What is EQ? Emotional intelligence is sometimes called EQ (or EI) for short. It describes an ability or capacity to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions.
Just as a high IQ can predict top test scores, a high EQ can predict
success in social and emotional situations. For most people, emotional
intelligence (EQ) is more important than one’s intelligence (IQ) in
attaining success in their lives and careers. As individuals the success
of our careers and personal lives depend on our ability to read other
people’s signals and react appropriately to them.
Jobs such as those in sales and customer service in which emotional
competencies obviously make a big difference, we already intuitively
know. What surprised me was from the work done at Google with their ‘Search Inside Yourself’
course. They reported that this is true even for individual
contributors in the tech sector, namely engineers whom you would expect
to succeed purely on intellectual prowess. The top six competencies that
distinguish star performers from average performers in the tech sector
are:
- Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards [EQ]
- Ability to influence [EQ]
- Conceptual thinking [IQ]
- Analytical ability [IQ]
- Initiative in taking on challenges [EQ]
- Self-confidence [EQ]
Of the top six, only two (conceptual thinking and analytical ability)
are purely intellectual competencies. The other four, including the top
two, are emotional competencies.
Emotions have the potential to get in the way of our most important
business and personal relationships. According to John Kotter of Harvard
Business School: “Because of the furious pace of change in business
today, difficult to manage relationships sabotage more business than
anything else – it is not a question of strategy that gets us into
trouble; it is a question of emotions.”
Decades of research now points to emotional intelligence as the
critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the
pack. It’s a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a
tremendous results. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside
33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional
intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a
full 58 percent of success in all types of jobs.
THE FIVE CATEGORIES OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EQ)
1. Self-awareness. The ability to recognise an
emotion as it “happens” is the key to your EQ. Developing self-awareness
requires tuning in to your true feelings. If you evaluate your
emotions, you can manage them.
2. Self-regulation. You often have little control
over when you experience emotions. You can, however, have some say in
how long an emotion will last by using a number of techniques to
alleviate negative emotions such as anger, anxiety or depression. A few
of these techniques include recasting a situation in a more positive
light, taking a long walk and meditation.
3. Motivation. To motivate yourself for any
achievement requires clear goals and a positive attitude. Although you
may have a predisposition to either a positive or a negative attitude,
you can with effort and practice learn to think more positively. If you
catch negative thoughts as they occur, you can reframe them in more
positive terms — which will help you achieve your goals.
4. Empathy. The ability to recognise how people feel
is important to success in your life and career. The more skilful you
are at discerning the feelings behind others’ signals the better you can
control the signals you send them.
5. Social skills. The development of good
interpersonal skills is tantamount to success in your life and career.
In today’s always-connected world, everyone has immediate access to
technical knowledge. Thus, “people skills” are even more important now
because you must possess a high EQ to better understand, empathise and
negotiate with others in a global economy.
5 SIGNS YOU HAVE HIGH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
A hard look at your emotional skills and weaknesses is the first step to improving EQ.
1. You know your strengths and weaknesses. A big
part of having self-awareness is being honest with yourself about who
you are — knowing where you excel, and where you struggle. An
emotionally intelligent person learns to identify their areas of
strength and weakness, and analyse how to work most effectively within
their abilities.
2. You know how to pay attention. Do you get
distracted by every tweet, text and passing thought? If so, it could be
keeping you from functioning on your most emotionally intelligent level.
3. When you’re upset, you know exactly why. We all
experience a number of emotional ups and downs during the day, and often
we don’t even understand what’s causing them. But an important aspect
of self-awareness is the ability to recognise where your emotions are
coming from and to know why you feel upset.
4. You’ve always been self-motivated. Were you
always ambitious and hard-working as a kid, even when you weren’t
rewarded for it? If you’re a motivated self-starter — and you can focus
your attention and energy towards the pursuit of your goals — you likely
have a high EQ.
5. You’re curious about people you don’t know. Do
you love meeting new people, and naturally tend to ask lots of questions
after you’ve been introduced to someone? If so, you have a certain
degree of empathy, one of the main components of emotional intelligence.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE CAN BE DEVELOPED
Some people have naturally good EQ skills. Others need to work on
them. The good news is that everyone can get better. Unlike IQ, people
can actually improve their emotional intelligence. Emotional
intelligence is trainable, even in adults. This claim is based on a new
branch of science known as “neuroplasticity.”
So how do we train emotional intelligence? It turns out the first
step is attention training. The idea is to train attention to create a
quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. That quality of
mind forms the foundation for emotional intelligence.
A strong, stable, and perceptive attention affords you calmness and
clarity. It’s the foundation upon which emotional intelligence is built
upon. Self-awareness depends on being able to see ourselves objectively.
Requires the ability to examine our thoughts and emotions from a
third-person perspective. Not to be swept up in the emotion, not
identifying with it, but just seeing it clearly and objectively.
The way to train your attention is with “mindfulness meditation.” Mindfulness is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
Mindfulness is a quality of mind that we all experience and enjoy
from time to time. It’s something that can be made stronger with
practice. Once it becomes strong, it leads to calmness and clarity that
forms the basis of emotional intelligence.
Once you’ve develop strong, stable, and perceptive attention, we then
focus on our bodies. Every emotion has a correlate in the body. Every
emotional experience is not just a psychological experience. It’s also a
physiological experience.
We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in
the mind. So, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, it’s more
effective if we bring the attention to the body rather than the mind.
Bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution
perception of emotions. High-resolution perception means your perception
becomes so refined, you get to watch an emotion as it arises.
This attention training forms the foundation of the very first category of emotional intelligence. Self-awareness. The
ability to recognise an emotion as it “happens” is the key to your EQ.
Developing self-awareness requires tuning in to your true feelings. If
you evaluate your emotions, you can manage them.
My years of managing dev teams lead me to develop an EQ training course.
It was easy for me to develop their technical abilities but what I
found, what would truly boost their careers was improving EQ skills.
I was fortunate enough to have started Tai Chi a moving meditation at a very early age. Practising Tai Chi for
over 25 years has allowed me to build a solid foundation to support the
most important aspect of EQ development, which is attention training.
If you are interested in supporting yourself or helping the teams you
manage, the links below can help you learn more about EQ training.
- Emotional Intelligence Training Course
- Learn to meditate with the Just6 App
- Meditation and the Science
- 7 reasons that emotional intelligence is quickly becoming one of the top sought job skills
- The secret to a high salary Emotional intelligence
- How to bring mindfulness into your employee wellness program
- Google ’Search Inside Yourself’