Tips for Building Emotional Competence (EQ)

Here is a bit of a summary of what I spoke about to the team this morning.

According to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, IQ factors only account for twenty percent of career success. The other 80% depends on emotional intelligence (EQ).

The world calls the ability to relate to others "emotional intelligence," the Bible calls it "wisdom." I call it "living skillfully" or being "relationally savvy" or having "people skills." Hybels calls is being "relationally intelligent."

The good news is that emotional competence can be developed

3 key areas for assessing emotional intelligence (EQ) are:

- Self-awareness (the ability to recognise one’s own moods, emotions and drives),
- Self-management
- Social competence (interpersonal effectiveness)

Tips for Building Emotional Competence:

Self-Awareness:
1. Notice your own feelings and emotions in different situations, notice when you feel anxious, frustrated, happy, satisfied, irritated, etc.
2. Think about what might have "triggered" those feelings
3. Notice what your "self-talk" is as you experience negative emotions, what inner dialogue is going on?
4. Be aware how that "self-talk" is affecting your feelings and your actions
5. Consider how those emotions might be impacting your behaviour and your ability to perform effectively in your job (some emotions enhance performance, others impede performance)
6. Ask a trusted colleague or friend for feedback on how they observe your emotions impacting others as well as your own effectiveness

Self-Management:
1. Re-frame your negative self-talk to make it more constructive. Find a more "useful" way to think about a situation which encourages more positive emotions.Example:If you feel anxious about getting feedback on your performance, notice the difference between "self-talk" that says "I don’t want to hear if it’s not positive, I’m too afraid to ask in case it’s not good news"; versus " I need to know honestly how I’m doing, and finding out can open up new opportunities for me".
2. Remember, it’s not what happens to us that is important, it’s how we choose to respond to events that matters
3. Talk to someone you trust and ask them to help you by challenging some of the ways you might be thinking about things which trigger negative emotions and explore "what’s another way to think about that"?
4. Emotions have valuable information, use them to solve problems, e.g. take a feeling of anger, find out why you are frustrated, and solve the problem

Social Competence:
1. Learn to "listen" for feelings as well as thoughts in what other people are saying
2. Start to practice the skill of listening for feeling, and reflect back to the other person the feelings you’ve heard
3. Select someone who you know is particularly strong in interpersonal skills and ask them to help you debrief on group dynamics/interactions (both spoken and unspoken) following team meetings, etc. – you can learn to become more aware of others’ emotions this way
4. Work hard on trying to see things from the other person’s point of view
6. Don’t state your point of view until you’ve accurately reflected back the other person’s viewpoint and demonstrated that you’ve understood them

(adapted from Helen Hooper)