Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, evaluate and control your own emotions and to better understand the emotions (or motivations) of other people.
With practise and feedback on your performance you can become more effective in recognising and managing emotions in both yourself and others. Emotional intelligence is central to how our life experience and can influence how successful we are in our relationships and careers. It can also help understand the nature of competition and build a positive, health understanding of competition. According to research from careers and skills agency Find a Future, it seems more than four in five (85%) parents and teachers are worried that their children are heading for a wake-up call once they start work because they are not used to losing or competing against others.
Here are 5 Top Tips to improve your EI so you can have a healthy perspective on a range of workplace issues, including competition:-
1.Self-awareness
One of the core areas of Emotional Intelligence is self-awareness. In many ways, this is the cornerstone of all the other areas. In order to be aware of others’ emotions, you need to firstly be aware of your own.
By increasing your emotional vocabulary and use it to describe your full range of feelings throughout various parts of the day, you can find out and pay more attention to your emotions.
In addition to describing your emotions pay attention to their intensity. Rate your emotions from 1-10. The better you gauge your emotions, the more easily you can monitor and change them.
2.Notice how you behave
A key part of improving Emotional Intelligence is learning to manage your emotions, which is something you can only do if you are consciously aware of them.
While you’re practising your emotional awareness, pay attention to your behaviour too. Notice how you act when you’re experiencing certain emotions, and how that affects your day-to-day life. Does it impact your communication with others, your productivity, or your overall sense of well-being?
Once you become more conscious of how you’re reacting to your emotions, it’s easy to slip into judgement mode and start attaching labels to your behaviour. Try to refrain from doing that right now, as you’ll be far more likely to be honest with yourself if you’re not judging yourself at the same time.
3.Take responsibility
This is probably the most challenging step and it’s also the most helpful. Your emotions and behaviour come from you – they don’t come from anyone else – therefore YOU are the one who’s responsible for them.
If you feel hurt in response to something someone says or does and you lash out at them, you’re responsible for that. They don’t ‘make’ you lash out (they’re not controlling you with puppet strings, are they?!) so your reaction is your responsibility.
Equally, feelings can provide you with valuable information about your experience of the other person, as well as your own needs and preferences, but your feelings aren’t another person’s responsibility.
Once you start accepting responsibility for how you feel and how you behave, this will have a profound impact on all areas of your life.
4.Flexibility
Everyone has routines and set ways of doing things. However, you can experience problems if you get stuck in a rut and become inflexible to change. By being too rigid, you may miss out on opportunities, fall behind in learning new techniques and may tend to deal with problems in the same, sometimes unproductive, ways.
Being emotionally intelligent involved knowing when to stick to and when to switch off your emotional attachments. When it’s time to move on, people high in EI can make that adjustment. If you find change difficult, look at the possible consequences. What might happen if you stay with the status quo? Or where might you be if you go with the flow?
Change is part of growth. Throughout life, new experiences and new opportunities can provide you with personal and professional fulfilment, and you need to be open to these changes.
Although you might find it uncomfortable to try new things, most people find the short-term plan worth the long-term gain. Part of growing as a person is learning new skills and approaches an experiencing new relationships and places.
5.Respond DON’T react
There’s a subtle but important difference between responding and reacting.
Reacting is an unconscious process where we experience an emotional trigger, and behave in an unconscious way that expresses or relieves that emotion (for example, feeling irritated or snapping at the person who has just interrupted you).
Responding is a conscious process that involves noticing how you feel, then deciding how you want to behave (for example, feeling irritated, explaining to the person how you feel, why this isn’t a good time to be interrupted and when would be better).
Want to read more of the Top Tips?
Visit the Creativedge ‘Top 10 Tips’ mobile App available for iPhone and Android smartphones:-
Appstore – https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/top-10-tips/id796349890?mt=8
Google Play – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.elixsoft.creativedge
