Emotional Intelligence

Developing Strong “People Skills” – We probably all know people, either at work or in our personal lives, who are really good listeners. No matter what kind of situation we’re in, they always seem to know just what to say – and how to say it – so that we’re not offended or upset. They’re caring and considerate, and even if we don’t find a solution to our problem, we usually leave feeling more hopeful and optimistic. ..

We probably also know people who are masters at managing their emotions. They don’t get angry in stressful situations. Instead, they have the ability to look at a problem and calmly find a solution. They’re excellent decision makers, and they know when to trust their intuition. Regardless of their strengths, however, they’re usually willing to look at themselves honestly. They take criticism well, and they know when to use it to improve their performance.

People like this have a high degree of emotional intelligence, or EI. They know themselves very well, and they’re also able to sense the emotional needs of others.

Would you like to be more like this?

As more and more people accept that emotional intelligence is just as important to professional success as technical ability, organizations are increasingly using EI when they hire and promote.

For example, one large cosmetics company recently revised their hiring process for salespeople to choose candidates based on emotional intelligence. The result? Salespeople hired with the new system have sold, on average, $91,000 more than salespeople selected under the old system. There has also been significantly lower staff turnover among the group chosen for their emotional intelligence.

So, what exactly is emotional intelligence, and what can you do to improve yours?

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

We all have different personalities, different wants and needs, and different ways of showing our emotions. Navigating through this all takes tact and cleverness – especially if we hope to succeed in life. This is where emotional intelligence becomes important.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your emotions, understand what they’re telling you, and realize how your emotions affect people around you. Emotional intelligence also involves your perception of others: when you understand how they feel, this allows you to manage relationships more effectively.

People with high emotional intelligence are usually successful in most things they do. Why? Because they’re the ones that others want on their team. When people with high EI send an email, it gets answered. When they need help, they get it. Because they make others feel good, they go through life much more easily than people who are easily angered or upset.

Characteristics of Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist, developed a framework of five elements that define emotional intelligence:

1. Self-Awareness: People with high emotional intelligence are usually very self-aware. They understand their emotions, and because of this, they don’t let their feelings rule them. They’re confident – because they trust their intuition and don’t let their emotions get out of control.They’re also willing to take an honest look at themselves. They know their strengths and weaknesses, and they work on these areas so they can perform better. Many people believe that this self-awareness is the most important part of emotional intelligence.
2. Self-Regulation: This is the ability to control emotions and impulses. People who self-regulate typically don’t allow themselves to become too angry or jealous, and they don’t make impulsive, careless decisions. They think before they act. Characteristics of self-regulation are thoughtfulness, comfort with change, integrity, and the ability to say no.
3. Motivation: People with a high degree of emotional intelligence are usually motivated. They’re willing to defer immediate results for long-term success. They’re highly productive, love a challenge, and are very effective in whatever they do.
4. Empathy: This is perhaps the second-most important element of emotional intelligence. Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the wants, needs, and viewpoints of those around you. People with empathy are good at recognizing the feelings of others, even when those feelings may not be obvious. As a result, empathetic people are usually excellent at managing relationships, listening, and relating to others. They avoid stereotyping and judging too quickly, and they live their lives in a very open, honest way.
5. Social Skills: It’s usually easy to talk to and like people with good social skills, another sign of high emotional intelligence. Those with strong social skills are typically team players. Rather than focus on their own success first, they help others develop and shine. They can manage disputes, are excellent communicators, and are masters at building and maintaining relationships.

As you’ve probably determined, emotional intelligence can be a key to success in your life – especially in your career. The ability to manage people and relationships is very important in all leaders, so developing and using your emotional intelligence can be a good way to show others the leader inside of you.

How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

The good news is that emotional intelligence CAN be taught and developed. Many books and tests are available to help you determine your current EI, and identify where you may need to do some work. You can also use these tips:

• Observe how you react to people. Do you rush to judgment before you know all of the facts? Do you stereotype? Look honestly at how you think and interact with other people. Try to put yourself in their place, and be more open and accepting of their perspectives and needs.
• Look at your work environment. Do you seek attention for your accomplishments? Humility can be a wonderful quality, and it doesn’t mean that you’re shy or lack self-confidence. When you practice humility, you say that you know what you did, and you can be quietly confident about it. Give others a chance to shine – put the focus on them, and don’t worry too much about getting praise for yourself.
• Do a self-evaluation. What are your weaknesses? Are you willing to accept that you’re not perfect and that you could work on some areas to make yourself a better person? Have the courage to look at yourself honestly – it can change your life.
• Examine how you react to stressful situations. Do you become upset every time there’s a delay or something doesn’t happen the way you want? Do you blame others or become angry at them, even when it’s not their fault? The ability to stay calm and in control in difficult situations is highly valued – in the business world and outside it. Keep your emotions under control when things go wrong.
• Take responsibility for your actions. If you hurt someone’s feelings, apologize directly – don’t ignore what you did or avoid the person. People are usually more willing to forgive and forget if you make an honest attempt to make things right.
• Examine how your actions will affect others – before you take those actions. If your decision will impact others, put yourself in their place. How will they feel if you do this? Would you want that experience? If you must take the action, how can you help others deal with the effects?

Key Points

Although “regular” intelligence is important to success in life, emotional intelligence is key to relating well to others and achieving your goals. Many people believe that emotional intelligence is at least as important as regular intelligence, and many companies now use EI testing to hire new staff.

Emotional intelligence is an awareness of your actions and feelings – and how they affect those around you. It also means that you value others, listen to their wants and needs, and are able to empathize or identify with them on many different levels:

1. Develop Your Emotional Self-Awareness

Get used to thinking of your emotions as carrying a message – either about something that’s happening now, or something that happened in the past that you have not yet fully resolved. Whenever you feel an emotion you’re not comfortable with, you can ask yourself “what is this feeling trying to tell me?”

One of the best ways to develop your awareness of your own emotions is to meditate. Take some time out to relax, being aware of your breathing as it flows in and out. Observe your thoughts and feelings as they come and go, without judging them. This will give you a degree of detachment, as you realise you are more than whatever thoughts and emotions you are experiencing at the time.

Another good way to become more aware and accepting of your emotions is to keep an emotional journal. Just take five minutes each morning to write down how you’re feeling. Writing things down in this way gives you a degree of detachment and allows you to express your feelings in a way which is safe. It also allows you to recognise recurring patterns in your emotional responses and gives you a record of how far you have come as you develop your emotional intelligence.

2. Take Responsibility for Your Actions and Feelings

It’s important that you accept the emotions you’re feeling as yours. Often we can regard certain feelings as unacceptable and refuse to acknowledge them. This will lead to trouble as we still continue to act from our emotions even if we deny them to ourselves. Sometimes we even project them on to other people, so that someone who is in denial about their own anger may encounter a lot of ‘angry’ people.

Often we talk about emotions as if they just ‘happen’, or that other people create them in us, as in ‘she made me angry’ or ‘he upset me’. Some people even seem to have inanimate objects controlling their emotions, as in ‘that squeaky gate is really pissing me off!’

So, can other people or even lumps of metal really control your emotions, causing your brain to release exactly the right combination of neuropeptides to experience irritation, fear or guilt? I would suggest not.

All the information we receive from our five senses about what’s happening around us is already filtered by the time we become aware of it – first by the limbic system, our primitive emotional brain, and then by our beliefs and the meanings which we put on these events.

For example, if someone shouts at you and you get upset, it may be that the look they give you, or the tone of voice they use, reminds you at an unconscious level of a much earlier time you were shouted at by a parent or other authority figure. What you feel in response are the same feelings you had at that earlier time. In fact they are the same feelings, trapped in your brain since that earlier event and restimulated by a current event that matches the same pattern.

Or it might be your beliefs that are really crucial to bringing about your emotional response. If you believe that people “shouldn’t” shout at other people, naturally you feel upset when someone does. In fact if you have that belief, it means that other people are capable of making you upset any time they want, simply by shouting at you. They may even evoke that response without meaning to – after all, since they can’t read your mind, how are they to know what you believe?

The emotional response to the meaning which we place on any given event can happen so quickly that we aren’t aware of our filtering process and assigning of meaning which happens in the gap between the triggering event and the response. It feels like the ‘trigger’ really does cause the emotional response.

However, if that were really the case, then everyone would react in exactly the same way in similar situations – which clearly they don’t. One person might get angry, another might get frightened, another find it funny, and another might not even notice.

Here’s the thing: in principle, you can change any of your mental filters and emotional responses. This means that you can take “response – ability” – the ability to be able to choose how you want to feel about anything that happens.
3. Remember – You Are Not Your Emotions

There are no “bad” emotions. Whatever you feel is giving you valuable information: either about the situation that you’re in, or about some event that’s happened in the past that you need to learn from and move on.

A trap that people often fall into is feeling that they ‘ought’ to feel a certain way – that they are a ‘bad person’ for feeling emotions they have been brought up to believe are wrong to express or even to feel. If they are on a spiritual path, it can be even worse, as they may feel they ‘ought’ to be above feeling that way.

Remember, it’s how you respond to those feelings that matters. Whatever emotion you’re feeling, you still have a choice about how you act on it – and that’s what counts. Judging yourself does not make you a better person.

4. Put Yourself In The Other Person’s Shoes

Any time that you’re dealing with another person – on a date, in a job interview, in a dispute, selling to them, working with them, or just hanging out – things will go more smoothly if from time to time you put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself, “What’s going on for this person right now? What’s important to them? What do they want from this interchange? What might they be feeling?”

Everyone sees the world in different ways, and everything that person does and says makes sense from their viewpoint, even if it makes no sense to you. People make the best choices they can given their unique ‘map’ of the world – if you assume they have the same map as you, then some of those ‘actions’ might even seem stupid or malicious. If you get a sense of what’s going on for them, you will find them much easier to communicate with.

5. Get Some Distance From The Bad Stuff

I once had a client who came to me for help with anxiety about speaking in public. Every time this person had to give a presentation at work, he found himself experiencing panic symptoms which got stronger as the day approached. He had always got through to the end of the presentation without major disasters, but he hated the experience while it was happening.

When we investigated how he was creating these feelings for himself, it turned out that for days before the presentation he was imagining as many ways that things could go wrong as he could think of. When I tell you that he was imagining these disasters vividly and as if he was really there experiencing it, you’ll understand how he managed to get more and more nervous as the presentation got closer.

While the impulse behind imagining things in this scary and demoralising way was a positive one – to allow him to prepare for any eventuality – the result was that he was doing the exact opposite of the positive mental rehearsal that every successful athlete does. He was mentally rehearsing failure, reinforcing his fear and making it more and more likely that he would mess up in reality as well. Even if the presentation had turned out well in reality, he wouldn’t have had to miss out on the bad feelings – he’d already lived them in his imagination many times over.

With some coaching, he was able to check for things that might go wrong in a less damaging way. By viewing each scenario as a detached observer, in black and white and as a smaller-than-lifesize picture, he was able to see his future self coping with various possible glitches, without having to become emotionally involved in what he was seeing. I also suggested that he finish off by seeing himself in a life-size, colourful picture, giving a perfect presentation, so that he ended his reverie feeling good. He was then able to approach his presentations in a much more resourceful emotional state, and consequently perform much better.

Often the way we feel is a response to ‘movies’ that our minds run, or to an internal critical voice. While the mind’s intention in creating these thoughts and images is positive, the effect is often unhelpful.

The qualities of the pictures, and the volume and tone of internal dialogue, are what give these thoughts their power. A big, bright, moving, 3-D mental picture, especially if we see it as if through our own eyes, will be more affecting than a small, dim, monochrome, 2-D snapshot, whatever the actual content of the picture. Similarly, a loud inner voice with an edge to it will have more of an impact than a softly-spoken voice, whatever it’s saying.

You can use your mental ‘remote control’ to alter the qualities of your mental pictures. Make your good memories and fantasies big, bright, moving and ‘real’ so you can enjoy the most intense positive feelings from them. If you have to look at bad memories or imagine an unpleasant experience, make the picture small, dim, monochrome and two-dimensional, and look at it as if you were a detached observer. That way you can still get whatever information you need, while minimising uncomfortable emotional responses.