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Leadership Unlimited, September2010
Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness Are Keys to Leadership
Success

Emotional Intelligence is a skill set that’s essential for
leadership success. EI became a buzzword in 1995 with the
publication of Daniel Goleman’s book on the subject.

EI deserves much more attention from leaders who are serious
about improving effectiveness.

EI has five components. Self-Awareness of your own emotions.
Self-Management of those Emotions. Self-Motivation. Social
Awareness of other people’s emotions. Social Skills, or
managing the emotions of others.

It all starts with Self-Awareness. You can’t do the other four
components, or do them as well as possible, without a lot of
self-awareness about the emotions you feel, what causes them,
and which ones cause trouble for you.

We have three primary emotions: Anger, fear, and joy. All
other emotions stem from these three. Another way of looking at
it is that all other emotions are subsets of these, or are
varying degrees of these three.

The ones that get most of us into trouble are anger and fear.
So we need a good understanding of these two.

Anger is rooted mostly in the past. Something happens, we don’t
like it, so we become angry with whoever caused the problem.

Although anger comes out in the present in response to a
triggering event, the anger usually results from an accumulation
of past incidents.

EI research shows that anger rarely happens instantaneously,
with no warning. When you look back on it, you can identify
what I call “telltale signs” that anger is starting to show its
ugly head. Some people describe it as a tightness in the
throat. Others as feeling a bit flushed in the face.

Whatever your particular signs, you need to be able to identify
it, so that you can take steps to prevent the anger from boiling
over in inappropriate ways.

Fear, however, is rooted in the future. Anxiety, worry, or
apprehension stem from fear, and they’re based on what might
happen in the future. The trigger is something that happened in
the past, but the fear is about the effects those events could
have in the future.

As with anger, fear has telltale signs. And we need to be
plugged into these signs so we can take steps to short circuit
the emotions, and channel them into more positive emotions—the
joy-based emotions, like happiness, contentedness, etc.

Fear related signs can be physiological, as the anger-related
signs are. But more often they are thought-related, in that we
find ourselves thinking about certain things, and realize we’re
experiencing a fear-type emotion.

Identifying the emotions early is Self-Awareness. Taking steps
to control and channel emotions is Self-Management. You can’t
take those steps unless you’re aware of the emotions, which is
why Self-Awareness is the key, the foundation of Emotional
Intelligence.

Develop your Self-Awareness by identifying the emotions that
cause problems. Then, looking for patterns, identify the people
and situations that trigger those emotions. Then develop
strategies for managing those emotions.

Those strategies comprise Self-Management, which will have to be
the topic of a future column.

Until next edition, keep leading the way!

Copyright (C) 2010 by Terry Wall

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