Have you ever experienced an uncomfortable feeling in your stomach just after you have agreed to do something that you know you shouldn’t do? Rationally, you accept the negative consequences of your decision. However, your emotions are telling you something different. To be successful in your career, you have to learn to listen to your emotions and to manage them well.
Our emotions are an integral part of our personal style. Fear, love, anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, shame and disgust are seen by many psychologists as the “primary emotions”. Our emotional make-up influences both our general temperament and our day-to-day moods.
Our emotions have been genetically shaped over 50,000 human generations. As a result, our interactions with other people are coloured not only by our rational judgement and our personal history, but also by our hidden genetic past.
We know that rational intelligence means little when emotions take over. The jealous lover, the angry boss, the upset partner and the frightened child all find it difficult to listen to reason or to act rationally. Yet if we are not able to manage our emotions, they will take over completely. As the Greek philosopher Pythagoras said, “No man is free who can not control himself.”
But what must we do to reach a level of emotional intelligence that allows us to operate successfully? Yale psychologist Peter Salovey lists four key skills that are associated with emotional intelligence:
1. Knowing Your Emotions
This means being able to monitor your emotions so that you have a surer sense of what you really feel. This ability allows you to make clearer decisions and deal with difficult situations.
Imagine, for example, that you are driving your car and another driver causes you to brake sharply. Most of us would react negatively in such situation. Indeed, many of us might curse the other driver or make a rude gesture. If we don’t recognize our irritation quickly, this might cause us to try to get revenge at the next set of traffic lights. Or it might put us in a bad mood for the rest of the journey and make us drive as aggressively and badly as the other driver.
On the other hand, if you can recognize your feeling of irritation, you might be able to do something to make your mood more positive. One method is to imagine that you are standing next to yourself and are watching what is going on. With practice, you can slip into this role whenever you feel that strong emotions are taking over. Once you have recognized what is happening, it is easier to do something about it.
2. Managing Your Emotions
This means being able to express your feelings appropriately and to shake off negative ones more quickly.
Some people are engulfed by their emotions or simply accept them fatalistically. People who are depressed, for example, can not easily shake off a mood even when they are aware that it is distressing. Anger, too, can engulf our rational thought processes and cause us to do or say things we would never otherwise do or say.
So how can we best prevent strong emotions from taking over our lives? In her book Managing Anger, Gael Lindenfield suggests four ways to deal with anger in a positive, assertive way that does not harm or threaten the people around us:
a. Tackle it early: minor irritations can soon build up into angry outbursts. Be aware of your irritation and deal with it.
b. Be direct: say that you are feeling angry or irritated and say what’s causing it. For example say “I’m feeling slightly irritated by …” or “I’m terribly angry about …”.
c. Don’t put yourself down: for example, don’t say “I know I’m being oversensitive but …” or “You’ll probably think I’m nagging when I say …”. If you do this, you are putting ideas into other person’s head and making it difficult for him or her to take you seriously.
d. Release physical tension: beat up a cushion or scream aloud to yourself in the car. In a famous episode of the British comedy series Fawlty Towers, Basil Fawlty’s car breaks down at a critical point. He gets out and beats his car with a branch from a nearby tree. It doesn’t make the car start, but it releases his physical tension so that he’s able to run the rest of the way back to his hotel.
3. Motivating Yourself
This is the ability to make your emotions work for you. This skill is necessary if you wish to be creative in your work. It will also help you to manage your workload and to focus your attention.
The American comedian George Burns said that the secret of living a happy life is to do what you love. The more you are aware of the things you love to do, and the more you discover the things you would love to do in the future, the happier your life will be.
Use this knowledge to motivate yourself. Hope and optimism are major factors in success. If you are optimistic, you see failure as something that can be changed. The pessimist, on the other hand, will often blame the failure on a characteristic he or she feels helpless to change. Being optimistic or pessimistic may be inborn traits, but temperament can also be learned through experience. The better you get at something, the more risks you can take and the more demands you can place on yourself.
Great people often become great because they continue to believe in themselves even after repeated failures. Thomas Edison made thousands of prototypes of the light bulb before one worked. But he realized that each failure taught him something he could use in the next prototype. Edison was a realistic optimist; it has often been said that he failed his way to success.
4. Recognizing Emotions
If you can quickly recognize emotions in other people, it is easier for you to show empathy and react to what others want or need. This is a very powerful “people skill”, one which we need in both our personal and professional lives. The two key skills we need are sensitive observation and attentive listening.
Body language can say a great deal about someone’s mood and emotional state. Naturally, there may be differences of interpretation between cultures, but generally we are quite intuitive in forming impressions about our speaking partners. Usually, these impressions come from noticing facial expressions and head movements as well as hand and arm gestures. However, they can also come from the way our speaking partners hold and move the rest of the body, including their legs.
We should be especially sensitive to signs of negative emotions. These include clenched fists; pointing the index finger at the other person; standing when the other person is sitting; striding around the room; or rubbing the back of the neck.
Attentive listening allows us to interpret the speaker’s tone of voice and helps us to read any meanings between the lines. If we listen attentively, this can help us to avoid jumping to conclusions that may well be wrong. Attentive listening means asking relevant questions, summarizing what we have heard, and giving the speaker space and silence to develop what he or she wants to say. An attentive listener remembers the saying, “God gave us two ears and only one mouth, so we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
Summary
Being emotionally intelligent allows us to be comfortable with ourselves and with others. It allows us to manage our own emotions and deal with the emotions of those around us. And it can help us to motivate ourselves. The result is that we become more positive in our thoughts and more effective in our interpersonal interactions, both in our private lives and in the workplace. Emotional intelligence is therefore a very valuable skill for your career. Unfortunately, it is also a skill that many people spend too little time thinking about and trying to improve.
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