CIO soft skills: Techniques to stoke your emotional IQ

Previous page: How to use your emotions intelligently

Mindfulness and meditation

At the heart of emotional intelligence is mindfulness, and mindfulness is at the heart of yoga and meditation.

At their most basic, both of these disciplines use attention on the breath as a tool to enable relaxed awareness, focus and objectivity. Stress, fear, anxiety and other negative feelings impair focus and decision-making capabilities. The brain literally works differently under stress.

Picture a lake during a storm. On a sunny, clear day, you can probably see right through the water to the bottom of the lake. But on a stormy day, the water is choppy and the view to the bottom obscured by waves. Simply put: "When you're stressed, you don't have access to most of your brain," says Boyatzis.

"That's why things like meditation become so important; it allows movement across the brain." When you are calm and happy, says Boyatzis, you can function at a much higher level, you can process difficult concepts, you can sense things at a wider distance, you are more open to experiences and you can multitask better. "Just the opposite is true when you are stressed."

When you're stressed or negatively emotional, you tend to be reactive: that is, more likely to act on a negative impulse. Meditation and yoga train you to notice a thought or feeling without becoming attached to acting on it.

Say you begin to move into a difficult yoga pose and all you can think about is how difficult it is and your whole focus starts to concentrate on how your muscles are resisting (which just makes them resist more).

The yoga teacher might direct you at that point to remember how your muscles felt loose and relaxed in the previous, easier pose, and ask you to try to feel similarly in this more difficult pose.

Simply thinking of it in this way can profoundly change your experience of discomfort to one of greater ease. And becoming adept at short-circuiting automatic, but not necessarily wanted, responses can have payoffs at both work and home.

Take an improv class

Comedic improvisation relies on listening and building off others. These skills are under-represented in the workplace, says Chet Harding, co-founder of the Improv Asylum in Boston.

"Corporations are built on 'Yes, But' - 'I'm listening, but I'll use my idea anyway.' Or, 'I'll look like I'm listening, but I'm really waiting for you to finish so I can talk.'"

To show the power of emotional intelligence and to develop it in corporate employees, the Improv Asylum offers specialised training. "A lot of what our training shows is how you come up with ideas that are bigger and better than what you could [come up with] working alone."

At the end of the class, he says, participants create a scene. It becomes clear that the idea came from no one person, and it's better than any one person could come up with on their own.

From the outside, the exercises can seem a bit, well, silly. But repeat customers such as Raytheon attest to their power. One of the first exercises is about the power of yes. Participants form a circle and switch places by allowing, or not, another to take their spot. The caveat is that if one person says yes, they must quickly find another spot before the person they said yes to arrives at their spot.

Harding says people quickly form strategies, and one emerges especially fast: "If you say yes to me, I tend to come back to you. I won't go back to you if you say no, because I'm just wasting my time."

Beyond that, lessons surrounding the way someone says no (if it's necessary) emerge as well. "Especially with customer service, you may have to say no, but how you say it is crucial."

He points to the example of Red Bull, a long-time client of the Improv Asylum. Instead of saying, "No, there's not," when potential customers worried that "there's too much caffeine in that," the answer can be, "I hear that a lot, but it turns out it's about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee."

Another exercise demonstrates "questioning something to death." Participants quickly see that when free-flowing brainstorming is halted by questions with a "that won't work" undertone, ideas quickly die before they have a chance to bloom.

Other exercises include creating stories bit by bit, one participant at a time. All require listening, empathy, flexibility and other emotional intelligence skills.

The Improv exercises illustrate what may not always seem obvious and what gives emotional intelligence such importance: people need people. "Fundamentally you can't do much in life alone," notes Boyatzis.

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