with other people.
Communication —The ability to communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and non-verbally. This includes listening actively, expressing yourself clearly, and adapting your communication style to different audiences.
Relationship management — The ability to build and maintain healthy relationships. This involves managing conflict, collaborating with others, and nurturing positive interactions.
Influence — The ability to persuade and inspire others, often through understanding their emotions and motivations. Good social skills also include leadership abilities, such as motivating others and managing teams.
Emotional intelligence and men
Historically, societal norms have often discouraged men from openly expressing their emotions, associating emotional expression with weakness. This has led to the stereotype that men are less emotionally intelligent or less in touch with their emotions. However, this isn't inherently true. EQ is not fixed; men can develop and exhibit high levels of EQ. They just might need to overcome certain socialized barriers in order to do so.
Barriers include:
Emotional suppression — Men might struggle with developing EQ if they’ve been taught to suppress their emotions or avoid vulnerability. This suppression can hinder their ability to connect with others and fully experience their own emotional landscape.
Fear of vulnerability — Developing EQ often involves embracing vulnerability—acknowledging and expressing a range of emotions, including those perceived as negative or weak. This can be challenging for men who have been conditioned to avoid showing vulnerability.
While men may face unique challenges in developing and expressing emotional intelligence due to cultural norms, those who cultivate high EQ can experience significant benefits in all areas of their lives. The growing recognition of EQ’s importance is helping to shift these norms, encouraging men to engage more fully with their emotions and the emotions of others.
No, women are not always more emotionally intelligent than men
The idea that women are more emotionally intelligent (EQ) than men is a common stereotype, but it's not universally true. While research suggests that there may be some statistical differences in emotional intelligence (and how it’s expressed) between men and women, these differences likely have much more to do with socialization than sex or gender.
Studies have shown that women tend to score higher on aspects of emotional intelligence related to empathy and interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, men may score higher in other areas like assertiveness, self-regulation, and stress management.
The bottom line is that emotional intelligence varies significantly among individuals, regardless of gender. Some men are highly emotionally intelligent, just as some women are. If you’re reading this feeling you still have a long way to go, that's completely normal—what matters is the willingness to improve.
Men are just as capable as women of developing emotional intelligence and have just as much responsibility to do so.
How to become a more emotionally intelligent man
The work of becoming more emotionally intelligent is not necessarily hard, but it does take time, effort and consistency.
Becoming a more emotionally intelligent man involves developing skills and habits that enhance your ability to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Like most skills, you won’t see a major change overnight. However, if you stick with it you will see your relationships improve, your listening skills enhanced and your understanding of yourself will deepen.
1. Acknowledge and seek to understand your emotions
Start by paying attention to your feelings. Regularly check in with yourself to identify what you’re feeling and why. Journaling or reflecting on your emotional responses to daily events can help you become more aware of your emotional patterns. Journaling doesn’t have to be a long or time consuming process daily. Rather you can use it as a way to process what happened in a day or think through the upcoming day’s events. Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and write until your time is up.
Recognize that all emotions, even those that might feel uncomfortable like anger or sadness, are valid. Allow yourself to experience a full range of emotions without judgment.
2. Develop healthy coping mechanisms:
Identify strategies that help you manage your emotions in a healthy way. This might include exercise, meditation, talking to someone you trust, or engaging in hobbies that help you relax. Doing more of the things that bring you joy serves two purposes. It allows you to do something you enjoy or feels good and by doing those things it infuses your life with positivity and will help you proactively in dealing with stressful situations.
3. Count to 10
Learning to respond vs. react is a skill that will serve you in all aspects of your life. One way to do that is to simply pause and consider your forthcoming actions. Learn to manage emotional reactions; practice pausing before reacting, especially in stressful situations. This helps you respond thoughtfully rather than impulsively. Techniques like deep breathing or counting to ten can be effective.
While counting to 10 can be helpful, we need about 90 seconds for our brains to calm down in an anger response. So, feel free to take 90, rather than 10, when you need to.
4. Become an active listener
Start listening to understand. Focus on truly listening when others speak. This means giving them your full attention, avoiding interruptions, and being fully present in the conversation. Asking follow-up questions is another way to hone your listening skills. In order to ask good follow-up questions you’ll have to fully listen to what the other person is saying. You get to practice your listening and the other person feels honored that you are so engaged. It really is a win-win.
5. Trying putting yourself in others’ shoes
Make a conscious effort to consider how others might feel in a given situation. Empathy involves understanding and validating the emotions of others, even if you don’t agree with their perspective. One way to practice this is to actively imagine you are the other person. How would you feel? What would your responses be if you were them? This exercise can often shift your perspective.
6. Communicate clearly
Work on expressing your thoughts and feelings in a clear, direct, and respectful way. Practice using "I" statements (e.g., "I feel…" or "I think…") to communicate your emotions without placing blame.
7. Invest time and effort into developing meaningful connections with others.
Show interest in others’ lives, offer support when needed, and be open to receiving support in return. Men are often socialized to be independent, when interdependence will serve you much better. Interdependence means you rely on others and others rely on you. You have the ability to ask for help when needed and have the willingness and capacity to help others when they ask of you.
8. Cultivate resilience
Learn to adapt to setbacks by reframing challenges as opportunities for growth instead of viewing them as insurmountable obstacles. The saying, “This is happening for me, not to me,” can be applied here. When you start to look at challenges as opportunities to learn, grow and adapt you are developing EQ.
9. Ask for (and be receptive to) feedback
Seek feedback from trusted friends, family, or colleagues on how you handle your emotions and interact with others. Constructive feedback can help you identify areas for improvement.
10. Practice mindfulness
Being present involves staying fully engaged in the moment. In this way, mindfulness practice can help you become more aware of your thoughts and emotions, allowing you to respond to them more effectively.
11. Learn from role models
Identify men who demonstrate high EQ and observe how they manage their emotions and interact with others. Learning from others can provide valuable insights and inspiration. You might even ask these role models how they developed EQ and what advice they can offer.
12. Become a “safe” person
Encourage emotional expression. Create a safe space for others to express their emotions by being an empathetic, nonjudgmental, active listener. Also, being open about your feelings encourages others to share theirs without fear of criticism or dismissal.
Benefits of becoming more emotionally intelligent
Developing emotional intelligence isn't just about being in touch with your feelings; it's about improving your overall well-being and your interactions with others. Becoming more emotionally intelligent can benefit virtually every aspect of your life. The following are just the tip of the iceberg.
1. You’ll improve the quality of your relationships
Men with high EQ are typically better at forming and maintaining relationships, whether personal or professional. They can communicate more effectively, empathize with others, and resolve conflicts in a constructive way.
2. You’ll become a better romantic partner than you ever thought possible
Men with high EQ are typically more attuned to their partner's emotional needs, leading to stronger, more empathetic relationships. They can navigate the complexities of emotional intimacy with greater ease.
3. High EQ can contribute to better mental health.
Men who are emotionally intelligent are more likely to seek help when needed, process emotions in healthy ways, and avoid the pitfalls of suppressing emotions, which can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression.
Therapy can be a powerful tool for helping men develop emotional intelligence (EQ).
If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a free consultation with me today. →
References
Adkins, J. H. (2004). Investigating Emotional Intelligence and Social Skills in Home Schooled Students. https://core.ac.uk/download/43621023.pdf
Kramer, B. L. (2019). Effect of emotional intelligence, collaboration technology, team climate, and intrinsic motivation on virtual team effectiveness: A study of team member perceptions. https://core.ac.uk/download/327250415.pdf
Moloney, O. (2022). Using restorative practices to enhance the teaching of social-emotional learning. https://core.ac.uk/download/573142200.pdf
Njoroge, C., & Yazdanifard, R. (2014). The Impact Of Social And Emotional Intelligence On Employee Motivation In A Multigenerational Workplace. International Journal of Information, Business and Management, 6(4), 163-170.
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. *Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9*, 185–211.