Cultivating Emotional Intelligence
As a human being in the world, you've certainly heard the term "Emotional Intelligence" and how instrumental it is to your success.
I'm going to make this concept very simple and I'm going to illuminate some easy ways to make the most of this beautiful skill -- one that we all have within us.
What Is Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence has four components
- Awareness of your own emotions and energetic state
- The ability to modulate your own emotions and energy
- Awareness of the emotions and energy of others
- The ability to modulate and influence the emotions of others
As I'll talk about later, the beautiful thing is that if you focus on your inner awareness, all four of these elements will fall into place for you.
But let's move on by discussing some important facts about human emotion.
The Biology of Emotion
Humans, for purposes of this article, have two brains:
- The emotional part of your brain, consisting of the amygdala and larger limbic system.
- The rational part of your brain, consisting of the cortex
Combined with this is the fact that our emotional brain is primed for negativity. This so-called negativity bias means we notice, remember, think about, and are motivated by negative thoughts and fears much more than positive thoughts.
This powerful (and usually negative) emotional amygdala has the power to overwhelm the rational part of our brains. This is especially true when we are
- Tired
- Stressed
- Sick
- Overloaded with information and stimulation
- Not accustomed to slowing down
So our emotional brain can hijack us AND it has a tendency to be negative? Awesome.
Yep. Our emotional brain is primed for negativity and if the conditions are not carefully curated each day, it can take us down a dark, scary road and leave us there. NOOOOO!
The good news? We can do the work to avoid this from happening.
How Can We Enhance our Emotional Intelligence?
It's possible to behave in a more emotionally intelligent way. My top strategies for this are
- Increase your own self awareness
- Learn some techniques for managing your emotions
- Learn some techniques for influencing others' emotions
The ways you can accomplish all of the above strategies are intertwined, and so we're going to take a wholistic approach to this. However, the MAIN focus is going to be to NOURISH AND CONNECT WITH YOURSELF.
Why? Because YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO "DO" EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE.
You have emotional intelligence. It's just blocked by the things we talked about earlier: Negativity, tiredness, lack of inspiration, stress and patterns of behavior that are getting in your own way.
So how can we, on a moment-to-moment basis, ensure we maximize the emotional intelligence that we already have?
80% of improving your emotional intelligence is just maximizing the greatness that's already in you.
In future posts, I'm going to write about specific techniques to amplify and access your emotional intelligence.
Mike Lyons is an HR professional and consultant in the Austin, TX area. He can be found on LinkedIn.