Understanding Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI), sometimes referred to as Emotional Quotient (EQ), is the ability to understand, manage and use your emotions in a positive way to help relieve stress, effectively communicate, empathise, overcome and difuse difficult situations.

This week’s #MSEBuddyNetwork focused on understanding our EI. We were asked to complete a questionnaire to determine our current state of EI in the 4 areas of self awareness, managing emotions, motivating oneself, empathy and social skill. At the end of the questionnaire you tot up the scores and there’s a brief descriptor of how to interpret the scores. If you score 10-17 this indicates a development priority, 18-34 suggests giving attention to the weaker areas and 35-50 indicates this area of strength.

Having an understanding of you EI affects your performance at work, your physical health and mental wellbeing, your relationships with others and social intelligence.

I scored 40, 37, 36, 37 and 29 in each area respectively. No surprises that the area I need to work on most is in social skills. I’m not a great mixer. I like my own space and am close to a very small group of people. I’m not an outgoing sort of person and not brilliant at networking. But this area is key to my every day work and some of the roles I occupy in a voluntary capacity. Its about persuasion, building rapport, collaboration. I’m OK at the reflection, change management and leadership side of social skills.

The Skillsyouneed.com website has some useful resources and suggestions on how to develop in these areas as well as suggestions on further reading.

The other thing I thought would be useful to do would be to get someone who knows you reasonably well to do the questionnaire but about you. That way it could validate your own perception of your strengths and weaknesses, or shed some light on your blind spots (Johari window).