Emotional Intelligence - Show gratitude

Gratitude is a form of “social glue” that holds relationships together. A lack of gratitude can erode people’s connections to one another.

Gratitude can be categorized in different ways. It’s an affective trait, meaning that someone can have an overall grateful disposition. Gratitude can also be both a mood and an emotion.

Various studies have found that cultivating gratitude makes people more generous, kind, and helpful towards others. Researchers often note a particular aspect of gratitude that helps people form and keep relationships: The “find, remind, and bind” function.

Someone with a strong gratitude practice pays attention to how thoughtful others are, which helps them find people they want to be in a relationship with. Having gratitude reminds people about the quality of their existing relationships, and it binds people to their friends and partners by making them appreciate and feel appreciated.

A person who is not nice usually struggles to display gratitude. Their general attitude skews toward negativity, meaning they pick out what’s wrong rather than what they feel grateful for. Their relationships tend to suffer because they don’t appreciate what they already have.