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Category: Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is twice as valuable as IQ in the business world, since the emotional health of the team directly impacts productivity, motivation, engagement and loyalty. This means a person has the emotional intelligence that encompasses an ability to 1) identify and manage one’s own emotions, 2) identify and understand someone else’s emotions, and 3) relate well to others personally and professionally even under the most stressful situations. This requires that a person be self-aware, self-regulating and empathetic. These relationship-based skills are ones wherein women certainly excel.

How to Use Emotional Intelligence Training to Be an Influential Leader

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence Training helps you support, motivate and assist your clients or employees as they improve their emotional competencies themselves. I love this quote from William Arthur Ward, “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”

I think it applies to leading as well as to teaching. Whether you’re trying to inspire your clients, your employees or your children, understanding emotional intelligence training is vital for your success. Emotional intelligence training might sound intimidating but it isn’t difficult once you understand the fundamentals for behavioral change.

What does emotional intelligence training include? Here are the three stages, which include fifteen steps that you can use to motivate your clients, employees, children or others to become more emotionally in tune with themselves, others, and the world around them.

Stage One: Preparation and Motivation

  1. Assess the job. Without knowing what the job involves, you won’t know what competencies are needed.
  1. Assess the individual. Before you know what needs to be improved, you must know the person’s strengths and limitations.
  1. Deliver assessments with care. Before giving your assessment, think about the impact your words will have on the hearer.
  1. Gauge readiness. Not everyone is at the same level or stage in life, so determine if the person is ready to hear and work with you.
  1. Motivate. Change comes when people want it and to achieve this you must motivate them at a higher level to overcome their reluctance to participate.
  1. Make change self-directed. People learn at their own rate and only when they see the need. So tailor training according to what they want to work on at this moment, helping them link their goals with their personal values.

Stage Two: Education and Support

  1. Focus on clear, manageable goals. Show them clearly what’s required to accomplish a goal.
  1. Give performance feedback. Self-awareness and insight are keys to creating lasting change, yet these are often the pieces that are missing. By giving sincere, well-deserved commendation and points to work on, you’re helping the person create this self-awareness. And when they learn to recognize what pushes their buttons – gaining insight into what irritates and annoys them – they’re able to learn how to control their emotions.
  1. Rely on experiential methods. “Repetition is the mother of retention” so the more they can actively practice the desired pattern of thought, feeling and action the faster and easier the new habits will become engrained in the brain.
  1. Arrange support. Continual mentoring accelerates motivation and accomplishment, so establishing a buddy system is vital.
  1. Provide models. We learn best by watching others, so show them how it’s done by providing good role models, including yourself. An embodied leader wants to model the desired behavior. In order to impact the lives of others, you work on exhibiting congruence in all aspects of your life. This gives you credibility, which is so critical for gaining the trust of your clients or employees. Fairness, respect, and humility, will bring out their best.
  1. Prevent relapse. Everyone has bad day, so have reasonable expectations and be prepared to handle the downs as well as the ups, and give ample opportunities to practice the new skills.

Stage Three: Transformation and Evaluation

  1. Encourage use of the new skill. Create a new environment with visual and verbal cues that reminds your clients to use what they’ve learned.
  1. Reinforce change. Strengthen and support each person as they achieve new skills and levels of emotional competency.
  1. Evaluate. To see progress you must have a measuring stick to assess it against. To keep them motivated, let them clearly see how far they’ve progressed.

Never think it’s too late to incorporate emotional intelligence training in your private practice, workplace or home. While it doesn’t happen overnight, you can alter deeply engrained habits and social behavior through retraining the brain and body.

If you’re a coach wanting to hone your emotional intelligence training skills or a CEO wanting to improve EI in the workplace, or an individual who want to excel personally, feel free to contact me for help in setting up your emotional intelligence training program.

Which of These 25 Emotional Intelligence Competencies Will You Master Next?

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Emotional Intelligence.

If you feel lost, unfulfilled and wanting to “find my true self”, it’s vital to mindfully define, in great detail, your emotional intelligence competencies.“What is it you’re really good at doing? What makes you unique?”

Do these questions make you squirm and think, “I don’t know…I’m just me?” Surprisingly, most people struggle with this. They do what they do without much thought. Of course you’re aware of your technical skills, people skills and personal work ethic. Yet, this barely scratches the surface of who you are.

With so many people feeling lost, unfulfilled and wanting to “find my true self”, it’s important to take time to mindfully define in great detail your core values, strengths, and emotional intelligence competencies.

When you do, a magical thing happens. You become empowered to break out of your comfort zone and excel beyond what you ever imagined possible. Like all top performers, you’ll finally know exactly what you’re capable of doing. You’ll know what to improve to achieve excellence. And while no one can master all 25 emotional intelligence competencies, you can significantly improve on some of them.

Daniel Goleman writes about the 25 emotional competencies in his book, Working with Emotional Intelligence. (I really enjoyed this book. You should check it out!) They fall into five categories, under two main headings – Personal and Social – as the following outline shows.

1. Personal Competence – how you manage yourself.

  • Self-Awareness: Know your internal states, preferences, and resources.
    • Emotional awareness – recognize how emotions affect your life.
    • Accurate self-assessment – know your strengths and limitations.
    • Self-confidence – embrace your self-worth and capabilities.
  • Self-Regulation: Manage your internal states, impulses and resources.
    • Self-control – keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
    • Trustworthiness – maintain standards of integrity and honesty.
    • Conscientiousness – take responsibility for your personal performance.
    • Adaptability – be able to handle change, flexibility.
    • Innovation – be comfortable with new ideas and ways of doing things.
  • Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals.
    • Achievement drive – strive for excellence.
    • Commitment – wholeheartedly support group or organizational goals.
    • Initiative – be ready to act on opportunities.
    • Optimism – remain positive despite obstacles and setbacks.

2. Social Competence – how you handle relationships.

  • Empathy: Have an awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns.
    • Understanding others – sense others’ perspectives.
    • Developing others – actively bolster their abilities.
    • Service orientation – anticipate, recognize, and meet others’ needs.
    • Leveraging diversity – Cultivate opportunities through diverse people.
    • Political awareness – reading power relationships and undercurrents.
  • Social skills: Proficiency at stirring up desirable responses in others.
    • Influence – effectively persuade others.
    • Communication – listen openly and sending compelling messages.
    • Conflict management – negotiate and resolve disagreements.
    • Leadership – inspire and guide individuals and groups.
    • Change catalyst – initiate or manage change.
    • Building bonds – nurture instrumental relationships.
    • Collaboration and cooperation – work toward shared goals.
    • Team capabilities – create group synergy, bring out their best.

Why not copy and paste this list into a Word document and print it out. Then score yourself from 1 (very limited) to 10 (excellent) on each one. But don’t stop there. Ask someone who knows you well to review it and get their viewpoint. It will be an eye-opening exercise for you and give you a basis for where you want to start improving.

And if you want to open your own private practice this exercise will keep you from floundering, because it helps you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) or unique value proposition (UVP) – the things that make you and your services unique. And when you identify that factor, your business will excel.

Would you like me to help you assess your emotional intelligence competencies and give you proven ways of getting out of your own way so you can excel? Then contact me and we can set up an in-person session or one via Skype.

What is Emotional Intelligence and Why Do You Need It to Succeed?

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Embodied Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Life Coaching, Life Skills.

What is emotional intelligence and why do you need it – answer this question and you can hone your EQ skills and become a leader who excels in any field.One of the things I love about my community of women leaders is their passion for finding (and sharing) new resources that help them pursue personal excellence. One of the most important resources you’ll ever find is defining and improving your emotional intelligence quotient. What is that?

Firstly, let me ask you…if you had to pick one over the other, which do you think are the more important skills you can have – learning the “how to” technical skills or the “why do they do that” emotional skills?

While, many people think that having a high IQ (intellectual smarts) is the most essential skill set for excelling in business and life, successful business leaders are proving to be those who nurture their EQ – Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence. This applies to the solo entrepreneur and the leaders of huge corporations – emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities.

Why is emotional intelligence so important? Being in business means you’re dealing with thinking, feeling people not inanimate objects. And if you want to motivate a person to do something, you need to make an emotional connection, not necessarily an intellectual connection.

What we’re taught in school about business and leadership is incomplete. They left out the more important skills, which are often termed people skills, soft skills, character building, or personality development. In today’s business world, these skills are now considered the new measuring rod for success. The higher a person’s position is and the more responsibility he or she has, the more emotional intelligence becomes crucial.

But what is emotional intelligence exactly? Happily, it’s a set of skills that anyone can acquire. It’s an essential ingredient for reaching and staying at the top in any field.

“Emotional Intelligence is the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.”

This quote is how Daniel Goleman, who coined the term emotional intelligence, defines it. I’ve just finished reading his book, Working with Emotional Intelligence. I highly recommend it to you. He uses real life case studies of star performers to compare the importance of emotional intelligence with intellectual, technical competency. Here are some major takeaways from this book that you can apply immediately to your own life…

Understand how the brain works. Daniel Goleman explains that intellectual intelligence is based on the neocortex, the most recently evolved parts of the brain. This prefrontal area gives you the ability to pay attention to, remember and apply vital information when making good decisions.

Emotional intelligence occurs in the lower or inner brain, the more primitive sub-cortex, specifically the amygdala. Here is where our emotional, preprogrammed “primitive” impulses, “gut feelings” reside. It also stores our accumulated life experiences.

What this means for you: When the mind is calm everything works normally. Your prefrontal lobes introduce your power of reason, judgment and appropriate social behavior and, at the same time, control your emotional impulses. However, when a perceived threat arises, the central, more emotional part of the brain takes over. Worry, panic, frustration, anger, or irritation can kick in.

If you don’t have a high level of self-awareness, these powerful emotions can hijack your rational mind and cause you to explode in ways that you typically wouldn’t. Like when you lose it and yell at your spouse or children. Or you get stage fright so badly you can’t give your presentation. Out-of-control emotions can make the smartest people act crazily.

But the good news is, when you understand how the brain works, you can learn to control your emotions. How?

Researchers are discovering that people who are excelling in leadership roles today have a high level of non-judgmental self-awareness, which leads to controlling their emotions. This is such an important topic I’m starting a series on how to deepen your emotional intelligence. Be sure to visit my website each week so you don’t miss out on any of the articles.

Would you like a head start to honing your EQ skills? I’d love to give you one-on-one support as you fully discover your personal emotional intelligence. Please contact me and we can set up a convenient time for both of us to start working together.

Read related information on Emotional Intelligence:

Women in Leadership Who Excel Have High Emotional Intelligence

Which of These 25 Emotional Intelligence Competencies Will You Master Next?

How to Use Emotional Intelligence Training to Be an Influential Leader

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