Improving your emotional intelligence is often about what you do less of, not more of. If you’d like to become more emotionally intelligent, learn to identify these habits in your own life, and work to eliminate them.

Criticize Others

Criticizing others is often an unconscious defense mechanism to alleviate our own insecurities. We’re all critical sometimes, but too much criticism can lead to the opposite of objectivity – it can make us narrow-minded and blind, especially to ourselves. Understand that criticism of others is a waste of time and energy because it’s all time and energy that’s not getting invested in improving yourself and the world around you.

Worry About the Future

Worrying about the future means living in denial about the fundamentally uncertain nature of life. As human beings, we crave order and certainty, but there’s a big difference between taking reasonable steps to reduce uncertainty and being so terrified by it that we imagine we can eliminate it altogether. When you stop insisting that the world act the way you want it to in the future, it becomes far easier to work with the world you’ve got in the present.

Ruminate on the Past

Ruminating on past mistakes is a misguided attempt at control. Most people who get stuck ruminating endlessly on past mistakes and failures don’t actually believe that they can change the past. Instead, ruminating about the past gives them the illusion of control, however fleeting and temporary. In reality however, no amount of rumination or analysis of your mast mistakes will change what happened. Don’t give up control over your future by pretending you can control the past.

Maintain Unrealistic Expectations

Unrealistic expectations are a misguided attempt to control other people. You probably see your expectations of others as a good thing: Having high expectations for people encourages them to grow and mature and become their best self! But this is still a subtle form of control. The solution is to let go of your expectations. Emotionally intelligent people don’t create stories about what they want for other people.

If you want to increase your emotional intelligence, try approaching the problem backward: Instead of trying to improve your emotional intelligence skills, strive to identify and eliminate the habits that are interfering with your natural emotional intelligence in the first place. Emotionally intelligent people avoid these habits at all costs.