Emotional Intelligence (EI) Executive Coach at InLight Coaching. Let EI enhance your career and relationships with EQi-2/360® Assessments!
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Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the skills and abilities that help you identify, understand and manage your own emotions and identify and empathize with the emotions of others. Whether online or in person, at work or at home, EI can help each of us build and maintain stronger and better relationships. Inspiring leaders in particular have much to gain from the effective use of EI.
A person with a high EI is more likely to:
• Name and express their feelings and connect to their emotions, so as to be able to understand and manage their responses to stimuli and events. They are able to identify root causes rather than ineffectively trying to deal with symptoms or results. They are self-aware, openly expressive and healthily assertive.
• Know what they want and make plans to achieve their goals. They have a better understanding of what drives them. They are more likely to understand what gives them pleasure and why. This means they are also more likely to identify their values and know their purpose in life.
• Remain calm in challenging situations. By labeling their feelings and recognizing their emotions, people with high EI can learn to manage their feelings instead of allowing their emotions to hijack their thoughts. This can help them remain calm while others are losing their heads.
• Decode their emotions. They practice understanding the meaning of any particular emotion and, where appropriate, redirect their emotional responses to where they are more appropriate and beneficial. They are able to recognize which emotions should be encouraged and which should be reconsidered.
• Reduce their anxiety in stressful times. By understanding the causes of stress and identifying its signs, people with higher-than-average EI have an excellent chance of reducing anxiety by generating alternative meanings for stressful events and taking more effective action, including advocating for themselves.
• Work well with others. Actively listening to others, identifying their feelings and emotions and empathizing with them helps people with high EI build more authentic, long-lasting and mutually rewarding relationships. Those with high EI will be more likely to notice signals that others miss. These signals can include slight changes in facial expressions, tone of voice and body language, all of which can help an individual respond quickly and helpfully, thereby building trust and intimacy.
• Learn from mistakes and criticism. If someone asks for criticism and doesn’t fall to pieces when the feedback is negative, this points to someone with high EI. EI doesn’t make someone cold or impervious to pain. Rather, it can help them regulate their emotions, which makes them more able to hear negative criticism and use it to improve rather than interpret it as a personal attack.
• Be the voice of their heart, not the echo of their ego. They are able to recognize and follow the quiet voice of their heart, instead of only listening to the demanding and often wrong voice of their ego.
• Ask for help. People with high EI learn that asking for help is a sign of wisdom and empowerment and not simply a sign of weakness leading to disappointment, self-belittling and rejection.
• Focus on having intended instead of unintended impacts. They are able to take a pause from blurting and patiently take a few deep breaths. Further, they have learned to react to or ask questions based on compassion and considerations of how they are landing rather than focusing solely on their own agenda. They practice empathy and compassionate accountability instead of telling people what to do.
• Shift from making assumptions to engaging their own curiosity. They refuse to take things personally and avoid becoming stuck with a fixed mindset. They are always seeking to grow, develop and advance.
• Change from taking things personally and being gratuitously judgmental to expressing their curiosity, compassion and understanding. No one is totally right or wrong. Those with high EI see an opportunity for themselves to grow and evolve instead of dwelling on taking things personally.
• Shift their locus of control. They are able to focus on what they are capable of influencing and controlling rather than wasting their time with matters that are outside their area of control.
Developing Your EI
In striving to improve your EI, you need to know that it has five main components, which are:
• Self-perception
• Self-expression
• Interpersonal skills
• Decision-making
• Stress management
Almost all people have uneven levels of EI in these categories. Some of their EI levels are higher than others. In seeking to improve your EI, consider where your strengths lie and where you can improve most. As you go through your daily activities, make an effort to improve your development areas. Take these initial steps:
• Raise your self-awareness to the point where you can as objectively as possible observe your relationships with your thoughts and your feelings.
• Label your feelings and their root emotions and identify their locations in your body. By labeling them and identifying their roadmap in your body, you can help yourself pinpoint exactly what you feel and identify which emotion initiated this feeling. Pay attention to how often you experience the same feeling/emotion.
• Understand the trigger behind the emotions. Which of your values was not honored? Name the main judgemental thought you generated in order to give meaning to this specific event. By working on reducing the threshold of your triggers, you can reduce the number and intensity of your impulsive responses and decrease your later regrets.
• Express your feelings and emotions. Talking about or doing something about your feelings and emotions can be healthy. Don’t bottle them up or keep a description of them from someone who would benefit from it. Find your voice through a healthy assertive communication style (i.e., a style which is protective of your needs, wants, beliefs, values, while remaining respectful and positive).
• Regulate your emotional responses so that you have time to choose among alternative actions. You might do this by pausing, exploring a different perspective, meditating, distracting yourself with a pleasant hobby or asking for help.
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