How To Develop Your Emotional Intelligence in This Post-Covid Era
YuJin Wong ● CSP, Asia's Leading Mental Fitness Expert
Mental Fitness Expert | Award-winning Keynote Speaker | Certified Speaking Professional | Best-selling Author
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand one’s emotions and comprehend and empathise with others’ emotions as well. It is crucial for effective collaboration, interpersonal relationships, and communication in life and the workplace. And I can assure you that if you possess this one key ability, it will make navigating the ins and outs of work and life easier.?
Now that we’re in the post-Covid era, emotional intelligence has become more relevant than ever. It is four times more reliable than IQ when determining your chances of success in the field.?
Although IQ may be important, our EQ determines how we will and can grow and evolve in our fields because our ability to collaborate and communicate with coworkers - and how we react - affects how we work.?
High emotional intelligence may seem like a personality trait, but developing our emotional intelligence through practice is still possible. Here are some of the ways you can develop emotional intelligence in this post-Covid era.?
Start With Yourself
To develop our emotional intelligence, we have to start with ourselves. The driver of high emotional intelligence is self-awareness, especially in the workplace. Self-awareness is the ability to identify your emotions and emotional triggers; it can also help you understand how others might perceive your emotions and why you are acting a certain way.
Self-awareness is also about monitoring your emotions, recognising different emotional reactions, and correctly identifying each particular emotion you feel.?
You can develop and practise self-awareness by journaling, asking people for brutally honest feedback, and continuously checking in with yourself. By developing self-awareness, you can reap the rewards and benefits. For example, according to Kern Ferry Institute, in a respondent group of 486 businesses, businesses with a higher rate of return had employed staff with higher levels of self-awareness.
Practice Adaptability
Adaptability, or flexibility in different situations, is another important skill for developing emotional intelligence. After you have mastered recognising what you are feeling - and others, you can use adaptability to react appropriately. This is self-regulation, and it is not an easy skill to master because, as humans, most of us tend to resist change and situations that make us comfortable.?
However, adaptability makes change easier. It also allows us to navigate life easier and embrace challenges better, especially in the workplace.?
To become the best motivational speaker , I have learned to be adaptable, especially onstage, and engage with many people.
Although adaptability can be a tricky skill to develop, it is still possible to cultivate it. You can try these tips to become more adaptable:
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Knowing and then focusing on your priorities comprise a big part of practising adaptability in the workplace. Once you connect your work to your broader goals, you should understand how your daily tasks contribute to company initiatives. Then, if something comes up and you must adapt, effectively pivoting to focus on the more crucial tasks becomes much easier.?
Empathy
Empathy is also seeing a situation from another person’s point of view and also getting to know your employees better. Empathy also means seeing what other people are going through and understanding how they feel.
You can put empathy into practice within the workplace in many ways. Recognising employee efforts is another great way to develop your emotional intelligence. It also involves your responses to people based on this information.?
For example, you sensed that a team member spent extra time and effort on her new presentation, which came out beautifully. However, she’s also quite tired and stressed due to the task. The more empathic approach to react to that is to praise her efforts so that her hard work can receive recognition. You can also try cheering her up.
Communicate Frequently
Communication requires emotional intelligence. However, don’t expect anyone to communicate with 100 percent honesty, as some of your colleagues might be too shy or too polite to tell you the brutal facts and the truth. However, you can pay extra attention to what your body tells you they feel and less to what they say - and eventually, trust your instincts about them.
With a developed EQ, you can have strong social skills and communicate better because you will recognise other people’s emotions and respond appropriately to the situation. In addition, you can develop in practice by actively listening to what others have to say, which involves showing attention, asking questions, and providing feedback.
Further Your Career To The Next Level With The Mental Rockstar Program!
Emotional intelligence is a crucial skill to possess in the workplace so you can manage the emotions of yourself and others and respond appropriately to them. It also gives you the power to guide and help people become more successful and communicate more effectively with your team.?
By having a strongly developed EQ, you can further your career. Leadership skills and high emotional intelligence go hand in hand through the active display of traits such as patience, empathy, positivity, and empathy. You can better guide your team and lead them to success through these traits. As a result, high EQ can help you advance to a leadership role.
The Mental Rockstar Program is a program that is designed for organisations aiming to excel in their respective industries. YuJin, an award-winning mental toughness expert, former lawyer, and investment banker, uses his deep corporate world knowledge to lead and produce this program. So contact Mental Rockstar today to unleash your peak performance in your workplace!
Head of IT at Yamaha Distributors South Africa
1 年Its becoming more and more noticeable that people are not coping emotionally, and this is spilling into the work environment. The challenge is that people have become disillusioned, they remove themselves from reality and create a different reality internally. The negative impact is the ineffectiveness when attempting a mature and professional approach to address their concerns which in their head seem legitimate however in reality is just that - in their heads.