But wait? What IS emotional intelligence? In this episode I define what I mean when I say “emotional intelligence,” I outline the major concepts of emotional intelligence, and I share my framework of how to improve it in a very practical way.
Tyler Small: What is emotional intelligence, anyway. Today, I'm going to take you through three different ways of looking at emotional intelligence. The words we use to describe it through the different points of the human life cycle. I'm going to talk about the components of emotional intelligence from a theoretical perspective, and then I'm going to get really practical and jump into the weeds of.
[00:00:29] What emotional intelligence looks like in real life and how to hack your emotional intelligence.
[00:00:36] I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.
[00:00:41] So you may have noticed you walk up to a baby and it's cooing and it's. Locked eye contact on your eyes and it's giggling.
[00:00:53] And when you smile, the baby smiles, when you move to the right, it follows you moved to the left, it follows right that eye contact. If you offer a finger or your little thumb, like it grabs on it latches on, and it's super happy to interact with you. Now that little baby may be emotionally intelligent.
[00:01:14] The baby also may be extroverted. And there's a big difference between being extroverted and being emotionally intelligent. Sometimes we talk about people as being extroverted or being outgoing. That means that they all love to meet new people. They love to be in the forefront. They love to be the center of attention.
[00:01:35] They love to be very gregarious as opposed to people who are introverted, who like to have maybe a smaller group of friends and they like to speak more quietly, or they like to have more of a calm conversation. When they're connected with people that they've known for a while, they may become more comfortable with talking and being more friendly.
[00:02:01] And that's something that people who don't know them very well would never see that openness, they rely on a high level of trust in order to. Slowly extend their relationships. So introverted and extroverted is something that doesn't necessarily determine whether a person is emotionally intelligent or not.
[00:02:23] It's just two different kinds of people. So from the time that we're babies, sometimes we can see those differences, but the emotional intelligence is a little different and we see that as kids start to play with each other, they go into preschool elementary school. And sometimes on the report card, it says plays well with others or doesn't play well with others.
[00:02:48] And so that can be an indication of emotional intelligence. How friendly is the person we talk about being a good friend, right? And so sometimes that includes talking, resolving conflict. Those are the big one throughout life. And as we get into middle school, the upper grades of elementary school and middle school, we start doing more group work.
[00:03:12] And the group work platform is a very interesting one because it gives opportunities for us to develop emotional intelligence. Sometimes we call it social skills and all these things are very similar to emotional intelligence. As some people participate in sports, they get on a team.
[00:03:34] And so becoming a team player becomes something of importance and value of how do they treat their teammates? Do they pass the ball around or are they a ball hog? Are they communicate effectively Oh, Sam is open. Sam is open. Or do they try and do the whole thing on their own. And
[00:03:53] as well as between teams.
[00:03:56] So emotional intelligence can play a role between teams and we often call that sportsmanship. Is somebody a good sport . And so that, that's another way that we can see this playing out. If somebody is really good with their teammates. But they are not good with the people on the other team when they go through and give high fives at the end.
[00:04:18]That is one way that we see emotional intelligence manifested. As we graduate from high school, we start moving into college, we do more group work, and finally we get into the workforce. And again, that term team player comes back a lot, even people who've never played sports often are called a good team player when they're helping their team.
[00:04:43] And one word does described to tell the difference between weak and strong emotional intelligence is selfishness versus selflessness. It doesn't mean that you're a pushover necessarily, but someone who's selfless is often that good team player, somebody who has social skills, they're good at the group work, going back.
[00:05:03] They play well with others, right? And then as you progress, as some people climb the ladder in the workplace, we call it leadership. And management is different than leadership, right? It management means that you you can go through the business processes of the organization. Leadership is more of that soft skills area, soft skills.
[00:05:26] We call it a lot. In the workplace and leadership are the soft skills required to help people move from point A to point B emotionally. And I say emotionally. And what I mean by that is we say a good leader helps to people to be engaged, helps to inspire those who they're tasked with leading. And so it often a leader is someone who influences.
[00:05:55] Others, not just sells or persuades but influences and helps people feel comfortable going in a certain direction. So I would contend that leadership is just a very similar thing to all these other manifestations of emotional intelligence, being a team player group work, social skills, because let's say that you're doing a project.
[00:06:19] And you realized that the group is not getting the project done at a pace that's going to finish by the deadline. In that case, you need to lead the group in order to, to change the pace in order to figure out, okay, we, what are we going to do differently in order to get these things done on time?
[00:06:37] That's what a leader does, right? So way back in elementary school, when it's plays Wells with others, if. Someone's being excluded, or if there's a conflict that arises, some people want to play the game by this rule. Other people want to play the game by this rule, you can be a leader in helping to solve conflict in helping people to get along in being agreeable.
[00:07:02] Those are all different parts of being leader. And I would say that leader is something that even small children can exhibit. So overall, I just like to call it emotional intelligence or soft skills or social skills. Those are all the common things. And while they may all have different technical or academic names, I think of them as much the same.
[00:07:30] So that's what I'm talking about. When I say emotional, it tells if somebody says what's emotional intelligence, I usually say us it's social skills. Yeah. And the abbreviation is E Q. So I think people picked EQ they landed on that. We used to say what's your emotional intelligence quotient, and it's your IQ is your intelligence quotient. So people thought that EQ sounded cool because it sounds like I Q and that's the term that stuck in this realm. Over the last 10 or 15 years, it jelled in EQ
[00:08:02]so that's what people are talking about. If you hear someone say this individual has a high EQ in the workplace, they mean emotional intelligence, high emotional intelligence. So from a theoretical conceptual standpoint, let me explain the different components. Of emotional intelligence. There's two big parts to it.
[00:08:21] Awareness and management of emotions. So the awareness of emotions happens within yourself and within others, you need to be of course, aware of your own emotions and aware of other people's emotions. The management happens. You're managing your own emotions. Everybody has feelings, and it's a matter of whether or not you're aware of what you're feeling and of you're managing what you feel. So if you feel really angry at somebody, if you aren't aware of it and you don't know how to manage it, you might go over and slug them, you might punch him in the face.
[00:08:58] So it's really important to be aware of our emotions and to manage them. Oh, I'm mad at Bill. Because Bill called me a name and I can manage that. I calm myself down just in deep breathing whatever it takes so that I can manage that feeling that I'm having. And I don't just let it control me. So I mentioned awareness management of ourselves and others, right?
[00:09:26] So you might say how can I manage the feelings and emotions of others? That sounds weird. And that is pretty weird. But I would say we're helping others manage their own emotions. So somebody comes in, we're talking with someone and they're just seem really ticked off really on edge, really moody. We can say, Hey, I noticed you're typically in a pretty good mood after lunch.
[00:09:52] What's something bugging you and that gives them the opportunity to share, and we can listen and. If they say, Oh, as a matter of fact, I got a parking ticket at lunch just really ticked me off. And we can say, ah, man I've gotten one of those before. And I was mad for days. We can identify them.
[00:10:07] We can share with them that we have felt something similar and, or we can say, I've never gotten a parking ticket before I imagine that would be really frustrating and we can help them to manage their own emotions by labeling it. And identifying with them.
[00:10:25] We can acknowledge that they are feeling the way that they are and that's okay. And that in that way we can help other people to manage their emotions.
[00:10:34] So those two components are awareness and management. And under awareness, we have awareness of our own emotions and awareness of other people's emotions. And then under management, we're managing our own emotions and helping others manage theirs.
[00:10:51] So now we've talked about. What emotional intelligence is from a human lifespan type of perspective, what we call it in different parts of life. We've talked about the theoretical components, the concepts of emotional intelligence. Now I want to break down emotional intelligence in a way that I hope is very helpful for you to actually utilize in order to hack your own emotional intelligence.
[00:11:17]I'm going to show you a progression. It's a four step progression. This builds on this build on this. Okay. Basically it starts with the experiences and experiences are the building blocks of relationships.
[00:11:31] Relationships are the building blocks of leaders. And leaders are the building blocks of communities and cultures. So let me go through this. We have positive experiences. We have negative experiences. We have neutral experiences. And when we have a really great experience with somebody that helps us to form a connection that helps us to form a relationship.
[00:11:57] If we have really poor experiences with someone. We don't really like that person. We have a poor relationship. We have a very weak relationship. We have an adversarial relationship sometimes. And then when those relationships start to form, that's when leaders arise. So we have leaders who lead people in their anger.
[00:12:20]We have leaders who lead people in their happiness and joy. We have leaders who. Are leaders of thought leaders of economics, leaders, of organizations, religious leaders, in order for leaders to really lead, they have to form relationships which are based on experiences. Do you see it? And then what creates a culture are the people who lead in that culture, the people who have the strongest relationships will lead in a culture in a community, in an organization.
[00:12:55] If you look at an organization, it's very interesting to do this. There have been many studies that look at the strength of the relationships in an organization and the amount of influence that certain people have. And as opposed to the hierarchical structures, who reports to whom, and oftentimes the people with the power in the organization are different than those.
[00:13:20] Who are at the top of the hierarchy. It's very interesting to look at. And so it's these relationships that are so important, which are basically caused by the experiences that people have. So the source then of influence the source of leadership. The source of relationships is really those experiences.
[00:13:42] That's where emotional intelligence comes in. And using emotional intelligence to create great experiences for people forms the strong relationships. And that's where leaders rise. They have the strong relationships create the culture. Okay. So you see how the step-by-step pattern goes. And we know that it's the experiences that are the source of all the movement, all the power that happens of influence in cultures.
[00:14:13] How do we exhibit emotional intelligence in an experience? I'll tell you it's very simple. Some people think you need to read people's minds in order to have social skills and that's not true. It turns out that you can ask just a few questions in order to find out what people want. And if our goal is to improve the quality of the relationship, then that helps us perform in these experiences to create good experiences for other people.
[00:14:47] If the goal is to create a strong relationship, then our experiences can be driven by certain questions. For example, how's this going for you? What are you looking for here? What are you hoping to accomplish? And the two golden questions that I ask are, how can I make a Five Star experience for you today?
[00:15:10] Or how can I make this, the thing that we're working on together right now, how can I make this a five star experience for you today? And then by asking those questions and really nailing down and getting those expectations really clear. I can make a plan. I call that being open and then I do my best to deliver results, to do what I said I was going to do, basically acting out that plan and check in.
[00:15:39] I call that deliver. So I have three steps open deliver, follow up is the third step. And that's when I just asked, Hey, on a five-star scale, how would you rate this experience? And that my friends is how I create. Five-star experiences for people in order to build the relationship. There's two other ways that I build relationships and I'll talk about those in the next two episodes.
[00:16:06] It's the Five Star Apology and the Five Star Thank You. I've just described the Five Star Experience. I hope you enjoyed this podcast what is emotional intelligence and I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional intelligence. Have a great day.