Controlling your emotions or possessing proper emotional intelligence is vital for a successful life. Feelings, along with rational thoughts, ensure you get what you need out of life financially, physically, and mentally. This is essential to understand your emotions and improve or possess emotional intelligence. The following five tips, when implemented, will improve your emotional intelligence:

Recognize Your Good and Bad Emotions

When you feel a particular emotion, recognize and label it right away. Don't push it away or ignore it. Allow the feelings to happen, good or bad. Let them rush over you. Then take a moment to recognize how it makes you feel and what reactions you took or want to take. To understand your emotions better, you need to experience them first, not avoid them.

Identify Your Triggers

A trigger is something that starts or causes you to react and experience an emotion or feeling. Before you feel something, there is likely a cause or culprit. Take note of the cause, how it makes you feel, and what actions you take now. This is important so you can learn to control your emotions before they happen. If you know that you will be around a particular trigger, you can bring resources to cope or avoid it altogether.

Understand the Difference Between Responding and Reacting

Often people tend to react to conflict instead of responding to it. This situation can lead to further consequences. These reactions don't benefit the situation. Learn to take the time to listen and then respond instead of reacting.

Receiving criticism from a peer or manager is often an excellent example of this type of situation. Imagine the last time you received constructive criticism. Did you take the time to listen to what they had to say genuinely, or did you feel attacked and react?

Utilize Active Listening Skills

This includes your own thoughts before you express them to others. If you have difficulty processing, your emotions pause for a moment instead. Reflect on your behavior and truly analyze what is being said by others and yourself. "Think before you speak" is an all-too-common phrase that is just as easy to avoid as it sounds. It takes determination and will power to control this behavior.

Be Mindful of Your Actions

Last but certainly not least, you must practice self-awareness and mindfulness. You need to understand your actions or lack thereof can have a negative or positive consequence at any moment. With this in mind, you won't allow your emotions to overcome or control the situations. Instead, you will likely choose a rational solution or make a good decision.

Keep track of each of these tips by investing and writing in a journal or diary. By keeping track, you allow yourself to look back on your progress, and seeing that proof can help you find the motivation to keep growing and improving. You have more control of your emotions than you think, if you keep trying and doing the work necessary to understand yourself truly.