4 Hacks to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence Before Hitting 30

According to various studies, your 20s are the most important time of your professional career. During this period, you set the foundation for success in your 30s and beyond by picking up the necessary technical/soft skills, traits, and experiences to foster and sustain growth. Since 2020, emotional intelligence has been one of the most in-demand skills in the evolving business landscape, according to LinkedIn – the world’s largest professional network.

Developing your EQ before hitting 30 is one of the most rewarding self-improvements you can make, as it can set you up for enhanced personal performance and relationships in your prime professional years. However, many new professionals entering the workforce after high school or college don’t understand what it is, why it’s important, or how they can develop it.

In this post, we’re here to answer all three questions so you can use this powerful skill to accelerate your career development and reach new heights. Moreover, we’ll be sharing four powerful emotional intelligence hacks for faster development.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Humans at the workplace are highly complex beings filled with an array of emotions that make it difficult for others to read. Thus, the ability to recognize, understand, manage, control, and use emotions is a skill not many people can possess.

This is precisely what emotional intelligence is – a powerful people skill that allows users to comprehend their emotions as well as others to maintain social relationships and even compel or influence others to perform a certain task or alter their emotional state.

Elements of Emotional Intelligence

To help people understand and quantify EQ, popular American psychologist Daniel Goleman outlined five core Elements:

1. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness can be defined as the conscious knowledge of one’s emotions as well as the emotion of others. In other words, it’s the ability to monitor, assess, and adapt your emotions according to a particular situation. More importantly, it involves understanding where those emotions come from and what triggers them.

2. Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is quite self-explanatory. It’s the ability to control your emotional state and express different emotions properly. It typically involves evaluating a situation rationally to understand why you’re feeling a certain way and waiting for the right time or place to let them out.

3. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand other people’s emotions. Therefore, it is the most important element of emotional intelligence from a professional viewpoint. This is because being able to empathize with others can help you strategize your actions, reactions, or communications in a way that results in the most desirable outcome.

For instance, treating an angry or frustrated employee with care and compassion instead of adding more fuel to the fire can change their mood and get them to do what you need them to.

4. Intrinsic Motivation

With a better hold on your emotions, you can easily motivate yourself or others to do things by adjusting your behavior, actions, or responses accordingly. This leads to better outcomes, especially in professional environments.

5. Social Skills

Finally, the fifth element of emotional intelligence is social skills. This relates to how well you interact with others and connect with them at an emotional level. In professional settings, you can use your social skills to develop strong relationships with co-workers, managers, and leaders.

Importance of Emotional Intelligence

Developing your EQ skills at an early age can have a huge impact on your professional or personal life. Most people in their 20s typically start at the bottom in their respective organizations and slowly build their skills and experience to climb the success ladder.

Emotional intelligence is one of the few skills that can accelerate this journey as its correlates with several high-level management roles, including conflict resolution, motivation, task allocation, and collaboration.

Here are three reasons you should improve your EQ before hitting 30:

1. To Learn How to Read Others’ Emotions

There’s more to reading people than deciphering the words coming out of their mouths. A person can say something and mean something else. This is where emotional intelligence comes in to help people look for facial cues and other clues they can use to understand how someone is feeling or whether they’re being honest. This includes their tone, body language, nuances, and facial expressions.

Being able to understand non-verbal cues before hitting 30 can set you up for higher roles at your workplace. Modern organizations are actively looking for people with high EQ and using them to improve their operational efficiency and employee satisfaction levels. Every person has a unique way of expressing their emotions.

While it’s impossible to know what someone else is thinking, a high EQ makes people more intuitive and predictive. Their social skills allow them to ask the right questions to learn about a person’s emotional state and adjust their behavior accordingly.

2. To Learn How to Handle High-Pressure Situations

One thing most employers or managers look at in young employees is their ability to work under pressure. People with high EQ understand their emotions as well as the emotions of others. This means they can manipulate them in high-pressure situations, such as high-stake transactions, internal conflicts, emergencies/disasters (fire, theft, etc.), and failures.

3. To Become More Conscious

Success in the post-pandemic age calls for young professionals to be bolder and more transparent. Developing your EQ can help you own your emotions and be more honest about how you feel. More importantly, it can help know to determine the right time and place to say something or when to hold back.

4 Emotional Intelligence Hacks You Should Try Before Hitting 30

1. Find Your Inner Professor Hulk

Whether you’re a die-hard Marvel fan or you just like the movies, you most likely know Bruce Banner, AKA the Hulk. If you paid close attention to his story, you’d learn that Bruce spends a lot of time learning to control his emotions. His famous quote, “That’s my secret Cap…I’m always angry,” is a great example of this.

Bruce figured out the things that resulted in him losing control and turning into the Hulk. To make more sense of this, he found his emotional triggers – things that push his buttons and force him to lose control.

One great EQ hack you can use is mentally rehearsing different situations that lead to emotional breakdowns. By mentally simulating your behavior in different scenarios, you can choose the best behavior or response to real-life events and become the best version of yourself.

2. Start Being More Accountable and Plan For Worst-Case Scenarios

Emotional intelligent people hold themselves accountable for everything in their lives, especially when things don’t work out for them. For instance, if they’re late to work, they don’t blame the traffic. Instead, they blame themselves for not leaving early or taking a different route. It’s all about anticipation and proactive decision-making.

As a professional, you should always have a plan B or contingency in place for when things go wrong. For instance, if a situation at work makes your co-worker angry or upset, you should know what calms them down or diffuses the situation.

To improve this aspect of EQ, take the time to observe your environment and everyone in it. Examine how your actions or reactions impact the workflow, your progress or reputation, and others. The trick to emotional stability is ensuring you’re never caught off guard.

3. Become Who You’re Talking To

Another great hack to improve your emotional intelligence is becoming the person you’re talking to. This is an extension of walking a mile in someone’s shoes because it involves more than imagining a situation from their perspective. By becoming the person you’re talking to, you’re anticipating their perception of your actions or reactions.

For example, when a co-worker messes up, you can either motivate them to improve their performance by providing remedies. Or, you can take stricter action and warn them of the potential consequences of repetitive issues.

While both solutions could work, you have to consider the type of worker you’re dealing with. For instance, those with excellent track records would be more upset if they received a warning. An extreme measure like this could affect their confidence or performance.

Similarly, workers who are often left off the hook following repetitive errors can take friendly motivation speeches and support for granted.

4. Leverage the Patronus Charm

If you’ve watched Harry Potter, you’ve most likely heard of the Patronus Charm – a spell used to protect wizards and witches against Dementors. It was introduced in the third book or movie (The Prisoner of Azkaban) and involved choosing a powerful memory and immersing in the feeling to cast it properly.

In the workplace, you’re going to come across several Dementors (problems) you need to solve. However, these problems can often become so overwhelming that you want them to go away temporarily so you can prevent your brain’s amygdala from taking control and causing an involuntary emotional reaction.

Finding your Patronus Charm to improve EQ is about shifting your attention to a pleasant memory and engaging in a healthy form of mental escapism. This could be a recent event, a funny scene from a movie or TV show, or the time you didn’t have the problem you’re facing now.

Conclusion

So, there you have it – 4 powerful hacks you can use to improve your emotional intelligence before hitting 30. Of course, there are many other ways you can boost your EQ skills. However, the strategies on our list are easily doable. More importantly, they can be practiced regularly for better adoption.

To summarize, emotional intelligence is one of the most important skills you can adopt in the modern age. By developing it as early as possible, you can achieve success faster in every aspect of your life and remain emotionally stable and connected to your environment.