Emotional Intelligence is the single most predictive stat for performance, leadership and personal excellence.
Intro
Welcome to 3 Things You Can Use, where Maddi and I decode self-improvement and entrepreneurship through books, three things at a time. This week's book is Emotional Intelligence 2.0, by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves.
According to Amazon,
"Emotional Intelligence 2.0 delivers a step-by-step program for increasing your emotional intelligence using the four core EQ skills―self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management―to exceed your goals and achieve your fullest potential.
...
With 90% of top performers high in EQ, and EQ twice as important as IQ in getting where you want to go in life, who can afford to ignore it?"
So, what are three things we can use from this book?
3 Things You Can Use
1. Emotional Intelligence
So what is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence, also known as EQ, is made up of four skills, divided into two competencies.
The two competencies of emotional intelligence are:
Personal Competence
Social Competence
And within each competence is two separate skills.
Within personal competence there is:
Self-awareness
Self-management (which is essentially self-control)
Within social competence there is:
Social-awareness
Relationship management
Emotional intelligence, in total, is your ability to recognize and understand the emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.
According to the book,
EQ is the single most predictive stat for performance, leadership and personal excellence.
90% of high performers are also high in EQ and only 20% of low performers are high in EQ.
Financially, high EQs make more money, averaging $29,000 more per year than low EQs. And it is so linear, they say that for every EQ point gained, you make an average of $1,300 more per year.
And the best part is, unlike IQ, you can improve your EQ.
So let's dig in into each of the four skills
.
2. The Four Skills
Each skill has a part to play in making up your total EQ score.
Self-awareness, the first skill, is the ability to accurately perceive your own emotions in the moment and to understand your tendencies across situations.
Its about understanding yourself, knowing how you operate and what pushes your buttons. According to the book, self-awareness and satisfaction are linearly connected, and the more self-awareness you have, the more satisfied you will be with life.
Self-management is the ability to use your awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior positively. It is self-control.
Having self-management is having the ability to manage your tendencies and put your emotional needs on hold for the sake of something better in the future.
Social-awareness, the first in the social competency, is the ability to perceive what other people are thinking and feeling. It's empathy and understanding.
Having social-awareness is being more tuned-in to others - knowing how they feel and knowing what they need to put them in a better mood and yourself in better standing.
Relationship management is the ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully. It's essentially combining the other skills in order to have effective interactions.
The better your relationship with someone, the better you can get your point across.
3. Understanding Emotions
The communication between our emotional and rational brains is the physical source of emotional intelligence.
Our brains are wired to give emotion the upper hand, throughout an experience, signals pass through the emotional segments first. Emotional intelligence is our ability to give our rational brain more weight, to still feel and understand the emotional side, but not to just blindly follow it, wreaking havoc on our environments.
Since we are wired to act on emotions, it can be challenging for our rationality to win every time.
Our ability to not act out at every moment is mostly shaped by the culture we grow up in, but what we can do to improve our emotional intelligence is to consciously affect our environments to help, with notes, and reminders and plans as well as to set our intentions to be better, through visualization, empathy and thought.
They say that emotions can help you or hurt you - but you have no say in the matter until you understand them.
Recap:
Emotional Intelligence is made up of four skills and is the best predictor of personal excellence, leadership and performance
Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are the factors of emotional intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is malleable. Practice your understanding and emotional control and have rationality win out if you want to rule the world.
This was a good one.
This book was succinct and powerful.
It includes 66 different strategies for improving your emotional intelligence. The 66 strategies are divided into each of the four skills, leaving you with atleast 15 different strategies to improve each skill.
If you get the book you will get a code that allows you to go take the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 test and find out your EQ.
If you'd like to take the test without buying the book, you can buy an access code at talentsmart.com, which is their website.
That's all for this one!
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Attribution:
Punching Sounds by: Mike Koenig
Reading Photo at end of video by: Marketa