Recently I attempted to help my children with making loom bands. Something that seemed like such a simple task on YouTube, turned out to be a great cause of frustration and irritation.Twenty minutes of deep concentration just to pull off that band and have it shoot into pieces all over the place. Well, all I can say is that tantrums were thrown (and not by my children).
At that point, one would not say I had an ‘above average’ EQ (or EI). After all that hard work, I wanted a reward, a beautiful bracelet I could show off and instead my efforts lay in pieces. Needless to say, my only reward was watching my 8 year old do better than me.
This got me thinking about work, all the hard work and effort we put in at times just to have everything go south. Having a bit of an emotional tantrum would seem normal in these circumstances. After all, we spend so much time at work, 8 hours a day and not to mention all the time spent in traffic. Having negative emotions is not wrong per say, it is how we deal with our negative emotions that make the difference. It is inevitable that we’ll be throwing a few emotional tantrums at work, or at home, sometime in our lives.
I always saw myself as a handling my emotions pretty well, I had no idea that you could label it. After being introduced to EI, I was intrigued and did several tests online to see how emotionally intelligent I was (of course doing another and another if I didn’t like the results of the first). The results… well, they brought on the feeling of another looming tantrum. So what does it mean to be emotionally intelligent?
Emotional intelligence describes the ability to understand one’s own feelings, and that of groups, and how these emotions can influence and motivation behavior. This is not a new concept, it has been around since at least the 1900’s, but the term was first introduced by Wayne Payne in 1985 in a doctoral thesis he wrote: A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence. But it wasn’t until the publication of Daniel Goleman’s best seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ that the term became widely accepted by mainstream media.
This sounds awesome, I would like to understand my colleague’s emotional ‘instability’ but, on the other hand, it means I’ll have to give up my tantrums, binge eating and revenge planning. Embarking on the road to a happier self is not going to be an easy road trip. You must to be willing to dig deep, make some changes, and apply new habits. All in all it will be worth it, a more stable self will result in a healthier working environment.
An employee with high emotional intelligence can manage his or her own impulses, communicate with others effectively, manage change well, solve problems, and use humor to build rapport in tense situations. These employees also have empathy, remain optimistic even in the face of adversity, they are gifted at educating and persuading in a sales situation and resolving customer complaints in a customer service role. This sounds like a pay increase waiting to happen! Statistics tell us that people with a high EI make more annually than their low EI counterparts. Managers say that EI is more important than IQ.
Can you increase your EI? Most definitely! Increasing your Emotional Intelligence is road trip well worth taking. I think I am now ready to tackle those loom bands again….