Social intelligence is the potential of an individual to interpret and comprehend their social environment and establish meaningful relationships with others. It is often referred to in lay terms as “street smartness”.

It is an acquired trait that grows with the person. The level of a person’s social intelligence determines how well they interact with others. It is important to improve one’s social intelligence as this has numerous benefits.

Here are some of my favourite tips on how to achieve this.

1. Pay attention to other people

It is true that people are wired differently. Some are extroverts by nature, while others are introverts.

Regardless, however, studies have shown that being sensitive and listening to others can help nurture one’s social intelligence. This does not equal to an introvert becoming extroverted. The mere act of paying attention to others without necessarily opening up is key to establishing successful interpersonal relationships.

As you interact with more people, you learn to trust and let them in.

2. Understand yourself

Before being able to understand your social environment, it is most important to understand oneself first.

How do you respond to social stimuli? How do you react when a stranger greets you? Is your social behavior repulsive? Answering these and other questions will help you identify your social strengths and weaknesses, and help you know which areas to work on. This in turn will boost your social intelligence.

3. Improve your communication skills

Effective communication is at the heart at social interaction. It may mean the difference between a successful and a failed social relationship.

Competent communication starts with verbal fluency, or being able to articulate your ideas freely without strain. This is accompanied by proper body language. Body language says a ton about a person, perhaps more than verbal communication. Take cues from people around you and learn the right body language.

Maintaining eye contact is also important for proper communication. This is a show of confidence and assertiveness, both of which help build social intelligence.

4. Learn how to resolve conflicts

Conflicts are almost inevitable in any social setting. People have diverse opinions and feelings about things, and this difference is bound to bring out conflict. Social disputes can make or break relationships.

To improve your social intelligence, establish healthy ways of conflict resolution. Learn from people around you and ask them how they feel about how your methods. Improve them where possible.

5. Be empathetic

We all feel good when other people understand and can relate to our predicaments. Research has shown that empathy is indispensable to establishing healthy relationships and improving social intelligence.

When we show empathy to others it makes them feel supported and they are more likely to responsive to us socially.

6. Invest in your relationships

Relationships of any type are dynamic. To keep them, you have to invest time and effort and adapt to their changing nature.

Remember: it is a lot easier to establish a relationship than it is to maintain one. Also, learn to give back- one sided relationships do not flourish.

Conclusion

Humans are social beings. We cannot live in isolation. It is as such important to improve our social intelligence in order to enhance our social interactions. Not only does doing this improve our overall social performance, it also keeps us healthy.

Years ago, psychology put on the spotlight a new kind of intelligence, a reasoning that used to contradict with the mind and its logic, an intelligence based on emotions. Emotional intelligence was defined as the ability to control and harness our emotions, channelling them into positive results like solving problems or managing interpersonal conflicts.

It also includes the skill of regulating one’s own emotions and those of others. For instance, some people can benefit from feelings that can be extremely destructive such as melancholy, loneliness, and sadness to generate a constructive analysis of their problems or what’s weighing them down.

High emotional intelligence has a lot of positive influence on different areas of one’s life. For example, emotional intelligence helps your performance at school/work. Furthermore, your awareness and management of your own feelings are now considered to be more important than your IQ.

It can also help your physical and mental health, basically because if you are unable to control your emotions the end result is a lot of stress, high blood pressure, and risk of heart attack, in addition to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

Finally, emotional intelligence also has a huge impact on your relationships. If you are unable to understand and manage your own emotions, it will block you from creating strong bonds, because you can not express how you feel and understand how others are feeling.

When you encounter a friend, a lover or a relative whose reactions are really difficult to understand or you seem unable to see what he is going through, that is probable because he has low emotional intelligence. Then we find ourselves faced with helplessness, just at the mercy of his apparently illogical and desproportionate reactions.

However, we are not that helpless. Here are some tips on how to deal with someone with low emotional intelligence.

• Help him develop emotional awareness: some people lack this ability as a result of not feeling understood in their early life emotional experiences. Also, because some people think their feelings are confusing, threatening or painful, they distance themselves from everyone else in order to avoid being misunderstood or judged. Let him know you are not going to judge his feelings. Your role here is to make them feel comfortable enough to speak to us about how they are feeling without judging them. Usually, the key is just listening.

• People sometimes might project their confused feelings from us, even threatening the relationship between that person and us. In this case, you need to be fully aware of how these people can sometimes be deliberately pushing you away out of terror or feelings of intimidation.

• Another key point to deal with people with low emotional intelligence is trying to communicate with them how we are feeling, and show them our ability to analyze how certain things make us feel. You must understand that this is not a weakness. Try also to push them a little bit out of their comfort zone, go out more often, buy a dog (seriously, it has been demonstrated to raise our emotional intelligence!) or have a serious honest conversation of how the things they do because of their low emotional intelligence are hurting other’s feelings.

Social science is an integral part of academic discipline that deals with society and studies its relationships within the individuals in the society. Social sciences encompass a wide variety of disciplines as economics, political science, human geography, demography, and psychology, among others. And it also includes education.

Many argue that education should not be considered a social science as technically, it is a discipline which merely gives systematic instruction, like in a school or university. However, beyond the giving of instructions, education provides far reaching repercussions that result to mankind having a better quality of life, which is the reason why is should be considered a science.

1. Education is an enabler

Educated men can work across generations and cultures. Today, people are not confined only to work in their own places of domicile: because educated people have acquired the skills to do more complex jobs, they are able to find more fulfilling and higher paying jobs, resulting in better lives for them and their families. In fact, many people have crossed the boundaries of language, so that they learn a second language to better understand peoples of other cultures.

2. Education has a correlation with better societies

Education provides mankind with information on how to live better and healthy lives, not only by giving information on what to do to achieve well being but conversely to show them the bad effects of bad health habits.

Studies show that societies with more educated people suffer less infant mortalities, have lower incidences of depression, and show a higher propensity to cope with everyday challenges. Conversely, those societies with more uneducated people suffer the brunt of increasing health costs, incidences of suicides, and higher rates of people having sexually transmitted diseases.

3. Education as an inspirer

To be educated is to aspire for goals way beyond what the mind can imagine. When a person is educated, he is able to think big, using all he has learned to follow up on his life goals. An educated man’s will to succeed cannot easily be thwarted with superficial challenges. In fact, the more an educated person is challenged, the more he strives to get over his problems.

4. Education opens our mind

Education gives man an open mind but helps him go on the right track. An educated person’s walls are limitless. He will always be open to ideas, however, when it comes to making decisions, he knows what will be best for him and will stick it out through thick or thin. An educated person is able to have a masterplan for his life where aside from his options, he has back-up plans just in case he is side-tracked.

5. Education helps us live the life we want

All of us go to universities to finish a degree. This degree is not something we get so that we can brag about it. This degree is a result of years of dutiful study so that we can land our coveted job, be financially independent and feel good that we have reached our goals after years of hard work.

Although education may not necessarily equate to success, having a good education will definitely open doors for people to advance their causes so that these opportunities, whether big or small, may in one way or the other, lead us to achieving the happiness that we all have been working for.