Secret Weapon to a Fulfilled Life and Enhanced Relationships
Perhaps you have heard the word "emotional intelligence." The phrase has become a buzzword. However, what exactly does it mean? What is the significance of being intelligent about your emotions? Emotional intelligence means having the ability to monitor your emotions, differentiate between varying emotions, and assess emotions in others. Thus better guiding your actions and thoughts (Mayer & Salovey, 1993).
Emotional intelligence is typically measured in EQ or emotional quotient via assessments. Unlike IQ, which pretty much stays the same, EQ is ever-evolving and can and should mature as you experience life. Research supports brain development and also plays a role. Emotional intelligence is typically viewed as an ability that you can develop and increase. Therefore, cultivating those abilities to better understand your emotions has been proven to have profound benefits. Today let's discuss some of those advantages. Specifically, let's explore three ways emotional intelligence can enhance your life. We'll review general well-being, romantic relationships, and the workplace.
General well-being
Emotional intelligence encompasses different parts of mental, emotional, and social skills such as stress management, impulse control, optimism, and self-regard, along with self-awareness as based on the model by Bar-On (2004). Consider your day-to-day life; abilities like impulse control help stop us from engaging in harming behavior or stop us before our emotions override our thoughts. Impulse control can help stop an argument from escalating. Stress management allows you to cope with tough or uncomfortable circumstances without causing long-term damage to both mental and physical health. Knowing your stress tolerance level can help you gauge what triggers may be too much for you.
Additionally, your outlook on yourself and the world can impact how you think and interact with others, so emotional self-awareness can help us identify our different emotions and feelings. Self-regard, or the consideration for oneself, is so critical in how you live. A couple of studies, such as the one John Hopkins conducted, showed that 13% of their very high-risk coronary artery disease patients were less likely to have a heart attack due to stress management and maintaining a positive outlook. So, developing more optimism, understanding stress levels or triggers, and maintaining positive self-regard can truly make a difference in your overall wellness in both the physical and emotional sense.
Romantic relationships
Relationships, especially romantic ones, are a significant part of our lives. As children, we learn how to engage with each other by seeing our parents interact and other couples in our family. Beyond adolescence, we begin to experience love, heartbreak, and everything in between. Along with this comes new emotions and new relational rules. Furthermore, we must develop emotional regulation and social intelligence to sustain and develop these relationships.
Understanding if you have low emotional intelligence can help you identify areas you can improve in, not only for yourself but also for your partner. For example, consider you have low empathy. Suppose your spouse has had a bad day at work, experienced heavy traffic, and may already be dealing with an additional stressor such as illness or family concerns. Would you be able to recognize their emotional state and properly comfort them?
A partner with high EI can better assess their spouse's emotions and produce actions that help reduce stress for the spouse and ultimately bring them closer. This can also help if you, too, are having a bad day; if you are aware of your emotional state as well as your partners', you both can come home and better navigate this emotional soup of high stress, frustration, and fatigue. Supported with techniques learned through counseling, you can have multiple tools to strengthen your relationship on a continuous basis.
Workplace + Leadership
Probably one of the most researched areas in emotional intelligence is EI within the context of leadership and teams. In the 90s, many of the prominent theorists of EI found a strong connection between good leadership and a high EQ. Common traits of leaders with a high EQ are producing amazing results, retention is typically great, and the leaders are well received. Why? Leadership involves both influence and transformation. An effective transformational leader knows how emotions affect their team's interactions, what influences the team, and how to make decisions that are best for the team (Bass & Avolio, 1997).
Additionally, teams can have group emotional intelligence. Group emotional intelligence is what makes the team effective. Strong teams with high emotional intelligence have high trust, are efficient, and have a sense of group identity. Teams who are not emotionally intelligent are the ones we have probably been a part of; can you recall a place you worked with lots of gossip amongst employees, poor communication, failing sales, limited guidance or direction, and high conflict? I know it all too well. Effective groups understand each other and are aware of how their own thoughts and behavior influence the whole.
Conflict will happen, but a group with high emotional intelligence will understand their counterparts' varying emotions and feelings and quickly move to a solution. Emotionally intelligent groups also do better at accounting for and incorporating diversity. Diversity in teams can include religion, ethnicity, gender, and geographical differences, and along with this brings lots of different cultural experiences and ways of thinking. Tim from rural Kentucky may respond differently to a problem than Kayla from a densely populated affluent neighborhood in New York. Do you understand what different insights they bring? How might this influence their emotional response? Increasing your overall emotional intelligence, especially in combination with conflict resolution and diversity training, can help you create a high-performing team full of diverse talent, skills, and thoughts.
When you go to work, you have to support the company's vision, communicate and cooperate with fellow staff, produce results, and tend to your customer's many needs. This will come with an array of emotional and social responses. Increasing your emotional intelligence and understanding how your emotions are hindering or helping these tasks helps you not just do the job better but actually enjoy what you do and know how to cope during the difficult times.
For CEOs or managers, If you want to help have higher sales, a happier team, and stronger leadership, then please consider EQ training and assessments for you and your staff. Emotional intelligence can be used to select ideal employees, build better managers, increase productivity, and decrease attrition rates.
At Purposed Life, LLC, Dr. Erica Roberts, EdD offers emotional intelligence training, assessment and coaching for business owners, company leadership and staff. Additionally, through our clinical services, our therapists can incorporate the Emotional Intelligence framework in your treatment plan. Visit us at apurposedlife.com to learn more or email us at info@apurposedlife.com for questions or more information.
Other References:
Bar-On, R. (2004). The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i): ra- tionale, description and summary of psychometric properties. In Glenn Geher (ed.): Measuring emotional intelligence: common ground and controversy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, pp. 111-142.
Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B.J. (1997), Full Range Leadership Development: Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, Mind Garden, Palo Alto, CA.
https://eclass.hmu.gr/modules/document/file.php/IP-ERLSF116/Mayer-Salovey.1993-libre.pdf
