Emotional Intelligence – An Important Leadership Skill

This is the ability to identify and manage our own emotions and recognize, understand or influence the emotions of others. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence is recognized to be one of the most important predictors of personal, business and professional success.

The model introduced by Daniel Goleman focuses on emotional intelligence as a wide array of competencies and skills that drive leadership performance. Goleman’s model outlines four main EQ constructs:

1. Self-awareness – the ability to read one’s emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide decisions.
2. Self-management – involves controlling one’s emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.
3. Social awareness – the ability to sense, understand, and react to other people’s emotions while comprehending social networks.
4. Relationship management – the ability to inspire, influence, and develop others while managing conflict.

Irene Becker in her 3Q leadership model has a list of the major emotional intelligence competencies that make up a fully integrated personality:

1. Emotional Self-awareness – The degree to which you can notice your feelings, label them and attribute them properly.
2. Emotional Expression – The ability to express your feelings and gut-level instincts. Emotional expression is an integral part of your day.
3. Emotional Awareness of Others – The ability to hear, sense or intuit what other people may be feeling from their words, body language (non- verbal) or other direct or indirect clues.
4. Creativity Tapping into the multiple non-cognitive resources that help us envision new ideas, frame alternative solutions and find effective ways of doing things.
5. Resilience/Flexibility/Adaptability. The ability to bounce back, be flexible, and retain curiosity and hope in the face of adversity, change or challenge.
6. Interpersonal Connections – Creating and sustaining a network of people with whom you can be your real and whole self. Where there is real communication.
7. Constructive Discontent – The ability to stay calm focused and emotionally grounded in disagreement or conflict.
8. Outlook/Optimism – Being positive and optimistic.
9. Compassion/Empathy – The ability to be empathic, appreciate and honor others’ feelings.
10. Intuition – The ability to notice, trust and use your hunches, gut-level reactions, and other non-cognitive responses produced by the senses, emotions, mind and body.
11. Intentionality: Saying what you mean and meaning what you say; being willing to forego distractions and temptations in order to be responsible for your actions and your motives.
12. Trust radius – Believing people are “good” until proven otherwise. Alternatively overcoming being too trusting.
13. Personal Power – Believing you can meet challenges and live the life you choose.

Instead of taking an assessment, you can see what Dr. Travis Bradberry says about the 18 signs that you have a high EQ.

1. People with high EQs master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive robust vocabulary of feelings to do so.
2. Emotionally intelligent people are curious about everyone around them.
3. Emotionally intelligent people are flexible and are constantly adapting and embracing to change.
4. Having a high EQ means they know their strengths and how to lean into and use them to your full advantage while keeping their weaknesses from holding them back.
5. Much of emotional intelligence comes down to social awareness; the ability to read other people, know what they’re about, and understand what they’re going through.
6. Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident, open-minded and difficult to offend.
7. Emotional intelligence means knowing how to exert self-control. They delay gratification and avoid impulsive action. They know how to say no (to self and others).
8. Emotionally intelligent people let go of their mistakes but do so without forgetting them.
9. Emotionally intelligent people give and expect nothing in return.
10. Emotionally intelligent people don’t hold grudges.
11. High-EQ individuals neutralize toxic people and control their interactions with toxic people by keeping their feelings in check. They consider the difficult person’s standpoint and can find solutions and common ground.
12. Emotionally intelligent people won’t set perfection as their target because they know that it doesn’t exist.
13. Emotionally intelligent people work daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude.
14. Emotionally intelligent people disconnect. They take regular time off the grid.
15. High-EQ individuals know that caffeine is trouble, and they limit their caffeine intake.
16. High-EQ individuals know that their self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when they don’t get enough–or the right kind–of sleep. So, they make sleep a top priority.
17. Emotionally intelligent people separate their thoughts from the facts to escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive, new outlook. They stop negative self-talk in its tracks.
18. When emotionally intelligent people feel good about something they’ve done, they won’t let anyone limit their joy.

The good news is that not only can emotional intelligence competencies be increased, but EQ will help us build the leadership, transparent communication and collaboration to lead better lives, do better business and contribute to a better world.

To your success!

Charlene

Are you Happy?

I went away for the weekend to chill with a girlfriend. On Friday night we decided to watch a movie and we chose Collateral Beauty as neither of us had seen it yet. The movie is about a successful advertising executive played by Will Smith, who is reduced to a clinically depressed loner after his young daughter’s tragic death. During this time he writes letters about abstract concepts of Love, Time, and Death.  I won’t spoil the movie but suffice to say, since it dealt with time, love and death, it got us thinking.

After the movie, my friend asked me, “Are you happy”? The question took me by surprise as I was not displaying any unhappiness, so I wondered why that question. It was a question I had pondered when I wrote my last book, The 30 Laws of Flow. So since I knew the Law of Polarity, that was how I answered. The Law of Polarity shows us that in order to know happiness, we have to also know sadness. In our dualistic world, you can’t know happiness without experiencing sadness. This goes for all of our emotional states. It is one of the privileges and greatest challenges of our human experience.

We can choose to be happy as an adopted attitude but I propose that what we are looking for is more appropriately described as flow or harmony, serenity, joy, bliss or love. Flow seen in this way is an acceptance, a receptive state of being. So when asked, am I happy, I described the state by using the word serenity instead of the word happy.

The word happy has so many connotations. The state of happiness will be triggered by completely different circumstances for everyone. The greatest teachers and sages throughout time have said that only the urge to find your real Self can make you truly happy.

When we start the transformation of expressing our inner selves in the external world, we become more open, removing the filters and masks and letting spirit move through us. A sure sign of this is when we are happy for no reason, feeling content, peaceful—it is coming from within us, we are no longer separate from it, and we are in a different state of consciousness, in the flow.

So when my friend expressed that she was not happy, we explored her inner world to discover the reason. What became clear is that a book project she had been passionate about had been left behind and she was not having fun doing what she was currently occupying her time with. As soon as she spoke about her book project, her energy changed and there were an aliveness and a joy back in her voice. So it became clear that rekindling this project would connect her back to her soul’s work.

Fascinating how after that conversation we saw in the village a placard saying “Happiness is not a destination, It’s a way of life.” Also, Denis Waitley said, “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.” So two great reminders that happiness is an inside job.

So I will leave you with the question, “Are you happy?”

To your success,

Charlene