Emotional intelligence is important to have a meaningful and fulfilling life. Harvard did the longest study on adult development that there has ever been. It was over 75 years and what they wanted to know was what constituted a good life, what made life good.
What they found from everyone that they studied over the 75 years was that it was about meaningful relationships. That's what made a great life! It was the relationships that the people had. Now, if you think about the relationships within your own life, you'll have your friends and family, your work network as well as your colleagues and your teammates. So there are different circles that you have these meaningful relationships within.
Understand that also as part of that, you want to have great relationships in all areas of your life. Emotional intelligence can definitely help you to do that.
Another great reason why emotional intelligence is so important is that depending on the role that you're doing, your emotions and the way that you process information situations and how you respond, behave or react is imperative to how the outcome will be.
Take the SAS, as an example, you have to have high emotional intelligence. People think of these people as hard military-driven individuals, but they are strong, critical thinkers. They have high emotional intelligence. They know when to use emotions and when not to, it would not be appropriate to show high emotions when you're just about to go into battle or you're just about to be deployed into military space. If you think of Andy Middleton on SAS who dares wins, for example, think about the way that they approach emotions and emotional response to situations. Okay. I'm not saying it's always right to turn off the emotions because they do need to be expressed at some point.
It's more about delaying that emotion that we have, take doctors, nurses or surgeons, they have to have a great level of emotional intelligence to be able to communicate with the patient's families, to be able to communicate with the patient themselves and manage the fact that they may be anxious, stressed or worried.
Ask yourself, how effective are you in doing that with the people around you when they feel worried and need that reassurance? Well, people that work in health care a lot more developed for actually doing this.
Then you've got therapists, people that work within psychology, counsellors and probation officers, these are the people that spend a lot of time helping people to look and reflect on their behaviour. You cannot change. Someone's mind if you cannot speak to their heart. It is really about creating that trust so that you can connect with that person. So they have to know how to, open up and know you respond to people because it all affects how a person feels.
Take cabin crew as another example in this role people see heightened situations where many people get on planes, there's turbulence, people are worried and the cabin crew are still serving the drinks, still serving the snacks, with a smile on their face, reassuring and keeping everybody else calm. It's habitual to them, but many great crew members have high emotional intelligence to understand circumstances, understand situations and adapt how they respond to those situations as well.
It really is absolutely crucial in so many different industries and so many different careers. It's about learning when to display, how, when to delay the emotion.
I'm sure that there are many delayed emotions that get expressed, especially when there are difficult times at work. When that person returns home and now that there is time or there is silence to process some of the things that happen during their day, it's not surprising that they let the emotions out. They have been holding themselves together all day or for weeks in some cases, not displaying them when they are within the workplace.
Emotional Intelligence helps us to be more diplomatic, reassure others and put them at ease. If you can understand circumstances, understand emotions, you can help other people to manage them and reassure them in the process.
High emotional intelligence through self-awareness will help you to know when you need self-care. We all have times when we are snappy or we notice that our patience is wearing thin. We start to get distressed, can't think or process things or forgetting things as well. This is when it is time to take a break from our consciousness.
Building trust with others is linked to emotional intelligence. It's about being compassionate and empathetic towards others so that you build trust and have strong relationships, which we've seen create a more fulfilling life.
It can help you to make difficult decisions. You've got the rational side, you've got your gut instincts or emotional state. When you can process your emotions you can ask yourself "what are my emotions trying to tell me?".
It is important to be able to motivate and lead others effectively.
If you are the leader of a military mission, you know, the team is being deployed and you have to motivate them to take action. If you act worried, nervous or scared by displaying those emotions, you are not going to motivate the rest of your team to get out of that helicopter or to jump into that water.
Let's go back to asking, "what is in it for you?" I'm going to go over it again -
Better mental health, great job performance, effective leadership of others and a more fulfilling life. The reason why I wanted to really hone in on this again, is that, did you know that you are much more likely to be earning £22,000 more per year when you have higher emotional intelligence? That is a big difference.
The Modern Mind Group are emotioneering human performance not engineering it.
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