Gratitude journal worksheet
Are you a therapist looking for emotional intelligence worksheets? You’re in the right place.
This guide provides mental health therapists with a brief overview of emotional intelligence and different emotional intelligence exercises you can use with teens, students, and adults.
You can also download free emotional intelligence worksheets to save to your electronic health record (EHR) for repeated use with clients.
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others.
It also helps clients navigate social environments and gives them the capacity to manage their own emotions.
Emotional intelligence not only guides thinking and behavior, but it also reflects competencies useful in the workplace and school, like learned optimism, self-control, and empathy. It’s considered an essential component of leadership effectiveness.
There are four components to emotional intelligence:
1. Self-awareness
Emotionally intelligent people have a higher level of self-awareness about their emotional states.
They can identify their feelings, what those emotions mean, and how they impact their behavior and relationships (peers, teams, students, the workplace, and romantic relationships).
2. Self-management
Self-management is the ability to regulate emotions. Emotional regulation skills enable people to respond calmly rather than reactively (even in stressful situations) and show empathy and understanding towards others, leading to stronger relationships.
3. Social awareness
While you can’t control other people's emotional experiences, emotional intelligence allows you to understand where their feelings may be coming from and provides the capacity to empathize, validate, and respond compassionately.
In turn, people feel heard and valued, experience stronger relationships, and are more productive in a work or team environment.
4. Relationship management
Emotional intelligence is especially helpful in relationships, the workplace, and school and college because it enables you to support your peers and team better, resolve conflicts more easily, foster empathy, communicate more effectively, and collaboratively solve problems.
Like many skills, emotional intelligence can be increased by developing self-awareness, strengthening emotional regulation and distress tolerance skills, practicing empathy, and improving interpersonal communication.
We’ve listed some of these exercises below and in the emotional intelligence worksheets.
Emotional intelligence exercises
There are several emotional intelligence exercises used to strengthen emotional intelligence skills, individually, as a team, and as a student:
Emotional intelligence activities for adults
1. Journaling
Start a regular journaling practice by taking a few minutes each day to reflect on your emotions and how they may have showed up in your life, such as your relationships at home and work.
2. Cognitive behavioral therapy techniques
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a great way to better understand the connection between feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
Exercises like a CBT triangle worksheet or thought record can help clients reflect on certain situations in order to challenge unhelpful thoughts and create more helpful ways of thinking and behaving.
Steps to completing a CBT reflection include:
Think about a recent event you found challenging.
Reflect on the thoughts you had about the event or situation. Was it neutral, positive, or negative?
Identify your feelings and emotions.
How did your thoughts and feelings impact how you responded to the situation?
3. Working with a therapist
Working with a therapist is a great way to strengthen emotional regulation and distress tolerance skills.
Activities include:
Opposite action: Acknowledge the emotion, question whether it is moving you toward destructive behaviors or emotional regulation, observe body language and instinctual response, identify an opposite (more helpful) action, commit to the action.
STOP skill: Pause when feeling an intense emotion, take a step back, observe your thoughts and check facts once feeling regulated, and proceed mindfully.
Check the facts: Name the emotion, reflect on what happened before the emotion, ask yourself if you are making assumptions or if unhelpful thinking is influencing your emotions, consider if there is a real threat or factual evidence to support your feelings, consider other explanations, and choose more mindful responses to achieve a helpful outcome to the situation.
Emotional intelligence exercises for teams
Give your full attention: Eliminate distractions, focus solely on the speaker, maintain eye contact, use open body language, and avoid interrupting.
Show you are listening: Use non-verbal cues, like nodding or smiling, to signal your engagement, and mirror the speaker’s tone with a calm and receptive demeanor.
Seek to understand: Paraphrase or summarize the speaker’s words to validate their feelings. For example: “It sounds like you’re frustrated because I didn’t acknowledge how hard you’d worked on the project and how many late nights you worked.”
Adopt a goodwill posture: Approach the conversation with empathy and avoid making judgments or assumptions. Show the person compassion and focus on fostering a connection.
Ask clarifying questions: Use open-ended questions to deepen your understanding. For example:
“Can you tell me more about how that made you feel?”
“How would you like to move forward?”
“What can I do to help improve this situation?”
2. Give and receive 360 degree feedback
Ask colleagues to give you feedback, complete your own self-assessment, and compare the results to identify areas for improvement.
Emotional intelligence activities for high school students or younger
1. Feelings charades
Help students develop emotional recognition and expression skills:
Write different emotions on slips of paper (e.g., happy, frustrated, excited).
Have students act out the emotion without words while others guess.
Discuss how body language and facial expressions convey feelings.
Reflect on the exercise as a group: Were any emotions difficult to recognize? Consider appropriate responses for each emotion that conveys empathy and understanding.
2. Empathy exercise
Ask students to split into pairs.
Each person takes turns in sharing a recent challenge or difficult event they experienced and how they felt.
The opposite person reflects what they heard and validates the person's emotions.
Emotional intelligence activities for students in college
These activities can be used with college students or in teams.
1. Emotion check-in
This exercise builds trust, self-awareness, and empathy.
Ask students how they are feeling using one word. If they are struggling to identify the emotion, they might find an emotions wheel helpful.
Next, ask what might be helpful for the class given the overall emotion. For example, if the class is feeling overwhelmed during finals they may find it more helpful to take a longer lunch break. Study or work on an assignment during class.
2. Classroom gratitude board
This exercise aims to bring together a spirit of gratitude and community support for students by appreciating each other's qualities.
At the beginning of class, ask students to spend a couple of minutes writing down one thing they appreciate or are grateful for in their class. For example, a student might express gratitude for the teacher's flexibility with deadlines. Or, that one student is really great at problem solving when others can’t find the answer to the problem.
Collect the cards, and after class, randomly attach the cards to a large board for students to reflect on during the next class.
These emotional intelligence exercises for students, adults, and teens are also listed in the free emotional intelligence worksheets.
How to use the emotional intelligence worksheets
You can download and use the emotional intelligence worksheets in several ways.
First, you can use the worksheet in sessions to explain emotional intelligence exercises to clients. You can also empower clients to identify their strengths and areas for growth.
Emotional intelligence worksheets can also be given to clients as a handout to work on developing their self-awareness skills in between sessions, followed by a debriefing at their next therapy appointment.
Sources
Landry, L. (2019). Why emotional intelligence is important in leadership. Harvard Business School.
Mental Health America. (n.d.). What is emotional intelligence and how does it apply to the workplace?
Romanelli, F., Cain, J., & Smith, K. M. (2006). Emotional intelligence as a predictor of academic and/or professional success. American journal of pharmaceutical education.
Srivastava K. (2013). Emotional intelligence and organizational effectiveness. Industrial Psychiatry Journal.
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