Life can get so busy and with all the technology all around us, it can become increasingly hard to keep our real life vs. our digital life in balance. That's why increasing our digital IQ is important, but it's not always easy. Having strong digital emotional intelligence using kindness, empathy and compassion can ensure you have more peace and harmony in your life.
Here are 8 tips to help you build more digital emotional intelligence:
- Be mindful of how long per day you spend on devices, otherwise your personal relationships will suffer from a lack of human interaction and feeling disconnected.
- Maintain your integrity in content you share - your digital footprint carries on long after you do. Stay mindful.
- Oversharing hurts everyone, so focus on sharing content you’re comfortable showing everyone, that includes your grandmother, father or partner.
- Be careful on how you digest content and how it makes you feel. If it makes you feel overly emotional and want to react, take a time out and walk away for a bit. Always use stress relieving activities if you feel triggered.
- Are you Internet savvy? Do you know how to decipher if the content you're reading is truthful and trustworthy? Do you fact check? It's important to check the accuracy of what you're reading online.
- Pause before responding to anything online (posts, pictures, comments). If you speak, share, post too quickly, or in a heated state of mind the lasting footprint may not paint a favorable picture of you.
- If it’s not considered polite conversation at a dinner party, such as religion or politics then you'll want to pause and refrain from hitting send.
- Your opinion isn't private when you post it online, even if you try to remove it. A post can live for 5 minutes and be re-shared thousands of times. Once you post, it's gone from your control.
Emotional Intelligence is such a problem in our digital world now a days, so be a part of the solution and try not to post in the heat of the moment.
A good rule to follow for digital IQ, if you wouldn’t share the content in person at a dinner party or in polite conversation then don’t share online. You aren't anonymous! What you posted/shared and took a picture of 10 years ago, can come back to haunt you in your professional or personal life.
Bottom line - stay mindful and allow empathy and compassion to rule your online viewing and responding behaviors and actions.
