What is Emotional Intelligence?
The term, "emotional intelligence," begs definition to avoid sounding like psychological jargon. Emotional intelligence, commonly known as EQ, can best be understood as:
A body of personal characteristics and social abilities
that play a central role in creating success & fulfillment
in our personal and professional lives.
There are a number of models of emotional intelligence in the literature. I offer the following model for you to consider:
Self-Awareness
Self-Regulation
Social Connectivity
Go to EQ & Performance
- Emotional self-awareness: Recognizing your emotions and their impact on yourself and others.
- Accurate self-assessment: Identifying and owning your strengths, limitations, and developmental opportunities.
- Appropriate introspection: Frequent reflection on life events to discover what you are doing - or not doing - that contributes to the unfolding of circumstances in your life.
- Self-confidence: Resilient confidence in your abilities.
Self-Regulation
- Emotional & behavioral self-control: The capacity to "catch yourself in the act," and allowing yourself to pause and choose more adaptive responses.
- Emotional & behavioral development: A life-long commitment to developing adaptive emotional & behavioral responses to the events in your life.
- Flexibility: Able to adapt to change and overcome obstacles.
- Drive: Passion for achievement.
Social Connectivity
- Empathy: Sensitivity to emotions in individuals and groups.
- Optimism: Bringing positivity to life, work, and relationships.
- Interest in others: Genuine liking for and interest in other people.
- Listening: Responding to others to demonstrate interest, draw them out, and test the depth of your understanding.
- Likeability: Developing a presence that generates positive responses from others.
- Transparency: Openness; willing to be known; appropriate self-disclosure.
- Trustworthiness: Being able to establish confidence in your character and intentions.
- Networking: Maintaining a broad base of relationships, personally and professionally.
- Influence: Developing relationships that make things happen.
- Leadership: Inspiring others to achieve. Moving individuals and groups to action.
- Developing others: Providing feedback and guidance to expand others' self-awareness and improve their effectiveness.
- Change agent: Enabling & inspiring individuals and groups to develop & adapt to new ways of getting things done.
- Conflict management: Resolving disagreements while maintaining, even enhancing, relationships.
- Team development: Creating teamwork and collaborative relationships.
Go to EQ & Performance