Emotional intelligence is the real-time management and judgment of your immediate feelings, emotions, and moods, that you use on others along with yourself on a daily basis. Your reactions on how you make decisions while navigating through your life, and more importantly your career.

There’s now more focus that’s placed on emotional intelligence and how it translates into the context of the working world. If there’s ever a time to use your emotional intelligence, it’s during your work performance appraisal.

For most, what these job appraisals triggers are a series of anxieties peppered with reactions of dejection, and at times even anger.

What you can do however is fine tune your emotional intelligence by knowing, refining, and then improving certain areas of your life, such as mood management, self motivation, and interpersonal expertise.

Managing Your Mood
Mood management refers to the ability to be able to manage and command your emotions under duress. Begin by recognizing what emotions usually compiles most of your thoughts and actions.

When combined, what’s formed is your emotional operating system as each influences the other. Your goal is making each of them work in perfect harmony complimenting each other, rather than against each other.

If your initial thoughts are, “This job performance appraisal is going to be brutal,I’m going to suck,” that will more than likely increase your heart rate which promotes defensive behavior.

But instead, if you tell yourself, “This is an excellent opportunity to learn how much more effective I can be.” This will keep you calm and collected, while being receptive to the evaluation.

Then use your self-awareness which reminds you to breathe slower, keeping you relaxed while allowing you to listen and pay attention. Managing your thoughts will allow you to command your behavior, this so you won’t say anything impulsive which may get you in trouble.

Having Self Motivation
This the ability to get yourself started on something on your own, an action that you take based on what you’ve learned. To make it easier to get self motivated, take one suggestion and step at a time, as doing so will prevent you from becoming overwhelmed.

Try blocking off some time during the day to do a specific self improvement oriented task, such as completing your paper work on time on a set schedule, then make it a routine.

Interpersonal Relationships
Refers to your personal skills when relating to others. Learn to listen while taking criticism well, and non-defensively. What this results in is not suddenly interrupting or making excuses.

You want to fully articulate someone’s thoughts so you’ll be able to gain awareness into how you’re perceived by others. Ask for suggestions which will help you to improve, this so you can formulate an action plan.

If you don’t understand what’s being said, then ask for more information. Refrain from making evaluations or debating issues such as, “I disagree, you’re wrong.” Never become defensive by using noneffective thoughts.

The Signs Of High Emotional Intelligence
It’s thought that emotional intelligence can be improved upon, provided you know exactly how well developed that your EI is, and which areas need improvement. A list of having high emotional intelligence includes.

• Knowing Your Strengths And Weaknesses – A big part of self-awareness is being completely honest with yourself, and knowing who you are, knowing exactly where you excel, where you might struggle, and then accepting or correcting them.

An emotionally intelligent person knows how to identify where their strength and weaknesses are, and will analyze on how to work the most effectively within this framework.

• Always Being Motivated – This stems from how ambitious and hard-working your were in school, as a student, even if you weren’t rewarded for it. If you are a self starter who’s motivated, and you can focus and dedicate your attention along with your energy towards the pursuit of your goals, then that’s a good sign, and you have high emotional intelligence.

• People Who You Don’t Know Interests You – Do you absolutely love meeting new people, and also naturally and instinctively tend to ask a lot of questions, this directly after you’ve been introduced to someone new for the first time.

If this is the case, what you’re displaying is you having a certain degree of empathy towards others, which is thought to be one of the main components when it comes to emotional intelligence.

• You Know The Exact Reason Why You Get Upset – We all experience bouts of emotional fluctuations, get mad, this during the day under different circumstances. And at times, we have no idea or understand what’s causing this sudden wave of anger or sadness.

So it’s thought that one of the most important attributes when it comes to self-awareness is the ability to be able to know where these types of emotions are coming from, what’s triggering them, knowing exactly why you’re feeling and reacting this way.

• You’re Capable Of Paying Attention – Do you get easily distracted, you look whenever someone walks by, or enters a room, you lose focus on every email, share, post, tweet, text, that you get.

If so, then it’s most likely keeping you from functioning at peak efficiency, which is your highest emotional intelligence level.

The Importance Of Emotional Intelligence
Just how important is high emotional intelligence considered to be when it comes to business or work success. There are company’s who will hire their entire sales and marketing personnel based strictly on emotional competency testing.

The good news is that it’s possible to improve your emotional intelligence, while it’s counterpart, intelligence quotient or IQ, is thought to be difficult to improve upon, especially increase.

It’s thought that Emotional Intelligence can be increased with deliberate practice along with focused training. The most important being having an effective EI guide or mentor, one who’s capable of giving accurate feedback. The biggest issue being that most are generally unaware of how others view them.

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