Emotional Intelligence is for everyone!!

Like all domestic help and their employers me and my domestic help have a love hate relationship! Be moments of discussing recipes or the tough conversations over her KRA’s and quality metrics of the work product produced. Despite these “some good and some not so good” conversations we are not able to part ways with each other. I for sure know that while I cannot lower my quality standards, I cannot survive a single day without her. ?At the same time she also knows others may not pay her as well as I do if she decides to quit, while she does get upset with me being nit-picky about her work.

She comes to work after I have left for work and in the evening leaves before I get back home, so it’s very difficult to communicate with her… of course other than the weekends, when I can be a real trouble maker for her. We both communicate through WhatsApp voice messages primarily because she can't read English and I can't write Bengali.

I wanted to share this context before I actually spoke about a recent incident that helped me understand how emotionally intelligent she is becoming by the day… I am truly wondering if our relationship is rubbing off on her!!

As usual one Sunday morning when I was at home, while she was working I went around chasing her asking her to sweep under the bed and under the sofa and dust in places that she would normally miss and so on and so forth. As she was about to leave after her morning routine, I gave her a list of tasks she had missed yet again ?. She said she will do it in the evening in a very low and uninterested way. ?I acknowledged her response and she stepped out.

Somewhere I knew she wasn't happy with me calling out things that were being missed…Yeah! Yeah! ?I know that's probably not the best way to give constructive feedback… but then we were not a team or so I thought.

I told my partner that I had sensed discomfort in her as she left and predicted that she might not come back in the evening to complete the work as she had committed. Later that afternoon, she messaged me on WhatsApp indicating she’d not be coming in the evening as she was feeling unwell. ?On one hand I was feeling victorious about predicting her behaviour on the other I was super angry and irritated at the fact that the one day I get to tell her what needs to be done... she decides to take a leave.

The next morning when she came she greeted me with a smile and said that she had come in a bit early to complete yesterday's pending work. I reciprocated with the short smile and checked with her how she was feeling now. To my surprise she laughed and said she was fine yesterday evening too, but decided to think about what was going on between her and me. That was clever! I thought to myself, while she continued to ask if I would like to split all the work. Basically, employ another domestic help so that both of them together could complete the whole work.

My face grew pale possibly thinking about the additional cost. She caught onto my emotion and smilingly responded that I need not pay anything extra… the new person can demand whatever she wanted and if I were OK I could give the remaining of what I pay to her. ?The work would continue for me without any additional burden while she will not be inundated with all the work either. For a moment I was speechless and the very next moment I was so so impressed at what she had said.

1. First of all, she was aware of how she was feeling the previous afternoon and decided to not respond immediately in all her anger and irritation. ?Probably, had she done so, we would have ended up in a small fight… like we always did earlier whenever we got into an argument.
2. Second she took time to calm herself and prepare an action plan before she came to me with the response.
3. Third, she came and prepped me and herself for the conversation with the smile of hers and politely moving around the house doing pending stuff from the previous evening.
4. Fourth, very calmly but firmly she put her point across… the fact that there was lots of work because of which certain tasks were getting missed and caused angst for both of us.
5. Fifth, not only that she also proposed to solution that she thought would work for both of us. The solution being splitting the work … so that that is not too much work for one person and things don’t get missed.
6. Finally, she could gauge my emotion. ?She couldn't catch that I was already thinking about the additional money that I might have to so she herself volunteered to trade for peace of mind for both ourselves as compared to a few thousand rupees more.

This is what I truly call demonstrating emotional intelligence…having firstly understood her your own emotions and being able to manage it, then being able to understand the others emotions and managing it too.

My respect for my domestic help has gone up a couple of notches with this incident.

Grow with Satori Vaishnavi Prasad J R Vaishnavi Viswanathan Pawan Sharma Riya Jacob Nandini Sharma Sreedevi Raghavan (ICF-PCC)

#emotionalinteligence