What’s Your Emotional Intelligence?
By Sherril Steele-Carlin
There is change afoot in corporate America. To be successful in the workplace, whether you work for huge conglomerate or a mom & pop grocery, you need more than intellectual beefiness, you need more than IQ, you need a sense of EQ. You haven’t heard of EQ? EQ is what most people call “Emotional Intelligence.”
What is EQ?
It's the measure of how you handle your relationships, in and out of the workplace. The Utne Reader online says, “Empathy and other qualities of the heart make it more likely that your marriage will thrive. Lack of those abilities explains why people of high IQ can be such disastrous pilots of their personal lives.” EQ is an offshoot of “social intelligence,” coined by E.L. Thorndike in 1920.
Why is it Important?
In the workplace, EQ is extremely important, and EQ scientists are discovering that EQ is on a decline – new workers entering the job market are showing less EQ than ever before. As a result, they are having difficulty working with others, staying motivated, and with self-discipline. Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important as IQ plus technical skills. Emotional intelligence is more than 85% of what sets star performers from the average.
How can you use EQ to create a better life for yourself? Hein says there are eight things you can do to raise your EQ, and get more out of your relationships. As you learn to deal more effectively with other people, your own life will be happier, and more successful.
Eight Ways to Raise Your EQ
1. Developing your emotional literacy, which I define as your ability to use feeling words.
2. Learning to forecast your feelings and incorporate them into decision making to help you make better decisions with less future regret.
3. Learning to use your feelings to help you set goals that are worthy of achieving.
4. Learning to accept your own feelings and understand how they represent your unmet emotional needs.
5. Learning to take more responsibility for your own feelings rather than blaming them on others or believing that others “make” you feel the way you do. (This is a hard one because most parents will say things like “You embarrassed me. You are making me angry, etc.” So part of developing your emotional intelligence, or at least improving your emotional health, is “unlearning” many of the emotional lessons you learned at home.
6. Learning to accept, respect, and validate other people’s feelings.
7. Learning to help others identify their feelings and helping them identify actions to help them feel better.
8. Improving your understanding of the relationship between your thoughts and feelings, such as how your “automatic” thoughts can make you feel worse. (An example of this is thinking, “My partner is always late!” There are many self-help books on this topic under the general category of cognitive and rational emotive therapy. One warning though is that some of this type of therapy discounts the values of feelings to the point some people have become insensitive and invalidating of others’ feelings.)
So, if you use EQ to create better relationships in your life, success may not be far behind.
