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Emotional Intelligence - and what it can do for youAuthor / Source: Gareth Harris Category: Mind and Body |
Have you heard of IQ?
Do you know what IQ is?
Do you know what your IQ score is?
You may well be able to answer yes to one or more of the questions above.
Well, what about your EQ?
Have you heard of EQ?
Do you know what EQ is?
Do you know what your EQ scores are?
What is Emotional Intelligence
EQ stands for Emotional Quotient and measures your Emotional Intelligence (Ei). Which put simply is an indication of how you interact and communicate with yourself and others.
Ei emotional intelligence can be seen as the ability to recognize, manage, be aware of and use our emotions in positive and constructive ways.
As well as ourselves it’s also about recognizing the emotional states of others and engaging them in ways that feel good to all and create mutual safety, trust, and confidence.
Emotional intelligence can be directly linked to the level of a person’s self-esteem, self-awareness, along with how compassionate, empathetic, and adaptable you are.
Emotional intelligence is what helps us communicate clearly, lead others, and build relationships at work and in our personal life. It also helps us motivate ourselves, solve problems, and achieve our goals.
“Emotional Intelligence is about managing ourselves and directing our behaviours to be more personally and interpersonally effective”
What does Ei look at?
Ei looks at two distinct areas of your life. It looks at what you need for effective personal management (interpersonal) and what you need for effective relationship management (interpersonal). Having a good balance between to two is an essential part of good emotional intelligence.
Your Ei is made up of 16 key areas which include; your self regard and regard for others, how emotionally self aware you are, as well as how emotionally aware you are of others.
It also looks at how goal directed you are, your emotional flexibility and how emotionally resilient you are to name a few.
In this article I will concentrate on 6 of the key areas and to help explain this I would like you to imagine a table.
The table is like your emotional intelligence and the four table legs represent 4 of the key areas of Ei:
● Self Awareness – the extent to which you are in touch with your body, your feelings and your intuitions
● Awareness of others – the degree to which you are in touch with the feeling states of others
● Self management – the degree to which you are able to manage your internal states, impulses and resources
● Relationship management - the extent to which you can inspire, influence, and develop others.
I would like you to imagine that the table is a bit wobbly.
Ok, with many personal development techniques you would now look at different ways to stop the table wobbling.
You could look at the four legs and maybe wedge something under one of the leg to make the table steady (like an emotional beer mat) or even worse you may try to trim a bit off one to of the legs to stop the wobble.
The thing is the table legs may well be perfectly level and taking these actions may be masking the real issue. The real problem may not the table, it could be the floor. The floor could
be uneven or broken.
In emotional intelligence terms the floor is:
● Your self regard- the degree to which we value and accept ourselves
● Your regard for others – the degree to which you accept and value others as people, as distinct from liking or approving of what they may do.
Self regard and regard for others is the bedrock of the Ei process and is very often the place to start when improving your emotional intelligence. And what I find is that if you make the floor level the table legs and the rest of the 16 key areas tend to improve too.
Ei Profiling
When I work with people to establish their Ei, I start by getting them to complete an online Ei questionnaire. This generates a unique personal profile report on the 16 key areas. The report
displays your Ei profile in two different ways.
Firstly using a Linea scale, where on the whole the more blue bars the better.
This is an example of a Linea scale:
As you can see from this example the person has a very low score for Self regard with a very high score for Regard for others. This could tend to indicate that the person has relationships where they see others as better/more worthy than they are and tending to put themselves down and use very negative self talk.
The other type of scale is called a Bipolar scale.
This shows if the person has a balanced approach in a specific area or if they tend to show extremes of behavior. In these scales the more green bars the better.
In this example, when it comes to conflict handing, you can see that this person is quite high on both the passive and aggressive scale which may indicate someone who “bottles it up” most of the time but when pushed too far could “lose it” quite easily. This scale example is not uncommon when a person has a low self regard score.
Your Ei can be improved
It’s important to note that your scores are only an indication of where you are now and unlike many personality type profiles these scores are not set in stone and can be worked on and improved.
What can Ei do for you?
So, how can knowing about your personal emotionally intelligence scores help you?
I find that understanding your Ei and the results of the questionnaire are a fantastic place to start any personal development.
It clearly identifies the areas that could do with being looked at and also shows you where different areas of your Ei affects you and others in a positive or negative way.
Very often I find that people are not surprised by the profile report and they find it really easy to give examples in their lives that demonstrate the different scores.
I also find that when you have it written down in front of you it’s a very good catalyst to making lasting changes in your life.
“The impact of the report and action plan has been incredible and others have noticed the change in me too. I no longer feel as though I have the weight of the world on my shoulders and my outlook is so much more positive. My next goal is to identify another area to progress from the EI report and develop myself further”
- R James
The next step
Ei profiling is an excellent way to take your personal development to the next level.In the report you not only get a personalized break down of the 16 key areas that clearly shows your strengths and weaknesses but also which parts of your Ei could be improved. You also get clear recommendations for improving each area.
So, we can use your profile as the starting point for our 1-2-1 personal development coaching sessions and you get to keep the report and use the recommendations for your ongoing development.
If you feel that finding out more about your emotional intelligence sounds useful, contact me through the FBN website, email me at fbn@positivedoing.com or have a look at my website www.positivedoing.com
About the author
Gareth Harris has been involved in personal development for over 10 years. He is a Master Practitioner of NLP and a New Code NLP Practitioner and is accredited to deliver Emotional Intelligence through JCAs ie online report. He is based in the UK and does his coaching and Ei profiling either face to face or online using SKYPE or something similar. Which means that wherever you live you can benefit from my
coaching sessions and Ei profiling.
Gareth Harris
www.positivedoing.com
fbn@positivedoing.com
Article Reference: http://www.positivedoing.com
