Emotional intelligence is a human barometer. It’s defined as the real-time management and judgment of your immediate emotions, feelings and mood. How you display this towards yourself and others on a daily basis, is the measurement.
It’s your immediate actions and reactions, on how you’re able to make decisions on the spot, while navigating through your life and workplace.
What’s focused on lately is the level of accomplished emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient, and how it translates into the work environment.
For instance, if there’s ever a time to sharpen your emotional intelligence level, it’s during your work performance appraisal.
For many, these job appraisals when in the hopes of a pay raise or promotion, does is triggers anxiety, such as the fear of rejection, which can at times lead to anger.
So what you need is to fine tune your EQ level, by mindfully knowing and improving the deficiencies of your life.
This includes better mood management, increased self motivation, and improving your interpersonal skills.
Managing Your Mood
What mood management refers to, is the ability to monitor, manage and command your emotions under duress.
Begin by recognizing which emotions usually comes to the forefront in your thoughts and actions, under times of turmoil.
This is known as your emotional operating system, as each reaction influences the other.
Your goal is making each of them work in unison, and they complimenting one other rather than against one other, which makes you appear like a crazy person.
If you’re initially thinking. “This job performance appraisal for me is going to be brutal, and I’m going to suck,” will most likely elevate your heart rate, which promotes defensive behavior.
Instead, if you tell yourself. “This appraisal is an excellent opportunity to learn how much more effective I can be at my job,” will help you calm down, and be more alert and receptive.
Use your self-awareness, to remind yourself to breathe slower, maintain eye contact, remain relaxed, which should allow you to listen and pay better attention.
Managing your thoughts, will help you to command your behavior, so you won’t say anything impulsive.
Having Self Motivation
Being self motivated, is the ability to start a task on your own. The action you take, is usually based on something you’ve learned.
To get self motivated, take one suggestion and one step at a time and complete it, as doing so will prevent you from becoming overwhelmed.
Try to block off some time during the day, to do specific self-improvement oriented tasks, such as completing your paper work on time and on schedule, then make it a routine.
Interpersonal Relationships
This refers to developing and refining your personal skills when relating to others. Learn to listen first, while taking criticism well, and never react defensively.
What this results in, is not abruptly interrupting or making excuses.
You want to completely articulate someones thoughts, so you’ll gain more awareness into how you’re perceived by others.
Always ask for suggestions that will help you improve, so you can formulate an action plan.
If you don’t understand what’s being said, then always ask for more information to clarify.
Avoid making evaluations or debating issues, such as, “I disagree with that, you’re wrong.” Avoid becoming defensive, by jumping to conclusions.
Signs You Have High Emotional Intelligence
It’s thought emotional intelligence, unlike IQ can always be improved upon, provided you know exactly which areas are needed to be developed.
This is knowing which specific weaknesses you have to work on, such as:
• Know Your Strengths And Weaknesses – A big part when it comes to self-awareness, is being completely honest with yourself.
Know exactly who you are, know where you excel, where you struggle, and then accept or correct them.
An emotionally intelligent person, knows how to identify where their strength and weaknesses lie, and will analyze how to work most effectively within this framework.
• Always Be Motivated – This is a byproduct of how ambitious and hard-working you were in school, as a student, even if you weren’t rewarded for it.
If you are a motivated self starter, you have the ability to focus and dedicate your attention and energy towards the pursuit of your goals.
What this displays is you have high emotional intelligence in this area.
• You’re Interested In People You Don’t Know – Do you look forward to meeting new and exciting people you look up to. You also naturally and instinctively ask a lot of questions, immediately after you’ve been introduced to someone new for the first time.
If this is the case, what this displays is you have a certain degree of empathy towards others, which is thought to be an important trait when it comes to having high emotional intelligence.
• You Know Why You Get Upset – We all experience bouts of emotional madness, get sad during the day under different circumstances. At times, we have no idea why, or understand what’s causing this sudden outbreak of anger or sadness.
This is considered one of the most important traits, when it comes to self-awareness.
The ability to know where these emotions stems from, knowing what triggers them, knowing exactly why you’re feeling and reacting the way you do.
• You Pay Attention – Do you easily get distracted, such as immediately looking once someone enters a room, or walks by. Do you easily lose focus on every email, post, share, tweet, text you get.
If so, then it’s most likely keeping you from functioning at peak efficiency, which is one of the highest emotional intelligence traits.
The Importance Of Emotional Intelligence
Just how important is having high emotional intelligence, when it comes to personal, business or work success?
There are now company’s, who will strictly hire their entire sales and marketing personnel, based on emotional competency testing.
The good news is, it’s possible to improve your emotional intelligence, while it’s counterpart Intelligence Quotient, is thought to be more hereditary, and more difficult to improve upon, especially increase.
It’s thought Emotional Intelligence, can be improved with deliberate practice and focused training.
What’s found important, is having a helpful EQ mentor, who’s able of give honest feedback. The biggest issue, is most generally don’t care or are unaware of how others view them.