How can you leverage your emotional intelligence to motivate and inspire your team?

Assessing your emotional intelligence and empathy levels can help you take action to motivate and inspire your team. Start by reflecting on how your own emotions impact your interactions with others. Next, focus on how you can better understand and connect with your team members' emotions and perspectives. Practice active listening and seek to understand their viewpoints, rather than being defensive or dismissive. Demonstrate empathy, active listening, and emotional awareness in your interactions with team members, and create a supportive work environment that encourages teamwork, collaboration, and innovation. So, don't just assess your skills – put them into action and watch your team thrive!

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to” - if you are not ready to grow. So first ask yourself if your willing to give up bad habits and take constructive criticism in order to grow. If you can truly get past that part THEN start asking loved ones and peers about how you are and ways you feel you can become a better person in the EQ space. Ask them how you come off to then when your emotions are high or in awkward high stress situations. You may learn a lot about outside perspectives & from there you can start doing the inner work to figure out why you act such ways and how you can tweak things to grow your EQ and communication.

In my experience, professional leaders often struggle with bridging comprehensive goals and true real-world business operations that change on a daily basis. Understanding how to motivate your team, and keeping a level conversation in consideration of their current situation is a true art that requires skill, tact, and experience to develop talent without causing attrition.

One of the strategies I use for active listening is called paraphrasing. When someone shares their thoughts, feelings, or ideas, I paraphrase them back to ensure I'm clear on what they shared. This helps me understand them and lets them know they were heard.

Working with clients to learn these skills I teach them the following. I learned this exercise from SIYLI (Search inside yourself leadership institute) based on active listening. You have two people sit facing each other and they take turns talking. The first person (A) talks for a full minute. The other person (B) just listens. No vocal bursts (uh huh, yeah etc) maybe nod but their task it to pay 100% attention to the person talking. Then you switch roles and (B) talks and (A) listens without interruption. Then you spend a minute in mutual conversation where both parties get a chance to communicate. It is a powerful way to learn how to just listen and see how empowering it is to have someone fully listen to you.

In order for people to gain clarity on others point of view and teach them empathy I teach them perceptual positions. For sake of brevity (and space) I will shorten it. The client imagines a conversation they may have (or did have and need clarity on) and first they think of the conversation from the POV of looking through their own eyes and imagine their thoughts. Then they float out of their body and into the other persons and look through the other persons eyes. Seeing the conversation from their perspective. Then you have them float up above both people seeing themselves and the other person in conversation and see what comes up from that perspective. Very powerful to gain awareness of another viewpoint.

One can only regulate and manage their emotions effectively once they do the inner work to understand why they were triggered (for a lack of better terms) in the first place. You can’t be so empathetic about why others treat you how they do that you let your brain fall out and forget to still stickup for yourself when needed.

You can even express by ensuring communication is received correctly “I think you meant this but I want to make sure we are in same page” goes a LONG way and is a very underrated technique that can help with possible communication issues that could ensue. And YES, always show your appreciation. Drop the ego and let others know how well they are doing and never give fake praise because people with high EQ can see right through it

Not everyone is receptive to the same messaging. It’s just live a love language, everyone gives and gets it different. Some do better with tough love while another person could crumble with that same style given to them. Get to know your people and understand what works best by straight up asking them what style of communication works best for them and adapt accordingly - great leaders always do.

Everyone communicates differently, and there can be a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications if team members don’t understand each others’ varying communication styles. As the manager of a remote team, it’s up to you to understand how the individuals that make up your team prefer to communicate so that you can help them improve their communication habits and facilitate a work environment that benefits everyone.