Emotional Intelligence Skills

Here’s the elephant in the room in most organizations:  The majority of the people who are there think work sucks.

Research shows that between 60-80% of employees in North America are disengaged at work, meaning their energy and commitment are low, and they struggle to bring their best selves to the workplace.

You know this. You can feel this. Chances are high that you are (or you have been) one of these people.

You’ve also seen firsthand the consequences this creates – for the quality of the work, the experience of the customer, the strength of relationships, the mental health of employees, to name a few.

There are many reasons for this, but I want to address one of the big ones. 

Work sucks because organizations are filled with human beings.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most humans struggle to manage their emotions well and to maintain positive and healthy relationships with the other humans around them. At some point, we’ve all said things we regret and done things that have damaged trust with another person. This doesn’t make us bad people – it makes us normal.

We’ve all known people who seem to navigate emotions and the human experience with more grace and resilience than others.

All these negative emotions and experiences can add up. Over time, they can breed mistrust, division, and cynicism, leading us to engage in behaviours that only make the situation worse (workplace gossip, anyone?).  It’s not hard to see why “coworker relationships” is the leading correlating factor for our overall job satisfaction. When these relationships feel bad, work feels bad.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We’ve all known people who seem to navigate emotions and the human experience with more grace and resilience than others. They still have bad days, but they bounce back. They still experience tension in their relationships, but they manage to rebuild the broken bridges and maintain respectful interactions.

Why are some people just better at human interaction?

What we are witnessing in these people is emotional intelligence. Though the term was coined in the 90’s, it refers to a core set of skills that have helped humans navigate emotions and relationships since the beginning of time. They are vital to the healthy functioning of families, societies, and any community. Today, the community of human beings in which we find ourselves most often is the workplace.

Thriving in this workplace community requires each of us to grow and develop our emotional intelligence. Thankfully, we all have the ability to improve.

How Can I Develop My Emotional Skills?

We believe the core skills can be captured in the acronym, SENSE.

S – Self-Awareness

E – Emotion Regulation

N – Noticing Others

S – Social Facilitation

E – Engagement Balancing

01 | Self Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to understand our own emotions and thoughts and to be able to express them naturally. Simply put, this is about noticing and naming what is going on inside of us.

Emotions live largely at the unconscious level of our experience, meaning they just seem to happen to us. Growing in this skill area means finding ways to bring this experience to the forefront of our minds, so that we can learn from it and respond appropriately. 

There are three areas to develop here.

• Awareness of thoughts and physical sensations

Emotions come in all shapes and sizes. They vary in intensity, duration, how we feel them in our bodies, and the kind of actions they provoke. Take time to pause throughout your day and simply check-in with yourself. What’s going on in your body? What thoughts or stories are being played out in your mind?

• Allowing emotions to be present

Emotions are not our enemies – they inform us about, and sometimes protect us from, what we are experiencing. But sometimes, for a wide variety of reasons, we just want them to go away.  However, if we dismiss or suppress our emotions, we can’t move on to the next step in developing our emotional intelligence: regulation.

• Recognizing and labelling emotions

When someone asks us how we’re feeling, many of us struggle to come up with more than the standard “fine” or “good.” We find it challenging to recognize and name our emotions. Until we can identify and have language for our feelings, we will struggle to learn the skills we need to regulate and apply them.

02 | Emotion Regulation

This is the skill people most strongly associate with emotional intelligence. When we think of those who have high abilities in EI, we often visualize someone who is a picture of self-control, able to stay calm and poised regardless of what’s happening around them. This stoic image may not be healthy, though.

A person with high EI may still experience strong emotions but will be skilled at preventing them from automatically influencing our behaviour.

Emotional intelligence is not about shutting down our emotions but about learning to feel and express them in healthy ways. A person with high EI may still experience strong emotions but will be skilled at preventing them from automatically influencing our behaviour. For example, we may get angry, but we learn to manage that experience in a way that doesn’t harm others or lead to regret later.

There are three primary strategies when it comes to emotion regulation.

• Changing the intensity of the emotion

This includes decreasing both negative and positive emotions that may be creating problems for us. It also involves learning how to increase the intensity of emotions that are needed or beneficial in a situation. For example, when you need motivation or engagement in creative work, a person who is skilled in emotional intelligence will understand  their needs and create the right conditions. Strategies may include deep breathing, stretching,  taking a walk, or engaging in conversation with a coworker.

• Changing our relationship with the emotion

Often, our emotions can spiral out of control because we become hyper-focused on the experience and begin to judge ourselves negatively for our feelings. It is important to allow emotions to be present without acting on them or feeling guilty. Meditation is a helpful strategy for many people in this regard. This is simply learning to be an attentive, detached, and nonjudgemental observer of our emotions.

• Changing our perspective on our emotions

Our thoughts and emotions are inseparably intertwined. Our emotions can spur our thoughts, and reciprocally, our thoughts can activate our emotions. A key skill in emotion regulation is becoming aware of how our thoughts contribute to our emotions and then learning to reframe those thoughts.

03 | Noticing Others

Whether we like it or not, our brain is hyper-aware of the people around us. One study revealed that our unconscious brain picks up on the emotions of others in eight to 40 thousandths of a second. The challenge is moving this awareness from our unconscious to our conscious, where we can meaningfully act on the information.

As you may have observed, noticing and understanding our own emotions can be challenging. Reading and making sense of the emotions of others adds complexity, requiring us to work with verbal and nonverbal cues, while considering our own biases.

There are two areas to develop with this skill.

• Becoming more aware of the signs of emotion

There is strong evidence that most people will recognize the facial expression of the seven core emotions – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Our facial expressions, body language, and speech patterns typically reveal which broad category of experience we are in. Learning to decipher these emotional expressions in others can help us understand them more accurately, respond more appropriately, and connect with them more deeply.

• Inferring emotions from verbal and nonverbal signs

While noticing the signs of emotion comes naturally to most, the trickier part is interpreting what that means for a particular person or situation. In this regard, there are very real limits to our ability. While the external signs are easy enough to spot, they may indicate a wide range of internal experiences for different people based on their background and context.

It is best to avoid making assumptions about other people’s emotions and simply stay curious. It may be enough to notice that they’re experiencing an emotion, and to allow them to do so nonjudgmentally. Depending on the situation and strength of your relationship, it may be helpful to share what you’ve noticed. Ask them to help you understand what they’re experiencing and what they need from you in that moment.

While noticing the signs of emotion comes naturally to most, the trickier part is interpreting what that means for a particular person or situation.

04 | Social Facilitation

In this area, we bring together all our skills and learn to apply them to facilitate positive outcomes in our personal lives and in our relationships with others. Emotions are powerful experiences, and with the right level of awareness and skill, they can add tremendous value and richness to our lives.

As our EI develops, we can use our emotions to better align with our values and achieve our goals.

What follows are four ways we can use our emotions to facilitate those desired outcomes, both within and beyond our workplaces.

• Relational influence

How we express our emotions influences others. Emotions can spread from one person to another (emotional contagion) and can also stir up related (but potentially different) emotions in others. For example, expressing anger might cause fear in the person witnessing it, and expressing gratitude might evoke pride in the recipient. As a result, our emotions can help us influence our social environment in ways that help us move toward our goals.

• Signals of alignment

Emotions contain information. If we approach them that way, they can often help us know if our actions are in line with our values and goals. For example, the emotion of fear might signal that something we value is in danger, and an emotion like joy might indicate that we are acting in ways that align well with what matters most to us.

• Fuel for creativity

Positive and negative emotions impact our creativity in very different ways. Negative emotions tend to narrow our thoughts, which can be helpful for focused problem-solving. Positive emotions tend to have the opposite effect, as they can help us consider a wider range of possibilities and are useful in generating creative and innovative responses to our challenges.

• Coping with setbacks

When faced with setbacks, emotionally intelligent individuals draw on positive emotions, such as humour and hopeful thinking, to better cope with negative experiences. Improved coping skills can increase resilience and keep us moving forward, even when the going gets tough.

05 | Engagement Balancing

This final skill is focused on learning to adjust our level of emotional engagement in certain situations or relationships. The goal of EI is not simply to engage maximally with all people and all contexts. Instead, it involves learning to balance our emotional engagement with others and their emotional engagement with us.

There are four ways that we can be out of balance in this area.

• Self-absorbed

We are vulnerable to this imbalance when we are too emotionally open with others while not being open to their emotional engagement with us. This can be challenging for us to see in ourselves. However, things to watch for include: Not listening to other’s perspectives or experiences turning what other people share into a story about ourselves; having trouble seeing the big picture; using relationships to get what we want; and frequently finding ourselves on the defensive.

Growing in our emotional intelligence is not a simple and quick endeavour. You can’t just take a workshop on it, get certified, and be set for life.

• Insensitive

We are vulnerable to this imbalance when we are resistant to emotional engagement in both directions – we don’t adequately engage with others, and we don’t welcome their engagement with us. In this space, we might come off as confident or self-assured, and we might trample on other people’s feelings without realizing it. But what we actually are is isolated and vulnerable because we’re operating without enough awareness of how others are experiencing us.

• Codependent

On the other end of the spectrum, we may be vulnerable to this imbalance when we are emotionally over-engaged with others, both in terms of what we share with them and what they share with us. Indicators of this include: Having trouble separating our emotions from those of others; difficulty setting emotional boundaries; feeling controlled by our desire to feel important to others; and difficulty dealing with change.

• Passive

We are vulnerable to this imbalance when we allow others to over-engage with us emotionally while withholding ourselves. Indicators include: Not being able to perceive or manage our need for self-care; saying yes when we don’t want to; burning out on giving and not receiving; and finding that others are taking advantage of our kindness.

Putting It All Together

Growing in our emotional intelligence is not a simple and quick endeavour. You can’t just take a workshop on it, get certified, and be set for life. This is a continuous learning process and is filled with moments of victory and progress, as well as challenge and setbacks. Even the most emotionally intelligent people will have moments where they demonstrate a lack of self-awareness or struggle to regulate their emotions and use them in productive ways.

Emotional intelligence is a lifelong pursuit. Be gracious with yourself and others as we all learn to move forward and navigate life in more healthy ways.