Ten Things to Do to Raise Your EQ

If you’ve ever patiently waited for someone to finish making their point in a meeting, only to become increasingly annoyed before finally interrupting them in an angry fashion, you’ll know that EQ is easier to understand than to practice.

Emotional Intelligence is making your feelings work for you. It’s using your thinking and feeling skills to make smarter decisions. And it counts more than IQ for success in life. Thankfully, it’s learnable.

Here are ten steps you can take to make your emotions work for you and raise your EQ.

1. Give your emotions a name

To build our EQ we need to know what we’re feeling. Emotions can be pretty simple to identify. ‘’I let slip our negotiating position. I’m mortified.’’ Or they can be incredibly complex. ‘’My boss snapped at me out of the blue when I shared our excellent sales performance for the quarter. I feel humiliated, undermined, furious, disappointed, inferior, confused.’’

The simple act of naming your emotions reduces their intensity – you can say them or write them down. Typically, writing them down is a more powerful route. When you know what the emotions are, you know what you are dealing with – and you can begin the analysis of how the emotions are meant to serve you, if at all.

2. Engage in analysis – and then choose!

Be curious about the data in your emotions. They’ve arisen for a reason. It’s your rational brain’s job to work out whether those reasons are valid – and what your options are for handling the emotion and the situation. We’ve all received those emails that seem an affront to us, or been aggressively questioned in a presentation. The unconsidered reaction might be to launch a verbal counter-attack – but what other options exist?

At work, two fundamental emotions that can impact our performance, if not handled appropriately, are anger and fear. Anger tends to impact others first, and then ourselves. Fear tends to impact us directly, we hold ourselves back – and by extension our performance and that of the business.

Emotions drive people and people drive performance. We need to understand and analyse our emotions if we are going to make optimal choices and perform in line with our potential.

3. Recognize that ‘between stimulus and response is a gap’. Use it to choose who you want to be.

These are Viktor Frankl’s words, an Austrian psychiatrist and survivor of multiple concentration camps. He advocated the importance of seeking meaning in all we do.

‘’Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’’

In the moment when the stimulus occurs, it’s not easy to pause and purposefully choose a path. Try to anticipate the stimulus or trigger moments that may occur in the day and practice the ‘’when…then’’ technique: ‘’When Brian monopolizes the discussion, then I thank him for his thoughts, summarize them if appropriate, and ask others for their perspectives.’’

In the moment, if you can link your response to your larger purpose, even better. If your bigger purpose is bringing out the best in others, how can you use that trigger moment to achieve this?

4. Check out your emotional baggage - then drop it

If you aren’t carrying any emotional baggage you are either highly evolved, or pretty low in self-awareness.

What patterns of behaviour do you consistently exhibit, which don’t serve you well? Can you trace them back to a root cause? Here’s an example. You might have an unusually high respect for authority and a reluctance to speak up in the presence of more senior colleagues. This is typically not helpful for you or the organization. Part of this may be cultural, but if you look back, it might also be due to the fact that you were petrified of a teacher at school, who seemed very old and was very strict. The pattern of behaviour created when you did everything you could to avoid displeasing the teacher may be a lingering pattern of subservient, conflict-avoiding behaviour transferred to your work and non-work life. Or even worse, you’ve turned into your old teacher.

4. Master your mind and your self-talk

Most of us are fortunate to be the masters of our own mind, so why do we sometimes speak to ourselves in such a disrespectful manner? Rather than pepping ourselves up with reinforcements of things we do well and traits others appreciate in us, we focus on the rarer occasions when we drop the ball. From my personal experience, when people take self-assessments, most immediately focus on the deficits, rather than the strengths.

We become our thoughts. If you tend to use extremes e.g. ‘You never say the right thing… You are always last to speak up… That was the stupidest thing to do, you aren’t exactly moving yourself forward. Yes, you made a mistake, so how can you learn from it?

Whilst I’m not asking you to be delusional, I am asking you to be kind to yourself and reinforce the positives – and then see how you can use these to address any deficits.

5. Be present

It’s very difficult to practice emotional intelligence if you aren’t present in the moment. You are missing the clues. If you have your head in your laptop in a meeting, you’re missing the body language cues, possibly missing the discussion flow and probably not catching the subtle change in tone. You are therefore poorly placed to intervene to alleviate a tense situation, or capitalize on a positive vibe to present your suggestion for a budget reallocation.

Too often, we are ruminating on the past, or anticipating the future, without being in the present - the only moment that counts.

6. Lose your assumptions

Very easy to say, incredibly difficult to do. We all use short-cuts to make sense of people and situations. It can be very helpful – and highly damaging.

If you assume the person you are meeting is going to be unreasonable, then you may be setting yourself up mentally to signal this belief, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Definitely do your research on the person and then figure out ways to make the interaction constructive and aligned to a common goal –look for the upsides and hold off making damaging assumptions.

Humans are hard-wired to be defensive and on the alert for perceived attacks. We therefore tend to react quickly to a statement or expression that could be construed as hurtful to us. To avoid misinterpretations, it can be useful to be genuinely curious and get to the crux of the matter – from your counterpart’s perspective. You know the mantra: Listen, ask questions, show empathy. It seems like it will take too much time to do this – invariably, it saves time.

7. Orientate yourself on the culture map

We know that groups – nations, regions, organizations, teams – have different cultures. What can you do to ensure you are acclimatized to the culture of the group, or the individual, you are dealing with?

If you’re going to be leading a project with team members from the Netherlands, Brazil and Japan, where might the cultural misunderstandings occur? How can you help the team to communicate more effectively and leverage diverse working styles for the benefit of the project?

If you’re doing a pitch to a new organization, take a look at their website to understand their values, check the language they use for clues to how they operate, look at the bios of their senior leadership team and board of directors to understand the traits that count.

Two great resources on understanding the cultures of different countries are Hofstede and Erin Meyer’s book, The Culture Map.

8. Give clear signals (avoid mixed ones)

‘’It would be great if our customers thought more highly of us,’’ sounds like a nonchalant wish. ‘’Can you devise a strategy to take our net promoter score from 6.4 to 8,’’ is a much clearer message.

This is especially true when it comes to feedback. Imagine you highlight a person’s strengths for five minutes and then fleetingly lament their current project being delayed, before reiterating how much you value them - would the message that they need to deliver the project on time be lost on them?

9. Construct, not destruct

You lose a sure deal to a competitor. How tempting is it to bash the team, play the blame game and seek scapegoats? How useful is it? Yes, it’s natural to be disappointed and it’s helpful to understand where expectation and reality parted ways. It’s not helpful to continue on the downward spiral of anger, recrimination and regret.

In meetings when you feel someone has made a less than helpful suggestion, is it necessary to put the idea or person down? Can you move on with a, ‘’And your point has prompted this thought…’’ before you go on to share an idea that is close to the polar opposite.

10. Show anger, but only on purpose

‘’Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, this is not easy.’’ The words of the world’s business thought-leader, Aristotle.

This may be why many successful leaders choose to shelve the anger-driven dialogue. Short-term, it will probably get results. As a long-term strategy, bearing in mind Viktor Frankl’s perspective and the relevance of this to today’s meaning-seeking knowledge workers , probably not.

Notes:

By success in life, I mean a combination of effectiveness, achievement, well-being and strong relationships. (Six Seconds research)

Close to 90% of the difference between average and star performers at senior management levels is attributable to EQ-related skills. (Daniel Goleman)