Nowadays I often hear people referring to "emotional awareness". What does it mean and how can it help me to be more successful in business?
Well, I assume you have heard about IQ - the Intelligence Quotient. It is a measure of your intellectual potential. IQ or intelligence is an important consideration for certain types of jobs but it does not necessarily predict success in business and personal life.
Psychologists agree that IQ contributes only about 20 percent of the factors that determine success. 80 percent of the success factors are determined by other considerations, such as emotional awareness (or E.I.). Emotional awareness is about being able to:
Identify emotions as clearly as possible and to understand how they manifest in your own behavior and that of others.
Manage your own emotional response in your interaction with others.
Act responsively and intelligently when dealing with other’s emotions.
Can you give me some guidelines that will enable me to be more emotionally aware in my dealings with others?
Let us start by identifying the different emotions that people can experience. Daniel Goleman distinguishes eight primary emotions and the following diagram indicates the different forms in which they can manifest in behavior and interaction with others.
According to Goleman, to trust is, in essence, to love and I thought love has no place in business!
The eight primary human emotions according to Goleman
