Are you sulking at the promotion that your colleague just got despite him being less intelligent than you are? Well, it is possible that he is emotionally stronger, versatile and dynamic. The reality is that people who are dynamic, the go-getters as they are fondly known (or known ad nauseam), are at a greater advantage.
Emotional Intelligence And Your Career
If you are unsure whether emotions play a role in your career, assume yourself being moved to a higher position where you are required to plan and execute projects worth a million dollars. The project naturally involves a lot of decision making about your staff and purchases during the course of execution. The sustenance and growth of your career now hinges on this project. Making adept decisions calls for balanced thought processes. Emotional flexibility helps you adapt to demanding situations quickly.
Emotional Traits To Succeed In Your Career
Previously, it was enough just to have good educational qualifications to get and keep a job. But presently work demands are extremely high, requiring you to be stronger in emotional issues.
1.Self-Awareness: Your day-to-day emotions play a role in shaping up the daily activities for you and your staff. Identifying your emotional behaviors and their effects help you understand your strengths or weaknesses. This allows you utilize your full potential which otherwise may get lost.
2.Self-Restraint: Knowledge of your mood swings before others know them is imperative. Impulsive moods and unrestricted emotions, however well intentioned they may be, will spoil the whole game for you. Having checks in place helps channel emotions and your concentration towards productivity.
3.Self-Initiation: Needing someone to push you into a working mood is the result of lethargy and complacency. This is sure to hamper your career prospects in the long run. You don't need anyone else to motivate you to get started! Self-motivated people value the relaxation resulting from an accomplished task; they don't believe in relaxing midway.
4.Interpersonal Skills: Relationship building exercises as a part of your motivational activities helps induce collaborative culture and a sense of responsibility. You can influence others? reactions into desirable responses.
5.Empathy: Acknowledging the feelings of others is also important. Your sensibilities, ability to understand frustrations and emotional dynamics and meeting the key needs of all types of people builds loyalty.
You Can Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
Unlike the IQ, EQ, or emotional quotient or intelligence as it is known, can be improved by careful application of mind and perseverance. But how do you know you need to improve upon your emotions? You are a candidate for improvement if you remember a recent incident where you regretted an act immediately after it was over. Psychologist Dr. Hendrie Weisinger advises improving your self-awareness which will open your eyes to your emotional status.
Steps To Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
The following steps may help you improve your emotional performance:
1.Watch your emotional acts over a fortnight, note down any significant acts which you committed or missed. Review them later and note whether your actions helped or damaged your prospects and if it could have been different had you taken a different step or path.
2.Stop impulsive resentments at others? mistakes. React to mistakes at a later time when you have cooled off.
3.Realize that you are helpless without your team. Understand their emotional needs which help inspire loyalty toward you.
4.Develop positive thoughts instead of finding faults with others. Finding faults is not the end of the game; rectifying them is.
The benefits of increasing your Emotional Intelligence skills fall into three basic areas: decision-making, relationships, and health. These areas are comprehensive in that they impact every action and reaction, every behavior and every circumstance. They are integral to your professional relationships as well as your family interactions, from the broad sweep of day-to-day small incidents that influence your life to major, multi-million dollar corporations.
Decision Making
By becoming aware of what you are feeling in the moment you have information you can use to make a decision about what to say or do now. Developing emotional self-regulation skills allows you to quickly transform negative, draining emotions into more positive, productive ones, enabling you to think and act more rationally at any time. Your moment-to-moment decision-making is enhanced significantly. These skills will help prevent you from reacting and allow you to respond more thoughtfully and thoroughly. Being in control of your emotions has a huge positive impact on your performance, your effectiveness, your confidence and your motivation.
Relationships
Emotional Intelligence skills will not only empower you personally, they will have a positive impact on your relationships with others as well. For example, instead of blowing up when your project manager announces a deadline without consulting you, managing your emotional reactiveness enables you to remain calm, ask good questions, perhaps even influence the deadline - all the while preserving your good working relationship with your manager. Had you reacted negatively, the breakdown in communication would have created barriers to working effectively. You would have essentially lost ground in your relationship and would need to exert a great deal of effort and time to repair the damage. You, your manager, and the organization benefit when relationships are maintained and enhanced.
On the home front, when your child comes home with a poor test score or lower grade than you think he can earn, rather than putting him on the hot seat, you can show him you care and are concerned about him, and still maintain a firm but understanding approach to the situation. Think of the positive effect this is likely to have on your relationships with your children.
When participants in my programs have employed simple EI techniques, they have been astounded by their children's responses. For example an SVP of HR for a large organization discovered his son had charged a tank of gas on his credit card. His immediate reaction was to grab a baseball bat to get his son's attention. Instead, he used a simple, quick emotional management technique and asked himself, "What's a better way to handle this situation?" He had a very serious conversation (without the bat) about the inappropriateness of using the card. For punishment, his son was not allowed to drive his own truck for a week. When the son asked, "How am I going to get to work?" Dad's reply was, "That's your problem." The next morning the son called his dad at work and thanked him for having a conversation instead of a yelling match.
This story demonstrates how managing emotions can have a significant impact. The conversation and interaction was very different than the usual, and the relationship was improved. And the dad was being a much better role model for his son.
Health
The third area affected by developing your Emotional Intelligence skills, but certainly not the least, is your health. Negative emotions fuel higher cortisol levels, often called "the stress hormone.Excessive cortisol levels, over time, can cause acid reflux, sleeplessness, asthma, ulcers, loss of bone mass and osteoporosis, low sperm count, redistribution of fat to the waist and hips, and fat buildup in the arteries, which can lead to heart disease and numerous other diseases (McCraty, Borrios-Choplin et al. "The Impact of a New Emotional Self-Management Program on Stress, Emotions, Heart Rate Variability, DHEA and Cortisol" Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33(2):151-70, 1998). Mismanaged emotions, correlated with dysrhythmias in our Autonomic Nervous System, are associated with many diseases including asthma, chronic fatigue, depression, hypoglycemia, hypertension and many more. Learning to transform from negative emotions into positive productive ones throughout the day or night over a sustained period of time has been shown to have a positive impact on many health-related problems. In my programs, participants most frequently mention a significant elimination or reduction of sleeplessness, often in a couple of weeks.
Developing Emotional Intelligence skills is not difficult. People who have applied simple, proven techniques consistently have realized the benefits in a very short period of time. They have reported improvements in all of the categories - decision-making, relationships and health.
Both Tony Jacowski & Byron Stock are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Tony Jacowski has sinced written about articles on various topics from University, Six Sigma and Information Technology. Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution's Six Sigma Online offers online and certification classes for lean six sigm. Tony Jacowski's top article generates over 90500 views. to your Favourites.
Byron Stock has sinced written about articles on various topics from Emotional Intelligence, Vitamins and Emotional Intelligence. Tailoring the art and science of Emotional Intelligence (EI) to your needs, Byron Stock focuses on results, helping individuals and organizations enhance , leader. Byron Stock's top article generates over 5400 views. to your Favourites.