When you’re trying to get ahead in your career, there are all kinds of professional skills that you need to develop. However, not everything is about specific technical skills. On top of those, you should also strive to improve your cognitive abilities through EQ training and your emotional intelligence in general.
Not every person is well-equipped in terms of emotional intelligence – just like any other skill, it’s something you have to nurture, hone, and build over time. And that’s precisely why more and more companies are starting to invest serious funds into their teams’ emotional intelligence training.
But the question is – why is emotional intelligence such a vital predictor for your success, in practical terms? Read on below to find out!
Emotional Intelligence 101
So, what is emotional intelligence?
In short, it’s our capacity to control and recognize our emotions – and do the same for other people’s emotions. We do that by nurturing a combination of different skills that can be taught and expanded upon.
Some of those skills are:
- Self-control
- Self-awareness
- Social awareness
- Maintaining interpersonal relationships
Of course, we all start out with different levels of default emotional intelligence – just like all of us have different default levels of logical intelligence.
But, here’s the good news – emotional intelligence can be improved, and all of its collective skills can be taught. For instance, self-awareness can be improved by increasing someone’s capacity to identify different complex feelings. And interpersonal relationships can be improved by increasing a person’s active listening capabilities and empathy.
There Are Plenty Of Benefits To Improving Emotional Intelligence
Plenty of benefits await any professional who chooses to invest time and energy into improving their emotional intelligence. They can build better relationships, both at work and in their private lives – and they reduce the overall stress level in the team, defuse conflict situations in the workplace, and simply have higher levels of job satisfaction.
Once you learn how to manage your own emotions, you can also better manage the emotions of others – making you better-suited for higher management positions in your company. Employees who can juggle their emotions and the rational part of their brains effectively bring a lot to the table regarding organizational efficiency.
Move To The Next Level
Think about it – what happens when someone has made the most out of their current position, but management thinks that they’re just not ready to tackle a more demanding leadership role? That’s right – they start feeling increasingly frustrated with their work; nobody likes hitting a dead end in their careers.
If you want to avoid that happening, you should seek emotional intelligence training. And if you’re already a manager seeing that happen to their employees, try to organize EQ training sessions to ensure your people push forward as much as they can and fulfill their ambitions and potential.
Don’t underestimate the role of emotional intelligence in developing leadership characteristics and skills. A higher level of emotional intelligence helps you, for example, stay calm during a crisis – or deal with visibly upset colleagues or customers.
Once you master emotional intelligence, you’ve mastered yourself – allowing you to exemplify more self-control and deal with any problem efficiently and methodically.
Stress Reduction
The modern workplace is stressful, which could probably be said for any workplace in any historical era. And that’s perfectly normal. After all, a workplace is a place where you grow, deal with new challenges, and better yourself by striving toward new goals.
However, if you want to thrive in such an environment, you can’t just wish away stress – instead, you must learn to manage it. Otherwise, rampant workplace stress will probably result in lower productivity and maladaptive behaviors.
Luckily, emotional intelligence training can help you deal with stressful situations. Professionals with higher emotional intelligence are far better equipped to deal with their reactions to the actions and emotions of others. Also, they can better control and recognize their negative emotions and take a reasonable degree of responsibility for their actions.
Plus, as an emotionally intelligent person, you’re better at managing your expectations, leading to far less workplace stress and much better interpersonal relationships.
Dealing With Criticism
If you want to improve yourself, dealing with some criticism is an absolute must – as long as that criticism is constructive. But there’s a problem with that: deep down, no one really likes hearing negative feedback.
In the process, people with a lower degree of emotional intelligence tend to bite back emotionally or become unnecessarily defensive. And all of that does nothing to improvise your performance or deal with the issue at hand – while it also creates a more hostile work environment. Thankfully, a higher level of emotional intelligence can quickly clear all of that up, helping you benefit from constructive criticism.
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