Emotional Intelligence, often shortened to EI or EQ (Emotional Quotient), was first mentioned in 1964 although become widely popular by the best selling book Emotional Intelligence by science journalist, Daniel Goleman.
Often referred to as 'soft skills' (ah don't get me started), they are particularly hard skills and characteristics to develop. At the Modern Mind Group, we offer training courses and workshops on Emotional Intelligence so let's look at some of the ways that having better emotional intelligence can change your life.
Here are 5 of the big ones -
1. Better Relationships With Others
Think about the conflict that we have with others. Often is it through being misunderstood, clashes in the way people behave or the things that they say. As the quote goes 'people won't always remember what you say but they will remember how you make them feel'.
Social skills are part of our emotional intelligence. Many of us want to have strong friendships and family relationships. This can be a struggle if you are not as self-aware. Understanding how we come across to others and being able to control our emotions is part of what we can learn to improve our emotional intelligence. Knowing how to communicate and express ourselves in a way that strengthens relationships rather than weakens them is key. People with higher emotional intelligence are often trusted more by others.
2. Improved Mental Health
Our mental health can be improved by having higher emotional intelligence. Two key areas within emotional intelligence that allow us to do this are - Understanding our emotions (Self-awareness) and Managing our emotions (Self-regulation).
Our mental health is about the way we feel, our thoughts, our emotions and affects the way we behave through our experiences. Mental health can often be linked to following a traumatic experience or a collection of experiences over time. We can often feel anxious, angry, sad, suffer phobias or have a low mood. Everyone experiences this at different times. The key is to identify them, process them and then make changes to balance out the emotions or control them rather than your emotions having control of you.
Being more aware of our emotions and how we feel can start to help us to know when we need to slow down, take a break or set goals to be more motivated.
3. Increased Earning Potential
A person with high emotional intelligence will earn on average £22,000 more per year. People with higher emotional intelligence are often seen in roles that involve spending time with people and being responsible for business outcomes. For example, being a manager or leader so this average would make sense for someone that can manage their emotions and also be able to manage the emotions of others.
4. Better Decision-Making Ability
When coaching people they often come to me because they are at a crossroad in their life or need to make a difficult decision. The journey of self-discovery leads back to fear of making a wrong decision and worry about the outcome. The emotioneering triangle is about moving people from fear to courage and then to confidence.
"Fear is a reaction courage is a decision and confidence is an outcome"
When we are empowered to find the courage to make decisions we often find that the reality of the outcome was not as bad as what we envisaged and therefore our confidence grows.
Having the ability to recognise an emotional decision versus a rational and calculated one is part of the art of emotional intelligence. This can be an internal struggle for so many.
Understanding yourself, your beliefs and your decision-making process can help you to know if you are making the decision through fear or courage.
5. Better Leadership of Others
Without a doubt, some of the best leaders have high emotional intelligence. They are leaders of people. Often they are great communicators and know how to connect and motivate their team. Their style of leadership is supportive and encouraging as well as being able to diplomatically speak to someone about their opportunities for growth without making them feel like they are not good enough.
Emotional Intelligence enables a leader to notice the emotions of others, manage the emotions of others as well as motivate their team specific to the employee's needs.
Which one of these 5 points would benefit you the most? Start your journey to improving your emotional intelligence and it is possible that you can achieve one if not all of the above.
The Modern Mind Group are emotioneering human performance not engineering it.
As people operations and performance consultants, we work with your business to identify and improve performance gaps so that you can be more profitable and professionally develop your people. Over 12 years of expertise in people operations and performance with results to back it all up. Why settle for the average when there is a world of possibility when you know how to achieve it? Untapped potential - Let's go get it!
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