By: Elizabeth Weihmiller
I want you to imagine for a minute an extremely emotional situation you had to face. I know this will be uncomfortable but just bear with me. Now imagine that this emotional moment happens on the Monday morning of an extremely busy and important week at work. Maybe you had to put your dog down unexpectedly, maybe your relationship came to an end out of the blue or you got side swiped driving into work and the list goes on. Your schedule this week is one where you have a big deliverable or HAVE to be in front of clients. You have no choice but to show up.
Person A lets the emotion completely derail them. They mess up their big presentation, they miss the deadline and piss off key stakeholders. This later goes on to affect their year-end performance reviews, which in turn brings up more emotion.
Person B takes a different approach to the emotions. They are still having the emotion, but they wait until the time and place is appropriate and don’t let it derail them. They manage to do an amazing presentation and the client walks away feeling the day was a success. They meet the expected deadlines and in turn this meets their clients expectations. In the long run this leads to a good performance review at the end of the year.
What is the key difference between Person A and Person B?
Person A has low emotional intelligence and has no desire to work on it. Person B has worked on and continues to work on their emotional intelligence.
As the world gets more intense and emotions are more easily triggered from daily stress and outside influences emotional intelligence becomes even more critical. It is the key to success in today’s fast paced world. The more self-aware you are the more easily you are able to acknowledge and recognize when you are heading into an emotional state which then allows you to self-regulate. The self-awareness then allows you to recognize when others are having emotions also known as social awareness. Once you have the social awareness you are then able to more easily achieve social regulation. These four components: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness and social regulation make up the key aspects of emotional intelligence.
In the clients I work with the ones who have high emotional intelligence are the ones I see having better interactions with their co-workers and being better leaders. They are making things happen, using discernment, and gaining respect, support and loyalty from others even when they have events that are high emotion. Because of their high emotional intelligence they are better able to handle the intense stress that comes from not only their work but also their personal lives. The ones with low emotional intelligence keep making missteps, they may misread social situations, they may lack self-awareness and in turn lack self-regulation and that gets them into trouble at work. They may let their personal issues impact their work performance. Which person would you rather be? The choice is yours.
The question I am asking you is: How would improving your emotional intelligence help you achieve more? Help you better handle those tough situations? How would improving your teams’ emotional intelligence help take your team to the next level?
We are not getting away from the emotion of this world. But we can learn to manage our emotions. We can learn techniques to help us overcome them in those moments where we have no choice but to show up and maintain professionalism and poise.
