You're a leader who wants to be more resilient. How can you develop emotional intelligence?

Managing people is challenging. If you haven’t resolved your own self-esteem and self-awareness issues, it is even more challenging. Moving beyond your insecurities and seeing yourself as someone who is there to push others forward, changes how you manage people. You are no longer managing but collaborating and leading with EI. Sometimes you need to drive a meeting, sometimes you need to let others run with it. Knowing when and which approach is needed comes from knowing your team, their strengths, weaknesses, and goals while having a plan to enable each direct report to reach their goals. There was a great book published years ago called The Platinum Rule which determined that you need to treat people the way they need to be treated.

To enhance resilience, focus on developing emotional intelligence (EI) through self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills. Start by reflecting on your own emotions and reactions to situations. Practice mindfulness techniques to manage stress and remain calm under pressure. Empathize with others to build stronger relationships and foster teamwork. Set meaningful goals aligned with your values to stay motivated during challenging times. Finally, hone your communication and conflict resolution skills to navigate difficult situations effectively. Continuous practice and feedback from peers can strengthen your EI, making you a more resilient leader.

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and effectively use one's own emotions and navigate social interactions. Benefits of high EI include improved interpersonal relationships, effective communication, better stress management, and enhanced leadership skills. It fosters empathy, self-awareness, and adaptability, contributing to personal and professional success.

Sustainable resilience requires deepening consciousness to reach a change of behavior building upon it. Building resilience is a transformative journey that begins with * cultivating self-awareness (to monitor whether one is present or feeling triggered), * cultivating presence, * practicing self-acceptance (especially for cases where one feels emotionally strongly triggered), and *mastering the art of shifting from triggered states to a state of presence to create the best conditions for making good decisions. It involves embracing every experience as an opportunity for self-discovery, where each moment becomes a practice in staying present, noticing when we drift away, and gently guiding ourselves back to presence.

Recognizing emotions in myself and others, I focused on self-awareness and management. Empathy enhanced my social awareness, while honing communication skills bolstered relationship management. My tip: Start journaling your emotional responses and actively listen in conversations. This simple shift fosters EI, making leadership not just about resilience but about connecting deeply with others, enriching decision-making and fostering a supportive environment.

To cultivate EI, begin with mindfulness practices that enhance self-awareness. Engaging in active listening exercises strengthens social awareness, allowing empathy to flourish. Lastly, role-playing conflict scenarios can refine relationship management skills, ensuring clear, constructive communication. Embracing EI not only steadies the ship but sets a course for thriving leadership.

One of the best ways to develop self awareness is to pause and name the emotion that comes up when we feel uneasy and disturbed. There are 34,000 emotions one can feel but we usually can classify them into 8 primary ones. (Source: Plutchick believed that humans can experience over 34,000 unique emotions but, ordinarily, they experience eight primary emotions. These primary emotions include anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, trust, and anticipation) And next best thing to do is to tap through what’s showing up (refer to Emotional Freedom Technique Tapping) to move the emotion (energy in motion) that’s stuck in the body so it can be released. Powerful tool to release stored emotions.

To enhance self-awareness, practice regular self-reflection, actively seek feedback from others, and explore your strengths and weaknesses. Introspective exercises can deepen your understanding of emotions and behaviors. Embrace self-honesty and stay open to personal growth, gradually refining your understanding of your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

People who feel good about themselves perform better. Be aware of the stories you tell yourself. Are you your friend or an enemy? An easy and useful way to improve self talk is : - Recognise what your inner-voice is saying. Listen to what it is saying. - Acknowledge what it is saying. This means you must step back from it. - Change and Challenge: What would be a more positive dialogue to have with yourself? What can you replace it with?

Learn to identify and read facial micro-expressions to dramatically enhance your ability to read others. Paul Ekman's research is a great place to start - learn about the patterns he has found across cultures in reading facial expressions to accurately identify the seven universal emotions of anger, contempt, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness and surprise. Once you can spot these in others, you can read the tone of their emotions as they are speaking with you to gain much more insight into how they are feeling, rather than just the words they use. This is a learnable skill and essential for Leaders to cultivate.

Make your emotions tangible. Ask colleagues to share one word that describes themselves personally and professionally in meetings. You can also quantify by asking how they are feeling on a scale of 1-5 with 1-2 being unfavorable and 4-5 being favorable. Explore these as icebreakers, connections, and emotional development opportunities.

Begin with listening - truly, deeply listening - as Stephen Covey put it, "Seek first to understand". Read all of the information coming to you in a given interaction - words, tone, body language and micro facial expressions - and start to establish a baseline observation of how this person looks and sounds when they are relaxed, stressed, excited, happy, worried and so on. By more deeply understanding your team and colleagues and their "usual" ways of being, you can calibrate far more effectively moment to moment, picking up on subtle cues and reading their mood and energy far more effectively. From here, deeper and more profound communication and relationships easily flow.

To develop emotional intelligence and resilience, practice self-awareness by identifying and managing emotions. Cultivate empathy by understanding others' perspectives and emotions. Improve communication skills to navigate challenging situations effectively. Seek feedback and reflect on experiences to continuously learn and grow emotionally.