Why You Need Emotional Intelligence to Succeed
Emotional intelligence is responsible for 58 percent
of your performance, so what are you doing to improve yours?
When the concept of emotional
intelligence was introduced to the masses, it served as the missing link
in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the
highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into
what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success--IQ. Decades
of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that
sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.
Emotional intelligence is the
"something" in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we
manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that
achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence consists four core skills that
pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social
competence.
Personal competence comprises your
self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually
than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your
ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.
- Self-awareness is your ability to accurately perceive
your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.
- Self-management is your ability to use awareness of
your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.
Social competence is made up of your
social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your
ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and motives to respond
effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.
- Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up
on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.
- Relationship management is your ability to use
awareness of your emotions and the others' emotions to manage interactions
successfully.
Emotional intelligence, IQ, and personality are different.
Emotional intelligence taps into a
fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect.
There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence; you simply
can't predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is.
Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it's the same at age 15 as it is at
age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills
that can be acquired and improved with practice. Although some people are
naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high
emotional intelligence even if you aren't born with it.
Personality is the final piece of
the puzzle. It's the stable "style" that defines each of us.
Personality is the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination
toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can't be
used to predict emotional intelligence. Also, like IQ, personality is stable
over a lifetime and doesn't change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality
each cover unique ground and help to explain what makes a person tick.
Emotional intelligence predicts performance.
How much of an impact does emotional
intelligence have on your professional success? The short answer is: A lot!
It's a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a tremendous
result. TalentSmart
tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills,
and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of
performance, explaining a full 58 percent of success in all types of jobs.
Your emotional intelligence is the
foundation for a host of critical skills--it impacts most everything you do and
say each day.
Of all the people we've studied at
work, we've found that 90 percent of top performers are also high in emotional
intelligence. On the flip side, just 20 percent of bottom performers are high
in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional
intelligence, but the chances are slim.
Naturally, people with a high degree
of emotional intelligence make more money--an average of $29,000 more per year
than people with a low degree of emotional intelligence. The link between
emotional intelligence and earnings is so direct that every point increase in
emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold
true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world.
We haven't yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren't tied
closely to emotional intelligence.
You can increase your emotional intelligence.
The communication between your
emotional and rational "brains" is the physical source of emotional
intelligence. The pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at
the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of
your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. However,
first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are
generated. So, we have an emotional reaction to events before our rational mind
is able to engage. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication
between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.
Plasticity is the term neurologists
use to describe the brain's ability to change. As you discover and practice new
emotional intelligence skills, the billions of microscopic neurons lining the
road between the rational and emotional centers of your brain branch off small
"arms" (much like a tree) to reach out to the other cells. A single
cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of
growth ensures it's easier to kick a new behavior into action in the future.
As you train your brain by
repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, your brain builds
the pathways needed to make them into habits. Before long, you begin responding
to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think
about it. And just as your brain reinforces the use of new behaviors, the connections
supporting old, destructive behaviors will die off as you learn to limit your
use of them.
By Travis Bradberry
http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/why-you-need-emotional-intelligence-to-succeed.html?cid=em01020week11b
No comments:
Post a Comment