Building your Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills provides substantial advantages in three areas: decision-making, relationships and health. These three areas can be found in virtually every behavior, every action and reaction and every situation you may experience. They are inherent in your family interactions and your professional relationships, from the every day incidents 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 actions to take (or not take). And when you build upon emotional self-awareness and develop the EI competency of emotional self-regulation, you can quickly shift negative, draining emotions into more positive, productive emotions. This enables you to think and act more clearly 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 effectiveness, your performance, 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 ranting and raving 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 barriers to working effectively. As a result, your relationship would lose ground and you would have to exert a significant amount of time and effort to repair 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 lower grade than expected, instead of becoming angry and upset, you can remain calm and clear-headed. In this state, you can convey your care and concern while still maintaining a firm and understanding approach. Several of my program participants have found using simple EI techniques at home to be very powerful when it comes to interacting with their children. For example, an SVP for a large corporation learned 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. However, 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 a disciplinary measure, 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 normal heated argument 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 experience 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 numerous 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 chronic fatigue, depression, asthma, hypertension, hypoglycemia, and many more. Transforming negative emotions into positive productive ones throughout the day and night over a sustained period of time has been shown to have a positive impact on many health-related problems. Often participants in my programs mention a significant reduction or elimination of sleeplessness, often in one or two weeks.
It is not hard to enhance EI skills. In a very short period of time, people who have employed 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 develop their Emotional Intelligence competency as a powerful tool to lead change, achieve strategic objectives 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
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