Developing Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is a valuable trait that can be improved. Much like our fitness and character the more effort we put into developing it the better we get and there is a good reason to create the habit.
Emotional intelligence can have a positive impact on our relationships, on our resilience and on our careers. It can help us navigate our own lives and be key to the successes we hold important and an enabler to a more tranquil life.
It is an essential trait for servant leadership and has a pedigree going back to some of the earliest and greatest thinkers. So what is it?
The Key Skills of Emotional Intelligence
Travis Bradberry and Daniel Goldman break down emotional intelligence into four key skills:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Management
- Social Awareness
- Relationship Management
What is Self-Awareness?
I mentioned here https://medium.com/@olirowlands/modern-problems-ancient-solutions-98c28e4ee47d that self-awareness comes from having a profound understanding of our emotional reactions caused by our perceptions and the ability to distance ourselves from them before accepting and acting upon them.
This interception of what we see and how we interpret it has been a theme in psychotherapy, psychology and philosophies of life going back to Socrates and earlier.
Most people have heard of “know thy self” attributed to Socrates and inscribed over the Temple of Apollo. In the Phaedrus, Socrates takes this further:
“But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things”
Labouring on this importance in the Protagoras, Plato alludes to the moral wisdom that unlike technical ability humans learned in order to achieve common communal action, for the common good and in the service of protecting the human race from the less aware but more powerful animal kingdom.
For Socrates and for Plato self-awareness was as much a moral journey as a journey of learning, an effort into developing an awareness of our reactional behaviours, the key to creating space between perception and action and with that a pre-requisite journey into leadership.
Writing on Servant Leadership Greenleaf too captures the necessity of broadening a leaders awareness. In the same breath, he warns on the risks of opening up our perception of the universal infinite and finite of our situation. Whilst pointing out that a span of awareness enables us to “see it as it is” which will help to clarify values and achieve serenity in the face of stress and uncertainty. The eudaimonic tradition can be seen heavily influencing Greenleafs writing, thoughts and actions.
On the theme of common action for the good, we can segway into the needs of modern team dynamics. Self-awareness is paramount to the development of high performing teams, understanding how and why one is interacting with others and being able to optimise the way those interactions happen so that they happen for the benefit of “as it is” rather than how we would like it to be is a key attribute for any team player. This has been no better captured than by Patrick Lencioni in his work on The Ideal Team Player.
Improving Self-Awareness Through Self-Management
To improve our self-awareness we have to become familiar with our emotional reactions and how they drive our behaviour in any given situation. Whether that response is helpful or detrimental to what we are trying to achieve. The pre-historic monkey that lives within all of us isn't necessarily working towards the same ends as our modern civilised self. We need to transcend our reactions in order to thrive.
There are many different views on emotions, Paul Ekman identified six basic ones: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. It's surprising not to see love in this list, according to St. Thomas Aquinas's treatise on passion love is the first of all and one that all others proceed from.
Our own personal experience can to some extent support this, love is often antecedent to anger, for example, we argue with those we hold most dearly when we forget to ask “what am I like to live with?” instead we expect the object of our love to know what we want them to be like, in the end, other peoples behaviour is out of our control, ours isn't.
Anger always needs a stimulus, a cause that we perceive, process and choose to react to, anger invariably comes before the fall for anger is unbridled vanity and pride in action. How far we fall and how much it hurts follows from the chain of events caused by the extent of our reaction, often the flapping wings of anger’s butterfly has a catastrophic effect on our future selves.
To overcome anger you have to fight a war of attrition with it, the next time you experience the tunnel vision, the tingly headed, the uncontrolled reaction, make a note of why you experienced it, how it made you feel and how you responded.
In the evening review the event and see if you feel your response was correct, whether you would have advised others to respond in the same way, your children for example. Think through the multitude of other ways you could have responded and consider whether the compassion we hold for the people we know needed to fall to anger because of a slight of pride or an inability to make the world move in the way we want it to. Was there a better more effective way, did we waste a day dwelling in an unhappy state?
Happiness, of course, is what we all want and emotional intelligence can help us achieve higher levels of happiness in our lives, the steps to becoming aware of our emotional responses and finding ways to amplify the useful and fade the useless are pretty simple:
- Keep a track of your emotional reactions as they happen, ask why, was it effective, was there a better way, how did it feel, what caused it?
- Think deeply on how you could have reacted differently to the same situation, rehearse the response so that next time there is no surprise.
- Remember that between stimulus and response there is an opportunity to choose and reinforce the character you are looking to espouse.
- Rinse and repeat for every situation you find yourself reacting with negative emotions.
Social Awareness
Whilst self-awareness and self-management are the inward facing aspects of emotional intelligence, social awareness is an outward focus. How we interact with those people around us and in emotionally charged environments how aware we are of our surroundings, the feeling in the room and best way to respond to it. To what extent we can show empathy and understand the perspective of others in order to navigate conflict.
Staying focussed in the current moment is perhaps the most useful posture we can take to improve social awareness. Not just aware of others but aware of ourselves. Small signals that we produce can have profound impacts on how others behave towards us and small signals that others produce can help us understand how they are feeling.
Simon Sinek is someone who shows exceptional social awareness, check out some of his interviews. He is very pro-active in reading the situation and responding in emotionally appropriate ways, he often mirrors his interviewer's body language a technique proven to build rapport.
Active listening and watching are the channels for growing our awareness of the present moment, to have constructive interactions we need to be equally aware of ourselves and the other person we are interacting with. It may be easier to be the third person in the room watching everyone without judgement.
Relationship Management
If we consider that every interaction we have with someone affects our emotional bank account with them we can choose whether to make a deposit or a withdrawal, unlike high street banking in this instance, it's important to never go overdrawn. People remember how we made them feel long after they've forgotten the things we did, they judge us solely on the temptations we yield, they do not knot the ones we have resisted. We have a natural bias towards remembering and amplifying negative interactions.
It’s worth considering the criteria for effective relationship management. Firstly understanding what the best course of action is in any given situation based on the likely feelings and thoughts of the person or people you are interacting with, knowing whether they are afraid, happy or sad can help develop emotional alignment. If you need to persuade understanding commonplaces and appealing to values are all established rhetorical techniques.
Secondly understanding the most effective and considerate way to interact with people in any given moment, some conversations simply shouldn't happen over a phone, some requests can be entirely misconstrued by short jabby emails. If we wish to influence in our relationships we have to consider how our messages are received. Whether we have caused a ripple of rumination or a simple smile of satisfaction.
Finally being clear on what we are trying to achieve before we engage will help ensure we are consistent and focussed in our approach, that means understanding our own needs and the direction of travel we need the interaction to go in. As the saying goes:
“No wind blows in favour of a ship without direction”
Seneca
