How to tell if you have emotional intelligence

1. You understand other's feelings and emotions as acutely as if they were your own, be it book or film characters, your friends, enemies, neighbours or total strangers. This helps you form instant connections with people whether real or fictional.
2. You easily put yourself in other's shoes and know other's state of mind. It also helps you perform better at jobs, leadership roles, relationships, stress and critical situations.
3. You have a keen understanding of a wide range of emotions even if you don't know what they are called.
4. Your ability to sense feelings and emotions extends to pets/ wild animals and plants/ forests/ flowers/ trees, and nature, very often even to inanimate nonliving objects. This should explain why a certain room depresses you or a wall painting enlivens you up.
5. It also helps you adapt and effortlessly mould yourself to other's moods and personality that makes people appreciate your company a lot more even if they don't know why they find your presence soothing.
6. People open up to you naturally, confiding their secret joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, hopes and fears and feel relieved for your silent understanding even if they don't exactly understand it. This might make you kinda dumping ground for other's pain but you understand it and often don't mind. Sometimes your quiet listening understanding presence is quite therapeutic for some people...
7. Because you understand emotions so well, you understand yourself a lot better than most people, and understand most people lot better than they understand themselves.
8. You not only understand emotions, you also use them, identify them, analyse them, able to manipulate them, manage them, adjust them and handle difficulties with them. This, in the long run, gives you a better mental and emotional health than those who don't/ can't understand their emotions. Think about it: a large majority of crimes, suicides, depressions occur because people cannot handle their emotions.
9. Your ability to understand emotions safeguards you against emotional manipulation and toxicity by negative people around you.
10. It gives you a clear sense of self awareness and self appreciation, as well as awareness and appreciation for others. You are more able to forgive yourself and others. You can accept yourself/ others and able to move on.

Thanks for reading.