Why is Emotional Intelligence critical to success?

According to research, Emotional Intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of performance (amongst other workplace skills) in your business, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills—it impacts most everything you do and say each day.

Do you buy anything from someone you dislike? If you do it will generally be for another reason such as exceptional price or value. We buy from those we like, so understanding how we think about people is key to understanding our biases, preferences and decision making. Key to both our own and others success is our behaviours which are directly impacted by emotion. Understanding both our own and others is important in our journey through life and a key attribute to success.

Wikipedia describes Emotional Intelligence as “Emotional intelligence (EI) is the capability of individuals to recognise their own and other people’s emotions, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s).”

So how are you thinking, and how is that thinking effecting your feeling and how will that feeling impact upon your performance? Self-awareness and self-management are important capabilities in any aspect of life. The ability to manage one’s emotion to deliver the required emotion, a requisite to success in any profession. From public speaking to sport, getting “in the bubble” to limit the damage of distractions and doubt upon performance can directly contribute to success.

Now even more importantly as a leader is the ability to understand where a team and the individuals that make up that team are emotionally. Because if we can generate the right emotions, we can perform way above expectation. Take Leicester City winning the Premier League last year, Donald Trump winning the US election or the battle of Isandlwana in 1879. All involved a team performance that delivered a truly unpredictable victory.

What to be aware of in terms of assessing your own Emotional Intelligence:

Empathy: “Do I actively listen to people using whole body listening when they talk about their issues, or do I just try to give them a quick solution? Do people tend to confide in me or not?”

Emotional self-awareness: “When my body or my mind gives me physical or subconscious signals that something is wrong, do I pay attention to it and try to sense what’s going on?”

Self-actualisation: “Am I doing the things in life that I really feel passionate about and are they relevant to my life goals—at home, at work, socially?”

Impulse control: “Do I respond to people before they finish telling me something or do interrupt assuming I already know what I am being told?”

Interpersonal relationships: “Do I enjoy socialising with people, or does it feel like more work?”

So how do we get to develop our Emotional intelligence?

If you would like to learn more about how you can develop your own Emotional Intelligence, then join us at our next Business Breakfast on the 20th July at the Hotel du Vin, Exeter, from 7.30am until 9am.

Eventbrite - Why is Emotional Intelligence critical to success?


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