EI Skills are superpowers. Our emotions influence the decisions we make, what kind of day we are having and even our health. They trigger our actions and can make our lives either easy or very difficult.
Have you ever missed out on a fun party because you felt too sad to go? Did you shout at people in the past only to regret it seconds later? Have you ever said no to a fantastic opportunity because you were afraid?
That was your emotions making your decisions for you. That was your emotions in charge of your life. Yes, they are supposed to guide us and helps us make decisions. But only guide and help. At the end of the day, we’re supposed to take the wheel. Emotional Intelligence do that. They put you back in charge of your life.
Negative emotions?
Let’s start by getting rid of one of the biggest misunderstandings and misnomers: negative emotions. There is no such thing. Emotions are simply chain reactions in our bodies and our minds, set off by events or triggers.
These chain reactions are pre-installed programs that prepare us to take action fast and efficiently. Emotions are unconscious processings of events, meaning they happen whether you like it or not.
When you are in danger, fear prepares your mind and your body to run away as quickly as possible. Anger makes sure you have a fighting chance. And sadness causes you to reach out to other people, which in turn makes you feel better.
Emotions and actions
So there are no negative emotions, just more or less uncomfortable ones. When our emotions first evolved our ancestors’ lives were much simpler. They didn’t have to feel so many uncomfortable emotions every day.
I mean, how many times can you reasonably expect to run into a lion? And once they did, they’d spend the rest of the day running and sleeping it off. Not us though. We are exposed to headlines that cause us continuous fear. We have jobs that force our bodies to sit all day, while stress hormones run rampant in our blood streams.
Times have changed. A once perfect system now needs daily maintenance and a set of skills. First though, you want to wrap your head around one basic fact: Having an emotion does not mean you have to act on it. With EI skills you can once more be in charge of how you feel, of the decisions you make and the actions you take.
The EI skill set
Emotional Intelligence is not at attribute or a characteristic. It’s not a personality trait either. It’s a set of Life Skills anyone can learn. With these skills, your emotions become onces more your guides and you can use them to make your life so much easier.
Use frustration as your in-built productivity hack. Shame becomes your alarm system for limiting beliefs, so you can release them. And even fear does not have to stay crippling anxiety any longer.
What, then, are the EI skills? If you have read up on the subject before, you will have stumbled over other lists with different names for the individual skills. I know I did and you find the terms I originally learned in brackets. But I decided to rename most of the skills for clarity’s sake. The 5 EI skills are:
- Self-awareness
- Emotional hygiene (aka handling your emotions)
- Happiness (self-motivation)
- Recognizing emotions in others
- Emotions contagion (managing emotions in others)
Order of importance
I listed the skills in order of importance. Self-awareness is the key to all the other EI skills. Once you know which emotion is currently running through your body and mind, you can take the appropriate steps to handle it or even use the emotion to your advantage.
Practising emotional hygiene on a daily basis keeps your body in balance so that no emotion gets you off kilter again. Self-motivation is really happiness in disguise. Once you learn how to be happy no matter what, any task becomes easy.
EI skills start with you. You are the only person you have control over. The fantastic news is though, that once you take care of yourself, the other two skills fall into place automatically. Recognising emotions in others is easier once you know what it looks like and feels like for yourself.
And for all the (aspiring) leaders out there who have been trying to manage individuals, groups and teams, here’s the thing: You cannot manage other people unless you are in charge of yourself. Once you are, you can easily influence an entire room by living the emotion you want others to have because emotions are contagious.
EI Skills for everyone
You are probably already good at one or a couple of the Emotional Intelligence Skills above. Maybe knowing how others feel is easy for you. Maybe you always stay positive in any given situation. Or you’ve already noticed that you can calm others down by staying calm yourself.
Take a minute to think what comes easy to you and remind yourself that you learned this skill at some point and mastered it through repetition. And that is exactly the way you learn the other EI skills.
Emotional Intelligence Skills can be learned by anyone and it takes a lot less time than you think. All you need is to make the decision that you want to lead a better, an easier and a calmer life. And then get started with your new superpowers.