Decades of research now point to lack emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. Learn the signs that you lack emotional intelligence.

This was a good read thought I should share. This is why the Just Being Emotional Intelligence Course is so valuable. You can follow the original article here.

When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held assumption that IQ was the sole source of success.

Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. The connection is so strong that 90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results.

Despite the significance of EQ, its intangible nature makes it very difficult to know how much you have and what you can do to improve if you’re lacking. You can always take a scientifically validated test, such as the one that comes with the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book.

Unfortunately, quality (scientifically valid) EQ tests aren’t free. So, I’ve analyzed the data from the million-plus people TalentSmart has tested in order to identify the behaviors that are the hallmarks of a low EQ. These are the behaviors that you want to eliminate from your repertoire.

1. You get stressed easily. When you stuff your feelings, they quickly build into the uncomfortable sensations of tension, stress and anxiety. Unaddressed emotions strain the mind and body. Your emotional intelligence skills help make stress more manageable by enabling you to spot and tackle tough situations before things escalate. People who fail to use their emotional intelligence skills are more likely to turn to other, less effective means of managing their mood. They are twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse and even thoughts of suicide.

2. You have difficulty asserting yourself. People with high EQs balance good manners, empathy and kindness with the ability to assert themselves and establish boundaries. This tactful combination is ideal for handling conflict. When most people are crossed, they default to passive or aggressive behavior. Emotionally intelligent people remain balanced and assertive by steering themselves away from unfiltered emotional reactions. This enables them to neutralize difficult and toxic people without creating enemies.

3. You have a limited emotional vocabulary. All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Our research shows that only 36 percent of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions. People with high EQs master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling “bad,” emotionally intelligent people can pinpoint whether they feel “irritable,” “frustrated,” “downtrodden” or “anxious.” The more specific your word choice, the better insight you have into exactly how you are feeling, what caused it and what you should do about it.

4. You make assumptions quickly and defend them vehemently. People who lack EQ form an opinion quickly and then succumb to confirmation bias, meaning they gather evidence that supports their opinion and ignore any evidence to the contrary. More often than not, they argue, ad nauseam, to support it. This is especially dangerous for leaders, as their under-thought-out ideas become the entire team’s strategy. Emotionally intelligent people let their thoughts marinate, because they know that initial reactions are driven by emotions. They give their thoughts time to develop and consider the possible consequences and counter-arguments. Then, they communicate their developed idea in the most effective way possible, taking into account the needs and opinions of their audience.

5. You hold grudges. The negative emotions that come with holding on to a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When a threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when a threat is ancient history, holding on to that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding on to stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding on to a grudge means you’re holding on to stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.

6. You don’t let go of mistakes. Emotionally intelligent people distance themselves from their mistakes, but they do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious and gun shy, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This creates the tendency to get right back up every time you fall down.

7. You often feel misunderstood. When you lack emotional intelligence, it’s hard to understand how you come across to others. You feel misunderstood because you don’t deliver your message in a way that people can understand. Even with practice, emotionally intelligent people know that they don’t communicate every idea perfectly. They catch on when people don’t understand what they are saying, adjust their approach and re-communicate their idea in a way that can be understood.

8. You don’t know your triggers. Everyone has triggers – situations and people that push their buttons and cause them to act impulsively. Emotionally intelligent people study their triggers and use this knowledge to sidestep situations and people before they get the best of them. 9. You don’t get angry. Emotional intelligence is not about being nice; it’s about managing your emotions to achieve the best possible outcomes. Sometimes this means showing people that you’re upset, sad or frustrated. Constantly masking your emotions with happiness and positivity isn’t genuine or productive. Emotionally intelligent people employ negative and positive emotions intentionally in the appropriate situations.

10. You blame other people for how they make you feel. Emotions come from within. It’s tempting to attribute how you feel to the actions of others, but you must take responsibility for your emotions. No one can make you feel anything that you don’t want to. Thinking otherwise only holds you back.

11. You’re easily offended. If you have a firm grasp of who you are, it’s difficult for someone to say or do something that gets your goat. Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident and open-minded, which create a pretty thick skin. You may even poke fun at yourself or let other people make jokes about you because you are able to mentally draw the line between humor and degradation.

Bringing It All Together Unlike your IQ, your EQ is highly malleable. As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, it builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. As your brain reinforces the use of these new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors die off. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think about it.

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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.

1. What is EQ?
2. Emotional Intelligence Training Course
3. Learn to meditate with the Just6 App
4. Meditation and the Science
5. 7 reasons that emotional intelligence is quickly becoming one of the top sought job skills
6. The secret to a high salary Emotional intelligence
7. How to bring mindfulness into your employee wellness program
8. Google ’Search Inside Yourself’

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:

1. Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards [EQ]
2. Ability to influence [EQ]
3. Conceptual thinking [IQ]
4. Analytical ability [IQ]
5. Initiative in taking on challenges [EQ]
6. 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.

1. Emotional Intelligence Training Course
2. Learn to meditate with the Just6 App
3. Meditation and the Science
4. 7 reasons that emotional intelligence is quickly becoming one of the top sought job skills
5. The secret to a high salary Emotional intelligence
6. How to bring mindfulness into your employee wellness program
7. Google ’Search Inside Yourself’