Emotional Intelligence Training: The Advantage Of Building Abilities
Enhancing your Emotional Intelligence (EI) provides considerable advantages in three areas: decision-making, relationships and health. These three areas cover almost every behavior, every action and reaction and every situation you may encounter. They are inherent in your professional relationships and your family interactions, from the daily events to the broad sweep of major, multi-million dollar corporations that impact your life.
Decision Making
Emotional self-awareness is a vital Emotional Intelligence skill. Being aware of your feelings can help you make a decision about what what to say or do (or not say or do). And when you build upon emotional self-awareness and develop the EI competency of emotional self-regulation, you can quickly transform negative, draining emotions into more positive, effective emotions. This enables you to think and act more intelligibly at any time, allowing you to experience significantly enhanced decision-making, in-the-moment. These skills will enable you to stop reacting to events and people and give you the opportunity to respond more thoughtfully and thoroughly. Being in control of your emotions has a huge, positive impact on your performance, your effectiveness, your confidence and your motivation.
Relationships
In addition to helping you personally, increasing Emotional Intelligence skills will bring about a positive impact on your relationships with others. For example, instead of erupting when a project manager announces a deadline without consulting you, you could remain calm and clear-headed by managing your emotional reactiveness. With this clarity, you could offer suggestions and conerns, ask good questions and perhaps even influence the deadline all while preserving your good working relationship with your manager. If, instead, your reaction had been negative, you might have caused a breakdown in communication and created impediments to working effectively. As a result, your relationship would lose ground and you would have to exert a great deal of effort and time to fix the damage. All parties (you, your manager and the organization) benefit when relationships are maintained and enhanced.
This also holds true on the home front. For example, if your child comes home with a poor test score, instead of becoming angry and upset, you can remain calm and coherent. In this state, you can convey your care and concern while still maintaining a understanding and firm approach. Several of my program participants have found using simple EI techniques at home to be very powerful when it comes to dealing with their children. For example, a Senior Vice President for a large organization discovered that his son had used his credit card to charge a tank of gas. His anger caused him to think about grabbing a baseball bat and having a serious conversation with his son. Instead, he employed a quick, simple emotional management technique and was able to transform that anger. As a result, he discussed the situation with his son in a calm and rational manner. As punishment, his son could not drive the truck for a week. The next morning the son called his dad and thanked him for having a conversation instead of a yelling match.
This story demonstrates how managing ones emotions can have a significant effect. The son and his dad did not have their usual heated interaction with no one winning. In fact the relationship was improved with the dad gaining a great deal of respect from the son.
Health
The third key area impacted by building EI skills is health. When you have negative emotions, your body produces more cortisol, the “stress hormone.” Over time, excessive cortisol levels can cause sleeplessness, acid reflux, loss of bone mass and osteoporosis, asthma, allergies, low sperm count, ulcers, redistribution of fat to the waist and hips, and fat buildup in the arteries which can cause heart disease and many other diseases (McCraty, Borrios-Choplin et al. ”The Impact of a New Emotional Self-Management Program on Stress, Emotions, Heart Rate Variability, DHEA and Cortisol” Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33(2):151-70, 1998). Mismanaged emotions, correlated with dysrhythmias in our Autonomic Nervous System, are associated with many diseases including asthma, depression, chronic fatigue, hypoglycemia, hypertension, and many more. Altering negative emotions into positive productive ones daily over a sustained period of time has been shown to have a positive impact on many health-related problems. Most frequently participants in my programs mention a significant reduction or elimination of sleeplessness, often in one or two weeks.
It is not hard to increase Emotional Intelligence skills. In a very short period of time, people who have used simple, proven techniques consistently have realized benefits. They have reported improvements in all three areas: decision-making, relationships and health.
About the Author
Byron Stock, a former engineer and director of corporate education, guides individuals and organizations toward excellence by helping them enhance their Emotional Intelligence skill as a powerful tool to achieve strategic objectives, lead change and create resilient, high performing organizational cultures. Learn about Byron’s quick, easy, proven techniques to harness the power of your EI in his new book, SMART EMOTIONS for Busy Business People available through his website www.ByronStock.com
Posted in Articles