We had the pleasure last week of Vistage Speaker Heather Anderson’s Master Class on Emotional Intelligence. If you have not done a deep dive into Emotional Intelligence, it is highly recommended. It gives you a vocabulary to express feelings or intuition you have about yourself and others. It gives you words to express frustration and tease out unhelpful patterns that can be addressed with focused effort.
And, you get to complete a self assessment that creates one “aha” moment after another. One of my favorite pieces is the EQ triangle – emotional self awareness, empathy and reality testing. In other words, what are you feeling, what do you sense others are feeling and what is the objective reality. If your scores are within 10 points in all 3 of these skills, you are pretty balanced in your reading of the data. If your self awareness is over 10 higher you tend to over emphasize your feelings. If your empathy is higher, you defer to the feelings of others over your feelings or the facts. If you are over 10 points higher on reality testing, you may run over your feelings and those of others to get to the result.
Haven’t you seen or produced any or all of the above scenarios? With the tool-kit of Emotional Intelligence you can consciously choose a better tool than your first reaction when faced with a difficult situation.
As we say in California “there is gold in dem dere hills”. Breaking out with a partner to discuss the least effective skill in my tool-kit, I discovered that no matter what the skill, it is really hard to change. He has been working on being more assertive for over 5 years. Consciously trying, asking for help and input from family, friends and professional advisors. I have been working on being more flexible. Seriously. Every time I choose flexibility when I don’t really want to, I feel the gears grinding in my head, heart and gut. It turns out that he has the same struggle. And, we do it anyway because we know it is the right skill to use in the moment.
You can get better at Emotional Intelligence if you work at it. With Heather’s wise guidance, we jumped ahead.
If you don’t think Vistage peer groups get value at every meeting-from the speakers, the conversations and the input from your peers, don’t click here.
Photo of our “triangle” on the trail to Crystal Lake, Mammoth Lake Basin, CA.