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What is emotional intelligence?
The Emotional Intelligence Consortium is a good resource for emotional intelligence research information, including programs that focus on boosting an organization's emotional intelligence. But other endeavours can help you in the quest to use your emotions intelligently and strengthen your soft skills. Here are four to start with:
Learn to take responsibility
The cornerstone of emotional intelligence and soft skills is responsibility. Everybody has met the manager who is always looking for someone to blame, who micromanages or who condescends.
These folks lack the most foundational tool at your disposal - taking responsibility, says Christopher Avery,
Cutter Consortium senior consultant and author of
Teamwork is an Individual Skill.
Responsibility is not simply paying your bills on time or managing a staff of 10. It is, in Avery's terms, the internal process of taking ownership to the extent you can for the situations in your life and creating the best from that.
Why, you may ask, in this age of layoffs and mergers, would you want to take ownership of situations you likely had no hand in? In a word: power.
In the 1959 classic
Man's Search for Meaning,Viktor Frankl wrote: "Everything can be taken from a man [except] the last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's way." The act of becoming responsible capitalizes largely on that mindset.
Being in denial, blaming, justifying, feeling shame, quitting or feeling obligation are all ways of abdicating responsibility. But they are also what humans are hardwired to do when something goes wrong, says Avery.
Recognizing this gives power, because it means that although those reactions might be natural, you have the choice to move away from them and on to ownership.
So when your brain flashes, "It's all her fault," "This place isn't fair so I give up trying," or, "I'll do it because I have to," you simply recognize these thoughts for what they are and move on to a more powerful position.
Becoming responsible is quite simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Avery has a three-step model: commitment, awareness and situation examination.
1. Commit to operating from an outlook of responsibility. Each morning, determine that you will take responsibility throughout that day and remind yourself at scheduled times, especially before entering what you suspect may be a difficult situation. Creating a new habit must be constantly encouraged and reinforced to become second nature.
2. Practise noticing when you are blaming, feeling shame or in other ways acting, thinking or feeling irresponsible. This can be difficult, says Avery: "The ego doesn't want us to see all the parts of our character."
3. Examine each difficult situation objectively: what is happening and what your role is in it, and determine how you can act more responsibly.
Just committing to these practices will change your relationships and promote respect, both from yourself and from others.
Take a public speaking course
Learning the nuances of public speaking is one of the best ways to improve your emotional intelligence and soft skills, says Jim Clemmer, leadership consultant and author.
"The ability to verbalize, persuade and influence are tightly interwoven in what is at the heart of emotional intelligence and the work of influencing or relating to others," he adds.
There's the self-management aspect, of course, in that you must manage your own feelings, such as nervousness.
In addition, practising public speaking can be an exploration into your personal style and what works best for you, including what audiences you are most comfortable with.
For example, someone who is analytical and serious is likely to have more comfort and influence using his own personality style as a base, rather than trying to suddenly be Mr. Funnyman.
Perhaps surprisingly, public speaking can also help you become more attuned to others. "Advanced presentation skills will teach people how to tune into audiences better: it forces you to empathize, to ask questions," says Clemmer.
You'll learn how to make it more about them and less about you. A good presenter is tuned in to the audience, so you will learn how to meet listeners where they are and how to guide them where you want them to go. Important skills for any manager.
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