Emotional Intelligence -- Benefits of Increasing EI Skills wortechnologies.com Business Articles and

Development of Emotional Intelligence skills is the "silver bullet" (or the closest approach we have) that, when applied appropriately, can address many of the underlying problems and obstacles people and businesses face. This document explains Emotional Intelligence - what it is and why it's important. It includes excerpts from SMART EMOTIONS for Busy Business People the "How To" book that teaches five simple techniques proven to increase resilience, personal productivity and Emotional Intelligence skills. By transforming negative, draining feelings into positive, productive emotions and actions, you can experience increased clarity, productivity, collaboration, creativity, focus, teamwork, communication, and more. Based on scientific research, the techniques presented in SMART EMOTIONS have proven effective for over 15 years. They have helped people from all walks of life who work in all types of organizations around the world.

The Need for Emotional Intelligence Skills

The pressures people are experiencing in business and government to do more . . . with less . . . faster . . . better . . . cheaper . . . are taking an increasing toll on performance, health, and relationships. The stress has grown steadily over the past 15--20 years. You read and hear the statistics almost daily. You know stress affects you - and others. You see it in others and experience it yourself every day.

Stress is a result of negative emotions (fear, frustration, anxiety, embarrassment, shock, worry, etc.) and beliefs that occur when people feel unable to deal with the demands of their environment. And the demands of both work and family environments have been increasing almost exponentially. In the description of stress above, the word "unable" is key: not possessing the skill of managing one's emotions.

A vice president of product development of a large manufacturing company participating in our skill-development program expressed concern that companies are putting their workers in jeopardy. "The levels of stress and the pace of work are not sustainable, even in the short term," she said. A director in her company told her that as they walked out of a meeting, one of the attendees said to him in all seriousness, "Will you come to my funeral?"

At home things aren't much better. You come home from work exhausted, only to remember the children need to be taken to a whole host of activities. Some of these activities are social, some physical. Some are important in developing interests and skills that may be valuable to your children's future. Later, you may find yourself helping with homework, feeling the stress your kids are feeling to learn more, quicker. Finally, after taking care of the children, you get to sit down, read the mail, pay the bills - and in many cases, get on the computer to answer emails or get work done that you didn't find time for earlier.

Mismanaged Emotions

Stress from mismanaged emotions impacts every area of a person's life. It shows up in individuals as lack of mental clarity, unsatisfactory performance, poor decision-making, conflict, lack of teamwork, health problems and more. The impact of mismanaged emotions on organizations and their people reads like a list of typical issues (problems) faced by almost every organization: missed deadlines, turnover, decreased productivity, poor quality, customer complaints, reduced profit and margins, and more.

Every day you went to school you invested roughly an hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year for eight to twelve years to develop your skills in math, reading, writing, languages and others - skills that are important to enable you to manage yourself and make good decisions about your life.

You, like most of us, probably did not invest time in skill-building specific, focused training in grade school, high school or college in recognizing and regulating your emotions. Therein lies the gaping hole in our educational system. Virtually every one of us can benefit from learning how to improve our Emotional Intelligence skills.

What Can You Expect to Gain?

If you experience negative emotions and feelings at work or at home, SMART EMOTIONS will show you how to recognize and transform those negative, draining feelings into positive, productive emotions and action. You can use the five simple, proven techniques to develop your Emotional Intelligence skills and increase your resilience, performance and mental clarity. The techniques have helped people from all walks of life who work in all types of organizations around the world.

Simply put, these techniques work. They work for people like you, and for the people who report directly to you, in business, government or non-profits. They will also work for your spouse, teenaged children, colleagues and friends. Using the techniques in this book will make your life at work and at home significantly better - forever!

There's just one catch! To experience dramatic improvements in your life, it is absolutely necessary to make a commitment to take a few seconds every day to use and practice the techniques. Skill development comes from "doing," not just reading.

The Benefits

Increasing your Emotional Intelligence skills offers benefits in three categories: decision-making, relationships, and health. These categories embrace virtually every behavior, every action and reaction, every situation you may encounter. They apply to your business and professional interactions as well as your family relationships, from the broad sweep of major, multi-million dollar corporations to the day-to-day small incidents that influence your life.

Decision Making By becoming aware of what you are feeling in the moment, you have information you can use to make a decision about what to say or do now. By developing emotional self-regulation skills you can quickly transform out of negative, draining emotions into more positive, productive ones, enabling you to think and act more rationally at any time. Your moment-to-moment decision-making is enhanced significantly. You can use these skills to keep yourself from reacting, allowing you to respond with more thoughtfulness and thoroughness. Being in control of your emotions has a huge positive impact on your performance, your effectiveness, your confidence and your motivation.

Relationships Emotional Intelligence skills will not only empower you personally; they will have a positive impact on your relationships with others as well. For example, instead of blowing up when your project manager announces a deadline without consulting you, managing your emotional reactiveness enables you to remain calm, ask good questions, perhaps even influence the deadline - all the while preserving your good working relationship with your manager.

On the home front, when your child comes home with a poor test score or lower grade than you think he can earn, rather than putting him on the hot seat, you can show him you care and are concerned about him and still maintain a firm but understanding approach to the situation. Think of the positive effect this is likely to have on your relationships with your children.

Health The third area affected by developing your Emotional Intelligence skills, but certainly not the least, is your health. Negative emotions fuel higher cortisol levels, often called "the stress hormone." Over time, excessive levels of cortisol can cause sleeplessness, loss of bone mass and osteoporosis, allergies, asthma, acid reflux, ulcers, low sperm count, redistribution of fat to the waist and hips, and fat buildup in the arteries, which can lead to heart disease and numerous other diseases (McCraty, Borrios-Choplin et al. "The Impact of a New Emotional Self-Management Program on Stress, Emotions, Heart Rate Variability, DHEA and Cortisol" Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33(2):151-70, 1998). Mismanaged emotions, correlated with dysrhythmias in our Autonomic Nervous System, are associated with many diseases including asthma, chronic fatigue, depression, hypoglycemia, hypertension and many more. Learning to transform from negative emotions into positive, productive ones throughout the day or night over a sustained period of time has been shown to have a positive impact on many health-related problems. The most frequently mentioned by participants in my programs is a significant reduction or elimination of sleeplessness, often in one or two weeks.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

There are a variety of definitions of Emotional Intelligence, depending on which book you read. Ours is very simple:

Emotional Intelligence is your ability, natural or learned, to acquire and apply knowledge from your emotions and the emotions of others.

The purpose of developing our Emotional Intelligence is to help us make better decisions about what to say or do - or not say or do.

We develop mathematical or linguistic intelligence, or any of the other skills we went to school for, to help us make better decisions about what to do. Unfortunately, few, if any of us, were given opportunities to work with our Emotional Intelligence skills as we grew up. All of us can benefit tremendously by recognizing and putting into practice the knowledge we gain from our emotions and the emotions of others. Emotional Intelligence enables us to make good decisions and manage our lives so we are happy and fulfilled.

A key word in the definition above is "ability." Ability indicates you can improve if you practice. All you have to be taught is "how to do it" to begin to get better. To continue to improve, of course, you must then practice "doing it!"

The Five Emotional Intelligence Competencies

In the literature on the subject of Emotional Intelligence, you will find lists of widely varying numbers of emotional competencies, some as many as twenty. SMART EMOTIONS is focused on five basic emotional competencies or abilities you can develop to use your emotions more effectively: Emotional Self-Awareness, Emotional Self-Regulation, Emotional Self-Motivation, Empathy, and Nurturing Relationships (Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 1995, p. 43).

The Intrapersonal Competencies

The first three EI competencies, emotional self-awareness, emotional self-regulation, and emotional self-motivation, constitute an intrapersonal set of skills. The intrapersonal skills are internal, unseen. The more effective we become in these foundational intrapersonal skills, the easier it will be to develop skills in the other competencies. When you manage your emotions more effectively, you'll interact more easily and effectively with others.

1. Emotional Self-Awareness The competency at the bottom of the pyramid is Emotional Self-Awareness. This is the foundation competency. It has to do with being aware of what you're feeling in the moment. The key word here is "what," not "how." Ask someone "how" he is feeling and he will typically say "fine." Unfortunately, "fine" is a grade of sandpaper, not an emotion. "What" is the better word, because it requires the naming of an emotion. If you don't know what emotion you're feeling, you don't have the information you need to decide whether to stay in the emotion or to change it.

2. Emotional Self-Regulation The second EI competency is Emotional Self-Regulation. This is not about "stuffing, holding in, or hiding" our emotions; rather it is about being able to choose our emotions. The key word is to "transform" our emotions. If we don't like the emotion we're experiencing, it would be beneficial if we were able to choose a better one, or transform it into a more positive, productive emotion.

3. Emotional Self-Motivation The third EI competency is Emotional Self-Motivation. This is about having the skill to activate positive, productive emotions. Frequently, people who have ascended to high positions in organizations or who are top performers in their professional field are very good at this. They are able to stay optimistic and enthusiastic about projects they have to complete, difficulties they have to deal with, and people whose opinions and views do not align with their own. The two key words associated with this competency are persistence and success. Our ability to call up and use positive emotions such as excitement, enthusiasm, joy, courage, etc., is critical to self-motivation.

The Interpersonal Competencies

The interpersonal skills are empathy and nurturing relationships.

4. Empathy The fourth EI competency is empathy. Empathy should not be confused with sympathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in "someone else's shoes" so you can see the situation from their point-of-view. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them. By putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, we not only learn and understand how they feel, we can also use that information to help us adjust our position or approach to arrive at win-win solutions to disagreements or conflicts.

5. Nurturing Relationships The fifth EI competency is nurturing relationships, "setting a positive tone of cooperation," even if things aren't going well. In times of difficulty, rather than trying to regulate other people's emotions, we must be able to manage our own in order to have authentic concern or care for others and ourselves. This fifth competency is available to you once you learn how to use and apply the techniques in the other four competencies.

Emotional Intelligence is About a Different Way of Being Smart In summary, Emotional Intelligence is not about being soft. It means being intelligent about our emotions - a different way of being smart. That is, having the emotional management skills to be more effective in the moment! The SMART EMOTIONS book will teach you the techniques to develop your Emotional Intelligence skills.

About the Author
Byron Stock, a former engineer and director of corporate education, guides individuals and organizations toward excellence by helping them use their Emotional Intelligence as a powerful tool to become more productive, creative, resilient and high performing. Learn about Byron’s quick, easy, proven techniques to harness the power of your Emotional Intelligence in his new Book, SMART EMOTIONS for Busy Business People available through his website http://www.ByronStock.com Byron Stock may be contacted at http://www.ByronStock.com. Click here to view more articles by Byron Stock.