L3P1 Emotional Intelligence dair
I always think I’m a person with low EQ, and I am. I don’t even know how to describe EQ in a simple sentence before I take this project. Now I know, emotional intelligence is your ability to understand and manage your feelings and to self-motivate. It also requires the ability to discern recognize how others feel and respond to their emotions appropriately.
The first assignment of this project ist o track my emotions and how they impact myself and others for at least two weeks. I have done these for three months. The benefit of recording is it gives me a chance for reflection. There is one feeling I want to eliminate most. That’s anger. Research shows when you get angry, your body release toxicant that could kill mouse. It’s bad to your health and hurts your liver (怒伤肝).
Guest how many times I feel angry in the past three months? Seven. The toxicant my body released could kill many mice.
One example, we played surfing on swimming circle. It was such crowded. I wanted my husband keep eye on my son but he thought he could take care of him. My son was falling behind. My husband threw my son up like threw an object onto the swimming circle. My son’s head hit on my knee, and my heart sink. I was so angry and shouted at my husband, and he instantly got angry too.
When I reflect why he got angry, that’s because I challenge him in public and hurt his pride, self-esteem. I could simply say I worried my son would get hurt and I think he would regret too. I could talk to him not to do that again at home later.
One key learning for me is empathy. Always consider how others feel and what would be the impact to others. If all these cases happen to me again. I won’t get angry any more.
I hope I could learn this lesson earlier in my life.
Back in 2006, I was in coating R&D synthesis group. I was doing a project called robust acrylic, meaning our latex is robust enough to fit all kinds of coating formulations. My boss designed a series of experiments to screen the best stabilizer and the dosage. I had a different thought. I thought only dosage matters. She doesn’t comment on my ideas. I felt so good with my idea and I sent my idea to my boss’s boss and her co-workers. I got private reply from her boss saying these are good ideas worth testing. I was happy and didn’t realize what went wrong until my boss informed me to leave the group. I was shocked and frozen. I was hurt without knowing what I did wrong. She left the company and her boss recruit me to my PSS role.
For a very long time, I believed I was right. Now I understand what I did wrong. How embarrassing my boss was in that situation, challenged by her subordinary in front of her boss! If I meet her again, I would say sorry to what I did due to my unmatured behavior although she won’t need, or even can’t remember it. On the other hand, if I would meet a silly girl, no a talented girl who present her great idea to me in an improper way. I would be more open and willing to listen and empower her to give it a try. Now you know how silly I was. Empathy can’t be built on one day. If I ever say or do something bad to you, please let me know, I would appreciate and learn empathy from that.
Empathy can not only avoid anger, but also build meaningful relationship based on trust.
My past conversation with my mother-in-law was difficult. She got angry so easily and I don’t know why. I try to observe what’s her real concern. As an old rural woman, with no money, no pension, she worries who care her when she grows older. When I start to show my care, how happy we are with her, she becomes less anxious and easier to communicate. The other day I ask her to lead my son to the small park on his way home after school. Since he doesn’t want to do the homework after school, let him play for a while and do some exercise, for the first time, she agreed fully without mentioning the difficulties.
Now every morning when I wake up, delicious break first is ready for me. Every night when I arrive home, healthy and nice dinner is waiting for me. I’m so grateful to live with my mother-in-law.
Believe me the hardest relationship in the world is Mother-in-law relationship. Other relationship is so much easier. No matter what my mother-in-law says now, I just don’t get angry.
Bye-Bye Anger!
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Purpose: The purpose of this project is to cultivate an understanding of how your emotions impact your relationships. It is also designed to help you identify how other's emotions impact your emotional state.
Overview: For a minimum of two weeks, keep a journal about your emotions and how they impact you and others. Discuss the impact of tracking your emotions in a 5- to 7-minute speech at a club meeting.(Note: You are not required to share the intimacies of your experience.) Finally, give your signed Project Completion Form to your vice president education to indicate you completed your journal.
Emotional intelligence is your ability to understand and manage your feelings and to self-motivate. It also requires the ability to discern how others feel and respond to their emotions appropriately.
By improving your emotional intelligence, you can communicate more effectively and develop meaningful relationships.
People with high emotional intelligence typically exhibit a particular set of behaviors. These individuals are quicker to recover from unhappy experiences. They are generally less vulnerable to anxiety and are able to channel negative emotions in a positive way.
High emotional intelligence can also result in improved impulse control, abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and working memory.
Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five elements: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through evaluation of your emotions, you can begin managing your emotions.
Primary emotions are felt first. The emotions most often considered primary are fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness. An example of a primary emotional response is the fear an individual feels when confronted with a situation in which he is startled or threatened. The primary response of sadness is most often felt when a person hears news of a death or other tragic event. These initial responses cannot be controlled. They are evolutionary and experienced by everyone regardless of cultural experience. Often, after a short burst of the primary emotion, feelings change, soften, or evolve into something else.
Secondary emotions are feelings that grow from, or combine with, the initial or primary emotions. There is a vast list of secondary emotions. Some of those are anger, frustration, disappointment, humor, contentment, or excitement. The primary emotions can also be secondary emotions.
For example, when startled by a friend, a person’s first response is likely to be the primary emotion of fear, followed closely by another primary emotion—happiness.
Each individual has the ability to control, or mitigate, secondary emotions.
The value of understanding both primary and secondary emotions is knowing how emotional responses affect you as an individual. Recognizing what you can control, or change, and what you are unable to alter is an important step in developing emotional intelligence. This type of recognition is also a primary component of self-awareness.
Recognize Your Emotions
Leading often involves working in challenging situations and with individuals who respond in a way you do not expect. In order to be an effective leader, you must recognize your emotional responses and understand why you are reacting in a particular way. Understanding your own responses will help you to recognize and understand the emotional responses of the people around you.
Develop Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is learned. Some individuals learn early in life how they will respond in a given situation. They understand the reasons for their responses and how their emotions will affect their environment. Others have to make a conscious effort to develop the ability later in life. Every leader can benefit from evaluating and developing their self-awareness.
Understand Your Responses
Self-awareness can be developed and bolstered by reviewing your feelings at regular intervals over the course of several days. The first step is to recognize and name the emotion as you experience it. The next step is to identify the reason for your response. It is not uncommon for people to go through a day feeling frustrated or overwhelmed without ever stopping to identify the reason or reasons for the feelings. By being aware of your responses, you can build an understanding of the skills you need to develop.
Self-awareness
If you find that you often feel frustrated before you walk into meetings, it is likely that you will lead your team with less patience and appreciation for their efforts. By recognizing your frustration and taking a few moments to understand why you feel the way you do, you can likely mitigate the feelings before you interact with others, thereby improving your meetings and your leadership.
Self-regulation
From the development of self-awareness, individuals are prepared to check and change their response patterns by self-regulating. Self-regulation is the process of evaluating your emotions and managing or channeling them in a productive way.
In the previous example, by checking emotions before entering a meeting, identifying frustration as the pervasive emotion, and deciphering the root cause of the frustration, you can regulate your response and choose to interact with your team in an effective and positive way.
By avoiding the impulsive response of anger, this leader is able to maintain a positive demeanor, communicate effectively with a team member, and avoid going off task by engaging in a confrontation.
When leaders are competent at regulating their own responses, they are more likely to recognize and understand emotions in others.
Empathy
Empathy is more than the ability to recognize emotion in others; it requires understanding the impact of emotions on the person experiencing them. At the core of empathy is knowing what it would be like to feel the same way, or experience the same emotions as someone else.
In the previous example, the person who attempted humor by startling another would show empathy by listening when the startled individual expresses the desire to never to be startled again. He would then honor the request by refraining from similar behavior in the future. An individual with a lack of empathy would continue to behave in the same way regardless of the impact on others.
The value of empathy is in developing relationships that are based on trust. Leaders with a high level of empathy are often seen as more trustworthy than those whose ability to empathize is not as strong.
Take a moment to recall the leaders you have worked with that induced the highest level of support from the people they led. List the reasons you were willing to follow and support those leaders. Even if you didn’t place empathy at the top of your list, you probably included listening, responsiveness, positive feedback, and support, all of which require a leader to be empathetic.
Anticipate Needs
Successful leaders are able to anticipate and recognize other’s needs, as well as assist them in getting those needs met. Some needs are practical, like workload and time management. Others are less tangible and could include requirements like a sense of fulfillment, camaraderie with team members, and the desire to learn new skills. All of these needs are important and add value to a team member’s experience.
Understanding the needs, desires, and skills of the people you lead will help you build a strong, cohesive team that successfully accomplishes goals.
There are two types of motivation every leader must consider.
Intrinsic motivation is the ability to set clear personal goals and accomplish them without external motivating factors.
Extrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from outside the individual. For a leader, this is the ability to establish goals for and with team members and encourage them to accomplish the goals you have set.
Both types of motivation require an understanding of what motivates the individuals involved and a positive attitude.
Personal motivation has its own challenges and relies heavily on your knowledge of yourself. Self-knowledge is a part of emotional intelligence, but there are many people who successfully set and fulfill personal goals without a high level of emotional intelligence.
Motivating others requires a broader set of skills. Setting goals and motivating team members to accomplish them calls for the ability to recognize the skills, needs, and ambitions of the people on your team. It also demands an understanding of what motivates the individuals involved, both internally and externally, and the rewards that appeal to them.
Social Skills
Social skills enhance the possibility of strengthening bonds and nurturing relationships that are critical to success. Developing a high level of emotional intelligence makes building social skills easier. For a person with strong social skills, continuing to improve emotional intelligence deepens his or her understanding of individual responses and group dynamics.
Group Dynamics
For most leaders, the dynamics of a group play an important role in their success. A leader’s success is assured through her selection of team members based on their skills, their ability to work together, their personalities, and her understanding of the way the individuals are motivated. Excellent social skills allow a leader to facilitate collaboration and cooperation, as well as lead team members toward goals.
Strong social skills are imperative inside and outside a leader’s sphere of influence. Though team building is important, effectively communicating with individuals outside of the team environment is also critical. By developing excellent social skills, a leader can appropriately interact with all types of people, even when the situation is less than ideal.
Strengthen Your Emotional Intelligence
All of the components of emotional intelligence contribute to a leader’s ability to address and manage conflict, resolve disagreements through negotiation, exercise influence appropriately, and effectively persuade others.
Emotional intelligence can be deepened and strengthened with time and effort. Building the skills that contribute to emotional intelligence can improve relationships in all areas of your life. There are several steps you can take to focus your skills.
Self-evaluation
Self-awareness requires a deep understanding of your emotions, strengths, challenges, values, and goals. Self-evaluation is the process of strengthening your self-awareness. This type of evaluation is about understanding, and adjusting when necessary, not criticizing. In order to be self-aware, a leader needs to understand his or her own responses and choices in complex situations.
Pay Close Attention to Challenges
Most leaders find it is easier to self-evaluate when interactions went well or were managed well. The real challenge is in understanding how and why circumstances went awry. As with any type of interaction, look at what went well first. Follow up by identifying your strongest reactions and their impact on the situation. In a stressful situation, understanding what you said or did is only the beginning.
Response
When you feel challenged by a situation, consider your physical responses (tightness in muscles, shallow breathing) and when those responses began during the interaction. Identify what caused the initial response. Look to:
The physical environment
People
Unrelated challenges like arriving late or dealing with a difficult schedule
Cause
During a stressful interaction, take time to evaluate your responses. Look to find the root of your feelings. Take note of the immediate circumstances when you began to feel:
Withdrawn or depressed
A lack of energy or procrastination
Angry
Outcome
Regardless of how challenged you feel by a particular interaction, there is always something to learn or understand. There are times when a negative response, such as anger, leads to a positive outcome, such as engaging in a conversation you would have avoided or motivating a needed change. It is important to note this type of response and result as well.
Recognize and Control Emotional Triggers
A trigger is defined as an event or situation that causes something else to happen or exist. For example, anger can lead to a higher level of motivation. In that case, anger is the trigger that leads to higher motivation. You can identify your triggers by evaluating the times you think something like:
Every time I arrive late, I have a terrible meeting.
Arriving late is a trigger for not performing as well in meetings.
Often triggers are identified as negative, but they can also be a positive force. In understanding that when you arrive on time or early you have a better experience, you are identifying one trigger with a positive result.
Leaders cannot control every facet of a situation. Even with a powerful effort to avoid events or circumstances that cause a negative response, it can’t always be done. The goal is to understand negative triggers and mitigate the response.
When faced with an environment or situation that triggers a negative response, use the following techniques.
Relax
Breathe and release the tension in your body.
Detach
Separate your feelings from the situation as much as possible.
Center
Drop your awareness to the center of your body and feel yourself breathe.
Focus
Choose a keyword that represents how you want to feel or who you want to be in that moment. Repeat it.
If you are in a stressful state, evaluate what you need from the situation. Recognize what you can change. If there is nothing you can change, move on. In the case of arriving late to a meeting, it may help to be accountable and apologize to anyone who was waiting for you. Once that is done, follow the steps to cope, such as breathing and detaching, and participate fully.
There is little value in dwelling on the negative. If you focus on arriving late, it can lead to further harm because your negative emotions cause you to avoid fully engaging in the event. Once the event or situation has ended and you have time to reflect, identify what you did well and what you could improve if the same situation occurs again. Then leave the experience in the past.
Reframe Negative Thoughts
Reframing is a way of altering the way you look at something to change your perception of the experience.
Self-evaluation can help you reframe. After you have reviewed a negative experience, look at what went well. Even in the worst circumstances, there are lessons of value. For example, you arrived late to the meeting. The circumstances of that were challenging and difficult.
When you reflect after the event, you may realize that the experience enabled you to focus your attention on releasing stress and stop your initially negative response from affecting the rest of the meeting.
As a leader, when you understand your own triggers and how to reframe your experiences, you can then apply that understanding to leading others. Your self-awareness will make you more cognizant of others on your team and the events or circumstances that cause them to achieve below their best abilities.
This understanding can also help you guide team members and recognize when you need to step in to avoid a negative situation for your team.
Helping your team members to reframe a negative experience or situation can motivate and build understanding of how to improve future events or circumstances. It can also stop a group from blaming each other when challenges are faced.
By identifying even the smallest successes, it is possible to look at places where improvement is needed in a more hopeful way and make the changes necessary to build greater success in the future.
Helping your team members to reframe a negative experience or situation can motivate and build understanding of how to improve future events or circumstances. It can also stop a group from blaming each other when challenges are faced. By identifying even the smallest successes, it is possible to look at places where improvement is needed with a more positive attitude and make the changes necessary to build greater success in the future.
Increase Your Empathy
Identifying triggers and reframing experiences can help you build a higher level of empathy. Once you understand your personal triggers, begin to watch others for theirs. Some may be the same as yours and others may be markedly different.
As you lead, pay attention to language that communicates stress in team members. Listen to their words, but also be aware of their body language. Stress responses are the same for everyone. Look for physical tension, short, shallow breaths, and other signs specific to individuals to indicate they are struggling to cope.
Consider your leadership behavior and how it will affect those around you. This type of awareness will allow you to make the best decisions for yourself and your team. It is not possible to avoid all negativity. In other words, you cannot avoid addressing a negative experience or the ramifications of a negative event. You can choose to make that experience a point of learning for everyone on your team. It’s important to be empathetic to each member’s feelings and reactions to the same event.
Some basic steps to develop your empathy are:
Practice active listening. Approach conversations with a genuine desire to understand the other person’s outlook.
Ask for clarification if you are unsure how others are feeling.
Validate the other person’s perspective. You may not agree, but you can accept their viewpoint as valid.
Respond encouragingly to good news. Share the happiness of others.
