Your success in life and business is based more on your ability to
be aware of and manage your emotions—your emotional intelligence—than
on your intellectual capabilities or IQ. Gaps in emotional intelligence result
in failures to sustain success, build lasting relationships, and inspire others.
People who excel in emotional intelligence skills achieve not only superior results,
but also have higher personal fulfillment and increased well-being. A lack of
success in life is more often than not due to mismanagement of emotions and stress.
Emotional intelligence embraces four areas:
1. Self-awareness: Pay attention to your stressful feelings. Self-awareness includes the capacity to notice stressful feelings that occur physically and emotionally.
Often people around you are far more aware of your stress than you are! They hear
it in your tone of voice, see it in your body language, and feel it in the pressure
you create. In stressful situations, brain structures like the amygdala in the
emotional regions of the brain can ‘hijack’ intellectual processes
when intense emotions are experienced. This is why even smart people can make
foolish decisions when under emotional stress, and why developing self-awareness
is so essential. Unfortunately, many people consider themselves “stress
athletes” and deny stress has any impact on them. They write off their angry
outbursts as simply “getting the job done.” Their body tells a different
story.
A single stress response—whether to an email, a sarcastic reaction
during a staff meeting, or the angry swearing at another driver in traffic—sets
in motion an incredible cascade of biological events in your body. Latest research
counts 1,400 biological changes following a simple stress response! Leaders who
lack EQ may deny they are having stress, yet their body is living with the effects.
When your body is experiencing a stress reaction—whether you
are aware of the stress or not—your body is out of sync and can’t
perform at its peak. Stressful emotions such as anger, frustration, anxiety, and
worry lead to increased disorder in the heart’s rhythms, nervous system,
and brain. These negative emotions undermine both emotional and cognitive intelligence
by blocking self-awareness, inhibiting your ability to manage yourself, blurring
your awareness of others, damaging your relationships, and inhibiting decision-making,
clear communication, and long-range thinking.
In contrast, positive emotions like joy, appreciation, care, and
kindness create harmony in the heart’s rhythms. Your brain and nervous system
synchronize to this rhythm to achieve coherence. Developing coherence leads to
increased mental clarity, creativity, and enhanced problem-solving abilities,
so it becomes easier to find solutions and better ways of handling any stressful
situation. Learning to self-generate positive emotions accelerates the development
of all the emotional intelligence competencies.
2. Self-management: Shift out of negative emotions and activate positive
ones. This domain requires management of those emotions that inhibit smart thinking
and alienate people. With the frenetic pace of life today, you need to recognize
and manage your emotions in the thick of an argument, during a critical negotiation,
when ethics are on the line, or in the midst of any high-stakes situation in which
decisions must be made. You may also face health issues associated with years
of work/life imbalance. Simply stopping to appreciate successes during the day;
expressing care to family, friends, and staff; extending compassion to people
going through tragedy or suffering expand your leadership capacity and enable
others to feel inspired and understood. When you reflect, you often realize that
many of the daily “battles” that occupy your attention pale in comparison
to the challenges and tragedies suffered by victims of hurricanes, earthquakes,
and war.
3. Relationship management: Prepare before you perform. Athletes,
musicians, actors, dancers, and performers in every field recognize how debilitating
even subtle negative emotions can be on their performance, and why passion and
joy in their work are so valuable.
Great performers also know you don’t just perform at a high
level without preparing yourself—physically, mentally, and emotionally—to
be in the proper state. So, prepare yourself daily to perform brilliantly. In
some fields, the stakes are so high you need to prepare for more hours than you
actually spend to perform. In business, few people spend any time each day preparing,
yet they expect to perform to exceptionally high standards for 8, 10, 12 hours
a day or more. Any athlete or performer knows this ratio is unsustainable. Even
investing one hour of preparation each day focused on bringing your body, mind
and heart into balance and coherence can have a dramatic impact on your performance
and leadership.
4. Social awareness: Lead with your vulnerability. One of the great
leaders of the 20th century was Albert Einstein. He inspired a radical shift in
how we view the universe, and his theories forever changed the way we think. Yet
he was not always right. In the mid-1920s, all in science—including Einstein—still
believed we lived in the only galaxy in the universe, which was considered “steady
state” and unchanging. A Catholic priest and mathematician challenged Einstein,
believing there had to be more to the universe than an unchanging, fixed number
of stars in a lonely galaxy. Einstein criticized the priest publicly, calling
his mathematics poor. Then the astronomer Hubble began to display his stunning
pictures of far-away galaxies. Einstein saw these breathtaking pictures and was
awe-struck. He publicly apologized to the priest and earned new respect from people
the world over. Such vulnerability creates great loyalty and admiration—the
basis of effective leadership. PE
