The concept of Emotional Intelligence was discovered by Daniel Goleman clearing the cloud off why people with average IQ outperform those with higher IQs, 70% of the time. Self-Awareness, Managing Emotions, Self-Motivation, Empathy, and Managing Relationships are five attributes of Emotional Intelligence. Today, Emotional Intelligence has been embraced and practiced in all parts of the world. Emotional Intelligence or EI is a mystique for extraordinary performance in all domains and aspects of life – Work and Personal.
Emotional Intelligence is innate and also can be learned. Today the executive hitting his quarterly targets with whatever heroics needed to hit them is the asset to any company. Right? Number driven workforce also has cons of high attrition leading to high training costs. And it’s devoid of any empathy. Empathy is understanding others emotions and feelings.
Emotional Intelligence is the key to sustained performance and lasting results. In the competitive world, employee engagement is required for a star performance. This calls for having leadership quality in the managers for high performing teams and job loyalty. To help you develop high performance and team management with better decision-making skills, I have drawn out these 5 principles of Emotional Intelligence.
5 Principles of Emotional Intelligence to Outperform the Rest
These 5 principles are decoded after in-depth research of the available publications from Daniel Goleman, Richard Branson, and Travis Bradberry.
1. Focus:
The focus is very important to do what you do with excellence and perfections and also errorless. It sounds simple but difficult to practice. There are three forms of focus.
Inner focus is to understand what you feel and why you are feeling that. It is called Self Awareness. There are situations like your boss rebuking you. You instantly feel to grab that chair in front of you and hit him on the head. That’s impulsive.
But you breathe in; get to understand the problem at hand. Think about some solution, a solution that will definitely solve the problem and impress your boss, ignoring all the shit he is throwing at you. This is Emotions Management. You have to manage your emotions and bring out the desired emotions for the desired outcome. Meditating for 30 minutes every day helps you achieve this.
Meditation has been taken into account by many mind trainers for material achievement and internal peace. I meditate on internal peace. Meditation is a simple process of focusing on your breathing. Focusing on inhalations and exhalations. You don’t have to control it, just focus on the breath. While doing this your mind may start wandering about anything. All you have to do is bring it back to focusing on the breath. The focus is best achieved with Mindful Meditation.
Another is Focus on empathy. You can read this in Empathy below.
Outer Focus is knowledge of the system. What will work for your organization and what competitors are doing, and what is the demand-supply gap? Outer Focus is exploitation and exploration. Exploitation is when you tweak that product; fine-tune it and resell it again as it is high on Demand. Like Blackberry Mobiles. And Exploration is when you also do competitive analysis, some R&D for innovations and visualize the future demand and understand what may become obsolete over what is new. Where Blackberry failed, Samsung performed remarkably well.
2. Attention:
Digital Marketing has made the world a global village; all the information is just a google away. Log into your Facebook account and you can talk to anyone living anywhere, solve your queries by posting in the groups, or help a traveler with locating a shop in your area. This is really a good invention if you regulate the time spend on social media.
Social Media has also been a major source of distractions. Mobile is LSD (a psychedelic drug). I came across young students riding a bicycle to school and texting at the same time. The mother next door has a toddler who is constantly trying to get the attention of her mother but she is busy texting on her phone. And the same goes for the father. The attention is lacking largely. It was found rude if you talk on your Blackberry while someone is still sitting in front of you. But today it is a practice of everyone, if not talking but browsing on phone and hardly talking to each other. This is a grave concern.
If you want your team to be productive and stay there, all you have to do is turn off your laptop or computer, keep aside your mobile and all another device, and pay attention to what they want to say. This will build a better relationship and trust in the team. This is an important quality of a leader, attentive listening. Attention is a very rare commodity and a very precious one. Your Team, Children, and spouse need it most. Give them that.
3. Outlook
The outlook is how you look at the world. Imagine that you are commuting on public transport say a bus. There is a father with a baby who is crying deafeningly. Everyone on the bus gets disturbed. Now two things can happen. You get annoyed with the noise and scorn father, who fails to soothe the baby, regret that you boarded this particular bus, dream to shove a pacifier and silent the kid. But nothing changes, and the kid continues to cry stridently.
On the other hand, you think about why the baby is crying. What is annoying him? This thought may lead you to go and ask his father to reason. You may search for some nursery rhyme or cartoon on your mobile and show it to the kid. He may get distracted from cry and if not laugh probably gets engaged with the screen. What I am trying to say here is your outlook, how you see the world matters a lot. The world is a beautiful place to live in with beautiful people, flora, and fauna if you ignore some anti-social actions of some group indeed.
The better way to have a positive and loving outlook is to stop watching News. Today, news telecasts only negative activity happening around the world emphasizing petty issues as grave concerns. You will hardly see anything good there. Read good books and formulate a positive and loving outlook.
4. Empathy
Empathy is understanding the emotion of another person, to be able to see how others see the world. Empathy is of three kinds
Cognitive Empathy: Cognitive Empathy is when you understand how other people see the world; you understand their paradigms and thought process. This helps you in framing your communication in the language the people understand easily. Leaders with cognitive empathy can get better performance out of their team.
Emotional Empathy is to understand the emotions of another person. It is also important as if you know only cognitive empathy you may miss the mark.
Empathetic Concern is understanding the concern or setbacks for your team. You would like to offer help and guide them to overcome the setbacks. Leaders with Empathetic Concern have a very loyal team. They seldom leave even when they are able.
5. Resilience
Resilience is the rapidity with which you recover. We have been highly influenced by the phrase, “Shit Happens”. But it does not have the cure. You have to recover to be motivated to do what you always love to do. We have to change the way we respond to the bad phase. Feeling nasty and annoyed while asking why this happened to me will not lower the pain or change anything. You have to focus on more positive experiences that you have, read a good book, meditate and work on your next goal or pursue your hobby. If you station your thoughts on some constructive activity you will easily heal faster and be motivated again.
The practice is the key. If you keep practicing all these 5 principles of Emotional Intelligence you will improve and do better with time. These constituencies of Emotional Intelligence require 1000s of hours of practice to master the skill set. Remember there is no better trainer than yourself, there is no greater motivator than yourself, and they’re no bigger game-changer than yourself. If you decide to change, you will.
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Author Bio:
Shanu Shah is Blogger and Publisher at www.totaldreamer.com. She loves to pen down her thoughts and imagination to the paper. She also offers other authors and poetry writers to publish their content on her website www.totaldreamer.com. Currently, she is working on an eBook and web-series.