Emotional Intelligence is the #1 skill that you will need once you become a Manager. We know that the following are the different aspect of Emotional Intelligence:
- Self-Awareness
- Awareness Of Others
- Authenticity
- Emotional Reasoning
- Self-Management
- Positive Influence
But what is Self Awareness and how do I develop it? Self-Awareness is about being aware of the way you feel and the impact your feelings can have on decisions, behaviour and performance.
It can be developed by:
- Reflecting on the way you feel and considering how your feelings are influencing your decisions, behaviour and performance.
- Seeking feedback from others.
- By becoming more familiar with your personality, values and beliefs. These shape the way you interpret events that occur around you and, consequently, the way you tend to think, feel and act in response.
- Asking someone that you trust to respectfully point out when you inadvertently behave in ways that you want to change, so that you can become conscious of the unconscious behaviours, biases and mannerisms that you want to change.
Following are some tips on how to improve your self-awareness:
- Stop and consider how you feel before you call someone or walk into a meeting room. Do you need to ‘let go’ of feelings or emotions from a previous meeting before you commence this one?
- Conduct a pre-meeting check in and post meeting check out to provide a safe opportunity for meeting participants to share how they feel.
- Demonstrate awareness of the way you feel.
- Demonstrate awareness of the impact emotions can have on your thinking.
- Demonstrate awareness of the impact your feelings can have on how you interact with others
- Asking others for feedback on your behaviour.
- Respond effectively to feedback from others.
- Demonstrate awareness of your mood.
- Behave in a way that is consistent with how you describe yourself to be.
The ability to reflect on the way you feel, label and define these feelings and practice discussing them explicitly with others is a way to improve. Or, if appropriate, share how you feel about different issues or challenges at work.
Interestingly positive emotions broaden and build the way we think and negative emotions narrow and limit our thinking. We also need to remember that emotions can contribute bias to thinking and decision-making.
With so much of us spending more time in virtual meetings, our ability to read mood and facial expressions has increased.
We should also take the time to consider what you can be like in your best and worst mood at work and then consider the positive and negative impacts your different moods can have and how to make appropriate adjustments to yourself or what you are doing when in different moods at work.
For further information, please contact Corinne.