Author, Personality Type & Behavioral Change Expert

ANNE DRANITSARIS, PH.D.

Want to know how increasing emotional intelligence can help you with your relationships, both at home and at work?

Contact Anne for a free introductory discussion.​

Emotional development

Until recently, our culture has placed emphasis on certain aspects of intelligence such as logical reasoning, math skills, spatial skills, understanding analogies, verbal skills, etc. to help predict the success of people in their personal and professional lives. The fact is, people with remarkable IQ scores do not always succeed in life and frequently do not know how to have successful relationships with coworkers, friends, and family. As a result, psychologists have recently proposed that emotional intelligence or EQ, the ability to understand emotions, is a more important predictor.

We know that our childhood, environmental, and early life events shape our emotional and intellectual intelligence, as do genetic factors and by a certain age in childhood our intellectual ability is established. However, emotional intelligence can continue to develop throughout the life span. Emotional intelligence is not a fixed point, but rather it is fluid and dynamic, and results from emotional teaching and a willingness to grow and develop. It is a fact that the brain is patterned throughout life; brain structures and circuits shape themselves through repeated experience, and through repeated practice, people can get better at things they once weren’t good at. In fact, emotional intelligence tends to increase through each decade of life. It’s what we used to call “maturity” – how one handle one’s self and other people.

People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives and have a surer sense about how they feel about personal decisions. The development of emotional intelligence, the capacity for engaging in mature emotional expression, resilience during stressful situations, taking risks in pursuit of your relationship, work and social needs are all ways to take care of your mind. Challenging self limiting beliefs and automatic patterns of thinking and behaving also keep our minds active, exercised and healthy.

We can increase our emotional development and growth through working on increasing our Emotional Intelligence. This allows us the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.