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emotional intelligence

4 Steps to Unlocking Your Potential with Emotional Literacy

March 1, 2020 by Alicia Curtis

Isn’t life an emotional rollercoaster at times? Do you feel that and wonder, how can I not get caught up in my emotions all the time? It’s true, gaining emotional literacy is the key to unlocking your inner awareness and untapped potential.

It’s about starting to think, feel and act more intentionally rather than just react to life.

We all experience emotions constantly, but it is rare that we understand exactly what they are and what they are telling us. We don’t realise it, but our emotions are a source of endless information about ourselves, the people around us and the environments we’re in! The trick is to observe them more!

So, what is emotional literacy?

Emotional literacy is not just having general knowledge about emotions but becoming fluent in your very own emotional language.

Developing emotional literacy allows you to:

  • Improve your problem-solving skills.
  • Make more informed, emotionally intelligent decisions.
  • Become a better leader and team player.
  • Learn vital information about your thinking and behaviour.
  • Strengthen your relationships with others.

Deciphering Emotions

In The Heart of Leadership, Joshua Freedman tells us that all emotions fall on an intersection of two continuums: pleasantness and intensity.

So your emotions range from pleasant to unpleasant on one continuum and from mild to intense on the other. The location of an emotion on these two continuums can dictate your decision-making, how you perceive and respond to others and your performance. This is why it is so important to have emotional literacy so you can be aware and place your emotions. Test the truthfulness of what you’re feeling or whether you need to shift emotions to see the issue differently.

The following steps are a starting guide to learning and interpreting your emotions.

1. Realise your emotions are assets

As a culture, we tend to deal with our emotions in a very unproductive way. We stifle them because we think they are weak or ugly, or we respond to them in a way that is unhelpful.
Wouldn’t you like to experience your emotions guilt-free and actually benefit from them? It sounds too good to be true, but it is possible.

Your emotions are letting you in on the very nuanced details of your life:
‘You didn’t get enough rest on the weekend’.
‘This person does not seem trustworthy’.
‘You should work on more projects like this’.

In Essentials of the Human Brain, John Nolte explains that the limbic system, or the emotional brain, is responsible for providing input from our surroundings and to indicate how our body is doing. It sends this data around the body and you feel emotions as physical sensations. How amazing is that?

It’s time to stop thinking about emotions as obstacles and realise they can move you in new and exciting directions.

2. Stop ignoring emotions

The next step is to stop ignoring your emotions. Have you ever had a feeling in your chest during tense or uncertain circumstances? Does that feeling ever go away without a change of some sort? Perhaps not.

If nothing changes, unpleasant emotions like stress, fear and anxiety can grow in intensity. Our brain just gets more desperate to have its message heard and acted on. If you feel apprehensive about a big meeting one week prior and don’t do anything to better prepare yourself, you will surely feel terrified one hour before.

On the other hand, pleasant emotions need to be followed up. If you feel happy about something, that is a great indicator that you should keep doing it!

3. Start to name your emotions

Now that you’ve started paying attention, you can start thinking about and speaking about your emotions more explicitly. It’s amazing how much of a difference it can make to pause and think or even speak about what you are feeling!

When you name an emotion, you’re acknowledging that it’s there, opening up a channel to begin considering that emotion. Sometimes, naming an emotion is powerful enough to change the direction of a situation. As you make this a habit, you’ll notice yourself becoming more present in each moment as your inner dialogue begins to change.

4. Understand the wisdom of your emotions

Once you have developed your emotional literacy, you can begin to better understand how your emotions are sharing wisdom that your mind hasn’t caught onto yet.

You can also start to observe emotional patterns, triggers, shifts and their strength. Don’t judge, just observe. Track particular emotions over a time period – consider emotions you want to have more and less of. Expand your emotional vocabulary by naming your emotions and see how you can express your emotions through conversation, art, writing or music.

It takes time to learn the language

So, the more you listen to your emotions consciously and learn to understand them, the more you can see personal and professional growth. Well-developed emotional literacy takes time and practice. Be gentle with yourself!

Continue to imagine what you might achieve when you know how to work WITH your emotions rather than AGAINST them!

 

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Filed Under: Self Awareness Tagged With: emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, life, self regulation, self-awareness

Choosing your Best Emotional Response

February 17, 2020 by Alicia Curtis

Want to carve out time and space for thinking and reflection in 2020? Join me once a month online for 90 minutes for reflection, inspiration and connection. Our next gathering is on the 28 April and you can use the coupon bemyguest to try it for free for the first time. Or better yet, commit to growing your reflection muscle by registering for all the 2020 Alyceum Live gatherings here.


 

Emotions are contagious! 

Which is why it is so important to understand how we process them especially when we are leading others. Our emotional brain seeks cues from the people around us.  So, once we begin to know our emotions and patterns of behaviour, the next stage in practicing emotional intelligence is learning how to manage ourselves. 

Consequential thinking is a great tactic to begin processing emotions in a constructive way.

Applying consequential thinking takes three easy steps:

 

  1. Pause: Give your body time to register the emotion.
  2. Evaluate: Compare this scenario to your intrinsic goals.
  3. Respond: Act with intention rather than reacting.

Consequential thinking can vastly help in reducing internal and interpersonal conflicts as it steers us away from behavioural patterns that breed stress, tension and uncertainty. Does this sound familiar in your workplace?

A leader who calmly overcomes disagreements and challenges will be better for their team than a manager who is challenged by their emotions.

It can help in the following ways:

  • Less tension and conflict standing in the way of performance.
  • Constant team building and trust.
  • A safe environment that allows new ideas to flourish.

Dealing with fear and anger

Stress-causing emotions such as fear and anger can have consequences for our health, taking years off our life expectancy and diminishing its quality. However, fear and anger are inevitable parts of our professional lives, so they should not be suppressed or viewed as weak either.  This will only lead to the escalation of these feelings.  These emotions arise when our emotional brain perceives a threat, so let’s try to decode them.

Fear

“Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.”– Marilyn Ferguson, Author

As Marilyn says in the quote above, feelings of fear are inevitable just like sickness.  The same way our immune system learns how to deal with an illness, we can learn about our fears and the best way to approach them.  Firstly, when experiencing fear, we need to know ourselves well enough to discern whether the ‘threat’ is coming from our internal or external environment….

Internal environment examples

  • Past negative experiences.
  • Personal insecurities.
  • Unrelated influences (family, lifestyle, etc.) causing a negative mindset.

External environment examples

  • Potential problems that need to be pre-emptively dealt with.
  • Choices that do not align with our goals.
  • Challenges we are not prepared for.

Think about it for you – when was the last time you experienced fear?  Where was the fear coming from? 

Regardless of the source, fear is leading us to identify what stands in the way of achieving our goals.  It is a very useful tool and we have no choice but to use it!

Anger

Just as fear is giving us hints about what stands in our way, anger tells us that we want to act on an obstacle. We might be less likely to act on fear, as a common expression of fear is backing away from a problem. However, anger can cause us to react too quickly and make things worse.

Moderation is key to stopping anger from escalating into a crisis – yes, that’s right, stop, take a breath, go for a walk, drink a glass of water or anything that allows you to pause and take a break.  This is the time to consider the consequences of the actions you are considering – but don’t get me wrong, you won’t want to do this!!

A helpful exercise – Body, mind, heart scan

A body, mind, heart (BMH) scan is a useful meditative exercise for identifying, analysing and proceeding with emotions productively. Paying attention to these three areas will improve our emotional intelligence and capacity to deal with fear and anger.

Body: what physical sensations are you feeling, and where?

Mind: what are your thought patterns? Where is your attention focused?

Heart: what are some of the feelings you are having?

In summary…

The effects of our emotions on others cannot be overstated.  All people, especially leaders, need to be aware of the consequences of their feelings and expressions on the people around them.

Difficult emotions like fear and anger are, in fact, telling us really important information about the situation.  It is not the emotion that should be avoided, rather the crises that they are warning us about.  Being able to observe our own emotions rather than succumb fully to them is what you want to practice.

Emotions, health and performance are all interconnected: positive emotions improve performance and health, negative emotions can hinder performance and health. These relationships continue to reinforce each other without intervention so let’s think about what emotional state we want to aim for and how we can cultivate in our personal and professional lives!

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Filed Under: Self Reflection Tagged With: anger, emotional intelligence, emotional response, emotions, fear

25 questions to improve your emotional intelligence

November 11, 2019 by Alicia Curtis

There is a lot of talk about the governance experience required by board directors to fulfil their duties on a board(which is a good thing!). What is talked about less so though but is becoming more and more important is the ability for board directors to bring emotional intelligence into the boardroom.

Exceptional board directors lead with humility, respect, have the awareness of the impact they have on those around them and know when to speak and when to listen.

Need a reminder about what EQ is all about?  Emotional intelligence is described by Perter Salovey and John D. Mayer as:

The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate amongst them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, he classifies emotional intelligence into five domains:

Self Awareness: Knowledge of your states, preferences, resources and intuitions.
Self Regulation: Management of your states, impulses and resources.
Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals.
Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns.
Social Skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others.

Here are some reflective questions to ask yourself to develop your emotional intelligence as a board director or team member.

Self Awareness

1.  Honestly do you know the strengths and weaknesses you bring to the boardroom?
2.  How do you define yourself? Are these self perceptions accurate? How do you test these?
3.  Do you listen and seek opportunity to understand how others perceive your strengths and weaknesses?
4.  What are your personal values and are they aligned with the organisation you serve?
5. Do you rate yourself as a continual learner? Would others have the same view?
6. Do you act with humility rather than arrogance?

Self Regulation

7.  Are you respectful in your language and actions to your fellow board directors, staff and stakeholders?
8.  Are you able to keep calm during conversations?
9.  Do you listen openly to other’s points of view?
10.  Do you notice when you’re frustrated during conversations?

Motivation

11.  Do you truly understand what motivates you to serve on a NFP board or in your work team?
12. Do you serve the long term interests of the organisation rather than your own concerns or short term objectives?
13. Do you act from a place of authenticity?
14. Are you self motivated to serve on a board or at work?
15. Do you set and aim to reach goals personally and as a collective on the board?

Empathy

16. Do you put yourself in the shoes of the people you serve?
17.  Do you understand the values, strengths and goals of your fellow board directors or team mates?
18.  Do you share the workload equally on the board?
19.  Are you willing to see how others perceive situations and decisions to be made?
20. Do you work hard to be trustworthy?

Social Skills

21. Do you commit to working respectfully with your fellow board directors?
22. Do you reach other to develop a strong relationship with your fellow board directors?
23.  Do you make time to have conversations outside of the boardroom to deepen your relationship with your fellow board members?
24. Are we committed to working as equals in the boardroom?
25. Do you act with a positive attitude?

Emotional intelligence is a critical component of an effective board. Are you actively cultivating the skills of emotional intelligence?

Ready to step into your full leadership potential?

GET THE FREE GUIDE:
15 WAYS TO FIND AN NFP BOARD POSITION
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Filed Under: Communication, Influence, Self Awareness, Values Tagged With: emotional intelligence, empathy, motivation, self regulation, self-awareness, social skills

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