This weeks blog is about emotional intelligence and arises from some personal learning, difficult learning! And I am going to describe it as work in progress.
You see emotional intelligence is tested more in challenging and difficult situations that when we are merely cruising along, we may be under the impression that we have got this emotional intelligence stuff all sorted and then, the situation just does not pan out as we had hoped.
Self-reflection is much talked about, many would also say, yes I am good at it, but it is after these unexpected troublesome situations when you need to go deep and work out, how was I not as flexible as I could have been, what is going on for me and why did it lead to a less than compassionate response.
It is through developing our self-awareness we that we see and maybe hear things we would rather not be recalling about ourselves, this is the start of another journey. Demonstrating emotional intelligence, is about awareness, regulation and desire to get a better outcome. If what you are doing is not working, do something different, yet it is easy in the midst of the situation to repeatedly follow the same strategy and become more entangled in not getting the desired outcome.
So here I am, reflecting on what for me has been an emotional roller-coaster, set off with the best of intentions, worked hard to find a solutions to the problem, got hooked on an unexpected response, tried to recover it, lost the plot and blamed everyone other than myself.
So I sat down with a set of our own Developing Emotional Intelligence cards to do some self-coaching. The first card I turned over “What unhelpful emotion / limiting belief can you let go of?” oh boy, call in serendipity, in that moment the unhelpful belief just flashed up, straight out of my unconscious.
A belief is something we know to be true! It does not actually have to be true at all, it is a construct in our heads, something we have chosen to treat as a fact, change what we believe and the whole situation takes on a different meaning. We may get a better understanding of the other persons position, motivation, desired outcome, all of which we have quite possibly missed because of our map of the situation.
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating” as the old saying goes, its one thing to cognitively get it, it’s another to embody that understanding into behaviour.
The toughest of learnings are our biggest opportunity for growth.
You can take a look at the Developing Emotional Intelligence cards by following this link https://www.revealsolutions.co.uk/coaching-cards-courses-books-resources/developing-emotional-intelligence-cards/