Developing emotional skills

I really need to develop emotional skills, but I don't really even know what they are, so I did a bit of googling. Came up with Daniel Goleman's emotional intelligence, that I heard of long ago, but a brief summary lays out five types of skills. How to develop these?

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/

eq5_raising_emotional_intelligence.htm

(The above is two parts of one link. It wouldn't display all the characters otherwise.)

Well, seems it has to do with awareness including body awareness of stress responses. Another link I came up with discusses emotions and skills in a way more familiar to me, in a context of meditational awareness. Another way I could work at it to improve.

http://www.bemindful.org/darkemotions.html

I thought both of these were insightful links, so I thought I'd share them. I am not affiliated witih these sites in any way, nor do I know the people involved. Just thought there was good food for thought and some guidance there.

I have been in treatment and learning both mindfulness and DBT. There are a lot of great books out there on both of these things. They have made a huge difference for me.

Thanks for reply. I've been to a long workshop on DBT. Seems like a person could make progress without a therapist. Does that make sense? I guess the therapist might help a lot, though. What do you think, since it sounds like you've had both? I just found a website with some DBT self help advice from other people with experience, but I haven't read it yet:

http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/

There is also CBT; you can also google that. There are a couple of websites that have some pretty good stuff you can download:
www.getselfhelp.co.uk
www.psychologytools.org

I'm probably too critical to that kind of self help. It often shows you where you need to be and the advice getting there is usually "try to get there". Learning emotional skills I'm not so sure you can get from a book but if it works for you then good. Maybe those texts are aimed at people different than me. For me they state the obvious but they fail to help where I personally have issues.

The second link I think was worth reading. People are indeed pain phobic these days. I lost a friend once and after ONE DAY I was told that is in the past now so forget it.

Yea. Right.

One day, after I had been raped the night before, one lady told me, "Just don't think about it."