Self-smart - How well do you know yourself? How well do you understand your emotions?
Emotional Intelligence is concerned with self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, empathy and the ability to influence others. According to Daniel Coleman's theory, success in business depends on emotional intelligence rather than academic learning.
People with Emotional Intelligence are self-aware, self-regulated and self-motivated. They are sensitive to other's feelings and have the ability to influence people.
Emotions are generally feelings, which cannot be seen or touched. You feel them.
Emotional Intelligence is a ladder of your ability to deal with emotions and also use them. The ladder starts from self-awareness to self-regulation to self-motivation to empathy to your influence on others. Emotional Intelligence is a quality every leader must have. It is a quality every individual who wants to be relevant must have.
• Self-awareness
To be self-aware means that you know how you feel and how to react to situations as they arise. In being self-aware, you must know your strengths and weaknesses. You must know what works best for you. Basically, It concerns knowing yourself. It answers the question: "What do I know about myself?"
In knowing yourself, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
• "What do I want/what are my goals?"
• "What are my strengths and weaknesses?"
• "How do I react to situations (positive or negative)?"
• "How best do I achieve my goals?"
• "What environment works best for me in achieving my goals?"
• "What time of the day/period am I at my full potential?"
Having knowledge of your goals, as may differ from time to time is a great step in being self-aware. You need to know how well you perform tasks and what you cannot do well. You need to know the ways you react to situations and what the effects may be. Where and when are best for the achievement of your goals? You need to use your knowledge of your strengths to achieve excellent results and try to work on your weaknesses.
You must be able to control these emotions when the time comes.
• Self-regulation
As the name goes, you should be able to regulate your emotions and control your feelings. How you react to situations must be controlled. It is your ability to accept and manage your feelings. It is your ability to take charge of your feelings and use it to your advantage.
Self-regulation goes hand-in-hand with self-awareness. You must be aware of your feelings for you to be able to control it. You must be aware of your skills for you to maximise them. You must have a knowledge of your reactions to situations for you to control yourself or stop yourself from reacting.
This skill is much needed in the work place. For instance, you work as a sales representative. Your job is to sell products and help increase sales. You are paid based on the number of sales you make. Your colleagues at work love football and argue over events and occurrences, and of course, it's something you love also (you are aware of this). However, you decide to stay mute and ensure you keep making sales and doing follow-up on potential customers. In the end, you made the highest sales and were awarded as the salesman of the year.
Your ability to control your feelings (your love for football) is self-regulation and is a constituent of what makes you emotionally intelligent.
• Self-motivation
This is your ability to motivate yourself despite the situations that may arise. It is your ability to keep yourself enthusiastic in achieving your goal(s). Just as it is in the instance I gave earlier, you should keep yourself motivated. Your goal of getting Salesman of the year should be a motivation. You controlled your emotions and kept yourself at work. This way, you have been able to mask your emotions and remained focused.
You need to ask yourself, "What motivates me? What can I do to keep myself enthusiastic/motivated?" It is part of self-awareness, your reaction to situations. What situations motivate you? You have to make use of situations and circumstances surrounding to keep you going.
• Empathy
Now, you're done with yourself. You know yourself an you can stand. Empathy comes next. Empathy is your ability to sense feelings. It is your ability to know the feelings of others. It is the ability to know the way others feel and understand it.
It is knowing when another is sad, happy, angry, scared, Etc. Being sensitive to the feelings of others, you are able to at right and maintain the right relationship with people.
• Influencing others
Just like being Self-regulated, where you need to be self-aware, so is influencing others, where you need to know how they feel.
You need to build on the strengths of people and try to minimise their weaknesses. You can help others build their emotional Intelligence.
The end
This is the end of the series! You keep reading, you keep developing yourself. There are many other skills required for you to acquire. I am not going through them thoroughly, but maybe, just maybe I may do so in subsequent posts. Financial Literacy is important for all. Emotional Intelligence stands you out and your ability to think right keeps you ahead.
You can share what you just learnt with friends and anyone you see would need this. You can also comment what you just learnt plus any suggestion, contribution or any other thing in the comment section.
© THE MONEY CORNER 2020
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