Emotional intelligence (EI) is quickly gaining momentum throughout the business world, as many companies are turning to EI for hiring and promoting. It is the foundation of good relationships, and relationships are what keep a company floating. Loyalty, trust, reputation – all founded on the principles employed in EI. So with something holding such an integral part of business, why wouldn’t want to be more in tune?
Whether you are aware of it or not, emotional intelligence is running 80-85% of your daily interactions. It is the essence of every conversation you start and end in your personal and professional life. Granted, some may take more effort. I personally spend more time calculating my conversation with the CEO that will be present at my next presentation than I do with my 3-year-old, but the relationship piece is eminent just the same. With that in mind, it’s important to understand the various elements of emotional intelligence and to start having a keen understanding of where we fall in each category.
Put simply, there are two categories of emotional intelligence: Self-awareness and social awareness. And these two categories are each broken down into two sections of knowing and managing. This leads to the graph below and the most widely recognize definition of emotional intelligence: the ability to know, understand and manage one’s own emotions and the ability to know, understand and manage the emotions of others in order to produce a desired result or outcome.
Let’s take a look at these areas one by one.
Self-Awareness. Knowing yourself is the cornerstone of EI. If you do not have a keen awareness of your own emotional state, and more so an understanding of why you are in the state, then moving into other areas of EI is almost impossible. When you find yourself in a position of being overly emotional (frustration, stress, anger, upset, agitated), start focusing on the triggers that led to this state.
Self-Management. Once you know yourself, you are more likely to be able to control your emotional state, especially under pressure. This is vitally important for managers and anyone in sales where handling high stress is a frequent occurrence. As you start recognizing the triggers, the ability to begin controlling, managing, and even changing that emotional state becomes easier, or you will be able to regulate the emotions and force logic into the equation to manage your emotional state more effectively.
Social Awareness. Once there is a keen understanding of emotional aptitude, the ability to begin recognizing emotions and triggers in others will become easier. Social awareness is recognition of an emotional exchange during an interaction. Conversations will begin to take shape in an emotional context, and seeing different emotional states in yourself and others during the conversation will help to guide or even end the conversation.
Social Management. The final stage of EI is handling the emotions in social settings, whether professional or personal, in order to produce a desired result. A salesperson will use emotional context throughout a sales process to move forward in the negotiation and guide the buyer towards a decision. A boyfriend may use the emotional awareness of his girlfriend during a proposal. Being socially aware and managing social awareness is the highest level of emotional intelligence, and it is the most difficult in which to gain proficiency, but with practice it can be done.
So as we move forward, I challenge you to begin noticing emotional contexts throughout your conversations and interactions. As you start noticing, start toying with your own emotional state and see how it affects others. You might just be surprised at what you start to encounter.
The E.I. Insider 