WHAT'S YOUR EMOTIONAL E.Q.?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the “something” in each of us that ensures effective communication between the rational and emotional processing areas of our brain.

It is a bit intangible – we don't actually know what it is, but we know from our own experiences that it exists, and from science some of the neuro-chemical mechanics it triggers to exert its influences .

We also know that it is a faculty largely acquired through awareness of its existence and practical training “on the job” as it were. This is where there's a rile for conscious, deliberate, educated parenting. As you improve your emotional intelligence, you improve your ability to understand and manage the primary motivations for your behaviour, which reaps dividends in everything you do every day. A developed Emotional Intelligence is powerful and efficient—it allows you to focus your energy on a single skill with tremendous results.

What Does Emotional Intelligence Look Like?

It looks like nothing. Like electricity, we cannot see it, but we can see the effects of where it has been. It affects how we manage behaviour, navigate social complexities, and make personal choices and decisions that achieve the kind of short-, medium- and long-term results we prefer. It is a precursor to another equally elusive trait – Maturity.

Emotional Intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies:

TWO PRIMARY COMPETENCIES

Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and the thoughts that arise as a result, and manage your reactions into responses, and thus manage your behaviour and tendencies from those of a reactive brat to those of a cogitative, considerate, response-able adult.

• Core Skill #.1. = Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive the emotions and the thoughts as they arise, which ones you entertain, and stay aware of them, and their effect upon your mood and efficiency as they are happening. But self-awareness is often (wrongly) confused with “self-centredness”. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's an Australian aboriginal teaching that goes something like this – “Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love.... and then we return home.” In true Awareness, you cannot be self-aware without becoming more attuned to “otherness”. Awareness isn't just catching; Awareness is all that is. In its active form, this principle is known as “The Butterfly Effect”.
• Core Skill #.2. = Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and thoughts, and any repeating patterns you've created, and the effect those patterns have on the choices and decisions you make about how to interact with your environment. Aware self-management of your habitual thinking patterns shines light on your understanding pf why you react the way you do to situations, and the kind of person all of that turns you into. Skilled self-management allows you to stay flexible and productively deploy your resources to act in the best interests of everyone involved. You also become less the victim of existence and more it's author. A self-aware, self-managed person exudes an air of quiet authority – someone who knows what's what, and doesn't have to proclaim it from the treetops like some toey alpha-elephant in musth.

Social Competence can be defined as the level of your ability to empathise with other people’s moods, behaviour, and motives in order to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships. Social Competence is made up of your social awareness of the moods, agendas and needs of other people, combined with the relationship management skills you've learned in the process of growing up with family, schoolmates, friends and acquaintances.

• Core Skill #.3. = Social Awareness -- your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and, through self-awareness, get some insight and differing perspectives of what is really going on.
• Core Skill #.4. = Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and thinking, and the others’ emotions and thinking patterns, to manage interactions creatively and successfully.

While working on your emotional intelligence will improve a lot of different skills, there are four in particular that people tend to set goals around whenever the yearning for some kind of life-change surfaces. I'll explain how you can improve each of these skills solely by exercising your emotional intelligence. It doesn't matter whether you have honed you emotional skills to a high degree, or you still have you “L” plates on, paying attention to the following disciplines will pay off for you – and those who interact with you.....

A) Managing Your Time

In this age of abundance, time is the one thing nobody has enough of. And now that I'm older, I'm more acutely aware that time wasted is time that I will not get back. It seems that I'm not alone either – Google receives 111 million searches a month for “Time Management”. Few people recognise how time management depends upon the emotional intelligence skills of Self-Management and Relationship Management. Until you learn that, you have no hope of differentiating between what is “Important” and what is “Urgent”. Nor will you have much success in accurately identifying your hierarchies of what's more or less important/urgent, and even less awareness of how your hierarchies change according to who you're dealing with at the time.

Creating a good schedule is a very rational thing, and some people's personalities are better at it than others'. But sticking to a schedule is decidedly an emotion-based thing. Many of us start out every day every week, every month, and every year with the best of hopes, blisslessly unaware of intentions we've long forgotten we have, hidden leftovers of a more primitive time in our lives when bad choices were made, and have not since been un-made – just papered over. Those unresolved and forgotten remnants are the gremlins that sabotage our declared present intentions to manage our time wisely. We're fighting against our selves. Look in the closest mirror. That's you enemy.

We start out in fair weather and the breeze behind us, but then we receive a complicated email from a co-worker, a consuming phone call from a friend or relation, a rash of “beeps” from Facebook, or otherwise get sidetracked until our well-laid plans disappear into a fog of distractions. We spend the rest of the day trying to put out somebody else’s brush fires, or working to resolve issues that weren’t there in the morning. Before you know it, the day is gone and you’re completely off schedule – if you can even find it under the pile of accumulated spoilers. So you either stay behind and miss dinner with the family - also high on your hierarchy of “What's Important” - or you tack today's schedule onto the end of tomorrow's. And the further you go, the behinder you get.

When the needs of others try to impede upon your plans, it takes deft relationship management to finesse the relationship while ensuring that your priorities are still addressed. When the distractions are your own, sticking to a schedule requires self-management, prioritising, and finessing the relationships you have with each of your Selves. It will make your life a lot easier if you have become acutely aware of, and on pleasant working terms with the competing needs of your different “selves”. The more “onside” each of them are with You, the more assured and comfortable you will be, and so will others in your presence.

B) Embracing Change

Show me somebody who claims to love change, and I’ll show you a well-intentioned liar. There's a very good reason why Change is the basis of so much that is funny – Change is something that afflicts every one of us. Change is uncomfortable for everyone at times, and for many of us, real change makes our anus tighten and our skin crawl. Those who apply well-honed self-awareness and self-management skills tolerate change much more successfully than others. Those who don't, get forced into change that they resist, overtly or covertly, along the way adding resentment to the baggage they're carrying. This dynamic explains why so many people may resent you and punish you later for something they felt “forced” into, even if you did “for their own good”, and which they appeared to embrace at the time. (They did that, not out of spite, but out of their own poverty of self-awareness. They didn't feel the resentment under the rug. This is why I say often “You cannot ever know anyone else on the planet unless and until you know your self.)

Self-awareness enables you to adjust comfortably to change because it gives you the perspectives and the space you need to realise when change is coming, how it's affecting you, and how to make ample room for it. Some changes may be discomforting for some , but Change itself does not hurt – it's your resistance to it that hurts.

Self-management keeps you cool in the moment—often with a reminder that the most stable, trusted facets of your life are not completely under your control. Surprises and challenges are on the menu right up until you settle the bill and go home. If you find yourself incurably change-averse, develop the antidote of self-awareness and the skills of self-management, even set aside a small amount of time each week to list possible changes and blue-sky on what actions you might take in response.

C) Managing Assertiveness

Assertive people are often criticised, sometimes unfairly, for being “rude”, “negative” and/or “not-nice”. This is not surprising, as it is rare indeed to find people in positions of power in this country who do not indulge in obfuscation or equivocation. Most people are quite taken aback when somebody speaks straight from a heart and mind in concord. To a liar, straight truth is a direct and overt threat to dishonesty and an assault on shifty doublespeak.

It is my view that there is a marked difference between the extremes of Assertiveness at one end and Boorishness at the other. A boorish person seeks to impose his views, opinions and beliefs by browbeating, quarrelling, blustering and bearing down upon smaller or weaker people. An assertive person has an informed, considered and balanced wide-angle view of a situation, delivers it without equivocation, deceit, archness or duplicity, and listens politely and openly to dissenting views.

The most emotionally intelligent response to a situation in dispute is often one where you either say nothing, or openly and directly express your truth. If you choose to speak, you say what you mean, and mean what you say. You do not avoid responsibility for the words that come out of your mouth, or the nature of the energy that punctuates the content by hiding behind cowardly cop-outs like “I didn't mean it”, or “I was only joking”, or “I've been taken out of context”.

To paraphrase Aristotle, getting upset is so easy. It's a habit ingrained from centuries of habit as a means to control what others say and do. Getting upset is evidence of a chronic condition of low self-esteem and Self-Importance – “I'm far too important that you should make me feel this way. Apologise and pull your head in immediately.” Getting angry with the right person, at the right time, and to the right degree requires emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence doesn’t resort to either lashing out, or covertly manoeuvring, or rolling over to become someone else’s doormat. To be assertive, you have to know what you’re feeling, read the other party accurately, and express yourself in a way that garners the best result. People with high EQ's do this naturally.

To be “nice”, more often than not, requires you to “pull your punches”. The result is confused perceptions and outright mis-communication. I have known Chinese Whispers to work better than this current flurry of “nice” political correctness, where no-one says what they really mean, nor really mean what they say. Nicety also leads to deeply hidden resentments because, when you are not straight with someone, your miscommunication is coming with a hidden subtext, which sounds something like “I think you're such an idiot that I don't think you can handle the truth from me.” This is one of those things that come under the heading of “what you don't know you're doing (things you don't know that you don't know)” that will sabotage you every time.

D) Making Effective Decisions

It has taken the world far too long to wake up to the fact that emotions simply cannot—and should not—be ignored when making choices and down-the-line decisions. Neuroscience shows us that sometimes the most rational thing you can do is trust your emotions when making a decision. But in order to make this work, you have to be aware of the emotions you’re feeling, know why you’re having them, and see how they factor alongside logic and reason into the situation at hand. Here, there is no substitute for self-knowing (intimacy – “into-me-see”) and emotional intelligence.

To sum up – If you ever want to have any traction in this world and derive any satisfaction from your time here, you had better develop Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Maturity. If your parents didn't have EQ to pass on to you, find someone who has it and do whatever it takes to spend time with them so that you can pick up on it. I don't recommend “coaches” because they try to impose “integrity” and “sincerity” from without, as an act, and most of them, I suspect from their showy displays, are about as real as a Bangkok watch.

Getting real is best done from the inside out.