Your emotions have a major impact on your success in life. Your emotional awareness defines your professional growth and your image as a frontrunner.
Loads of things are connected with being a better leader. All types of great stuff like communication skills, vision, motivations, and one of the key things being ‘emotional intelligence’.
What is emotional intelligence?
We all have an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) – a good one or a bad one, and we can’t do much about the bad one. But we obviously can get better at our emotional intelligence which is something that is related to the success in our life.
Psychology Today says, Emotional Intelligence is:
- The ability to accurately identify your own emotions;
- The ability to utilize emotions and apply them to tasks;
- The ability to manage emotions; and
- The ability to recognize the influence of other emotions;
“If your emotional abilities are not in hand if you do not have self-awareness if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” -Daniel Goleman
Emotional intelligence (EQ) serves as a vital factor in finding a difference in those who will grow in an organization. This is what drives a person to excellence.
What does EQ bring an impact on your professional success?
The Harvard Business Review found that EQ makes up 90 percent of the factors driving professional upward mobility and of the high-performing leaders, 90 percent of them high EQs.
Emotional intelligence and leadership
For any kind of leadership position, EQ is an important factor to be a better leader.
Not all leaders can work productively with people and therefore they fail to succeed in their operations. Leading effectively in a workplace demands EQ where each person feels motivated to succeed. Leaders with high EQ work productively in the workplace to develop a trust relationship with their employees.
Effective leaders always look forward to connecting emotionally with teams, to build mutual trust and respect for keeping the teams working effectively and efficiently.
How to develop emotional intelligence?
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Show empathy
Empathy means to understand the need for others and the willingness to appreciate it. An empathetic leader can make him the best leader.
And also it is essential in the workplace. For leaders to get through the tough times easily they will have to understand what co-workers are going through and then empathize them because, without empathy, a leader can never nurture a team.
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Listen twice as much as you talk
The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus quoted, ‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.’
I completely agree with this quote because it is actually very true. When a leader listens, it makes people believe that they are valued in the organization which gives them a feeling of satisfaction.
Good reasons to be a good listener:
- You will be appreciated as a leader
- People will contribute more to you
- Promotes awareness for a present moment
- Some new lessons to learn
- Helps in fostering tolerance
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Quick decision maker
Whether we take decisions on a professional level or personal level, our emotional awareness will decide how we make decisions in our life.
For a leader, decision making is a hallmark of his/her greatness and the most important ingredient in decision making is self-confidence. How you envision the world around you decide how confident you are, and it will affect how much worthy decisions you are going to make.
One must be able to take responsibility for whatever is happening in its workplace. Think critically to make better decisions and don’t be afraid to make decisions, as it can make people against you.
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Self-awareness
How do your emotions have an effect on your behavior and leadership role? Self-awareness goes hand in hand with emotional intelligence providing you with an improved view of how you discover the things.
Individuals respect the leader who stays calm when the problems may arise. Identify your own bad habits to develop a foundation for self-improvement. It’s on you how to choose to behave with yourself and others.
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Bringing it all at once
As you start practicing with emotionally intelligent behaviors, step by step you’ll build these your habits. You’ll enter an environment encircled by emotional intelligence without even scuffling with adopting the same to your actions. And old fatal behaviors will go away.
These are some of the things that can motivate you to be a better leader. It simply starts with working on your EQ, and that is really the key to success in life. It is important for business leaders to lead in emotionally intelligent ways to build a meaningful relationship with the team and employees and a healthy productive workplace.
