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The Quick Guide to Improving Your Emotional Intelligence

November 11, 2014August 16, 2017 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Emotional Intelligence ➳ a phrase that’s become one of the latest business buzzwords. Articles and books are popping up about the importance of emotional intelligence and how it may rival your on the job knowledge. Here are three ways to enhance emotional intelligence in the workplace:

Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence with Awareness

First, it’s important to be aware of your own emotions. You must become more self-aware and know how you’re feeling, how to recognize those feelings and how to find a way to appropriately deal with them in the workplace. Not recognizing your feelings and/or repressing them in your day-to-day nine to five can be detrimental to your emotional intelligence and thus make you less focused on the work.

Improve Emotional Intelligence by Asking the Right Questions

Secondly, you must learn to ask the appropriate questions to gauge how others are feeling. Learn how to read the people you work with daily first. Then, learn how to read others that you may do business with less frequently. It’s also important, in today’s working world, to recognize tonal cues that a person may give as much business today is done remotely.

Leverage Empathy & Motivation for Greater Emotional Intelligence

Finally, you must use your heightened emotional intelligence to react to others through both empathy and motivation when appropriate. A nod or conversation that says you understand will be just as helpful as a pick-me-up when used in the right situations. If we all heightened our emotional intelligence levels in the workplace, we could go a long way to improving our businesses from the inside out.

We found another helpful post from the folks at Advanced Systems Inc, with more information on how EQ can improve your business –> Emotional intelligence and the Future of Work.

How is your organization incorporating EQ? We’d love to hear. If we can help you and your team improve relationships, work performance, and hone your emotional intelligence to achieve greater levels of personal and professional success, please contact us.

Three Components of Emotional Intelligence

November 5, 2014December 1, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

For a long time, intelligence was divided into “book learning” and “street smarts.” People now come realize the importance of emotional intelligence. A person with emotional intelligence produces better work, knows how to relieve stress, manages emotions well, and forges stronger relationships. They also get along better with people and can work well as team members and leaders alternately. Whether your particular brand of intelligence involves book learning or street smarts, you can still develop emotional intelligence and become successful in your field.

See the Glass as Half Full. A key component of emotional intelligence on which everything else depends. How do you develop the talent of seeing the positive side? One excellent way is by watching what you say. If you find that you are a critical person who tends to see the glass as half empty, make an effort to see things the other way while you’re talking to people. Instead of saying, “Bill never finishes anything on time,” you might say, “Bill is a very detail-oriented person who takes his time doing things. However, he does them well.”
Make Yourself Happy. Oftentimes people focus on keeping others happy. You may spend a lot of time doing the things others want you to do. As you go through your day, you need to ask yourself if the things you’re doing are making you happy. In the eastern traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, this is called mindfulness. In truth, it’s using self-awareness. Ask yourself how you feel and use your feelings as a map.
Stay Healthy. As any psychologist will tell you, physical health is an important constituent of mental health. If your body is unhealthy, your mind is also going to be unhealthy. Your very first priority in life should be your physical health. Make an effort to eat healthy and exercise every day. Keep in mind that you don’t have to push yourself more than absolutely necessary. If you’d rather take a brisk walk than do weights, then by all means, take a brisk walk.
Surround Yourself with Positivity. You can literally surround yourself with positivity by changing your surroundings. Paint your walls a cheery color. Hang paintings or posters that you like. Buy books that appeal to you. Listen to music that recharges your batteries. Make friends who are also positive so that you can learn from their example. Work in a place that you find encourages positivity. Honing your social awareness will enable you interact well in groups by recognizing dynamics and picking up on social cues.

Where are areas you want to improve your emotional intelligence?

4 Skills An Effective Business Leader Must Possess

October 21, 2014October 21, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Though there are many skills an effective leader possesses, we will discuss four that our particularly useful in the workplace.

The Power of No

The ability to say “no” is crucial in both managing a team and managing expectations of clients or other leaders. It is a powerful tool against inferior work as well as unrealistic timelines. By saying “No” it opens up the ability to say “Yes” to the things that you want and are beneficial to the organization.

Delegation

The sensibility to delegate is important for a leader in order to keep from being overwhelmed by smaller tasks which would them unable to focus on the bigger picture. While a manager must be aware of daily processes, there is no rule that says they must do these tasks. Delegating also helps train the next set of employees to become leaders. It allows a leader to optimize their productivity and concentrate on the small set of actions that will have enormous results.

Adaptability

A business leader must be adaptable in order to deal with ever-changing team dynamics and business requests to get work delivered efficiently and effectively. Today’s workplace is a non-stop, demanding place to function in and to thrive in such a space, leaders must be able to change with whatever the team, the weather, the clients or the internet throws at them.

Communication

Lastly, strong communication skills—both speaking/writing and listening—are a skill that leaders of all levels must not only posses, but also constantly improve upon, to guarantee that their teams, clients and partners feel respected, “looped in” and heard. Clear communication is the basis for trust in the workplace and an open dialogue between all parties fosters a sense of community.

By adhering and growing their skills in these foundational principles, you can cultivate your business leadership acumen and be a guiding light for your organization.

Please contact us to learn more about leadership and its impact on your business operations.

Hungry for High Potential? Feed Your Body and Your Mind

October 3, 2014October 3, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Are you familiar with the term “high potential”? It’s possible people told you that you had high potential. Maybe you heard it with reference to a product, service or idea that was new to the market. Either way, there’s something exciting about this phrase which allows you to imagine a great future. A seed has high potential because although it’s tiny, it can grow into a full-fledged tree. First, many conditions have to be fulfilled. A seed needs to be watered regularly. It needs sunlight. And it needs soil of a good quality in order to grow. How can you realize your high potential?

Feeding Your Mind

The most important thing to help you achieve your high potential is feeding your mind. Many people place a lot of emphasis on education and learning. These are good examples of feeding the mind because you’re exposing it to new things, which people in general consider valuable and useful. Does this mean that reading a romance novel doesn’t feed the mind? Not necessarily. If you plan to write a romance novel or become a genre novelist in general, then reading romance novels also feeds your mind. The idea is to keep exposing yourself to new influences and to ask yourself whether they’re helping you grow.

Feeding Your Body

Some people focus more on feeding the mind while others are into feeding the body. For a balanced perspective, it’s important to have both, something which even Aristotle pointed out in his Nichomachean Ethics. If your body is diseased, in pain or addicted to unhealthy substances, you’re not going to be able to think clearly. You’re not going to have new ideas. And you’re not going to fulfill your high potential. Conversely, if your body is in good shape you’ll be able to think well and put your ideas into action without fatigue, pain or disease getting in the way.

Being Creative

Did you know creativity has a direct effect on your potential? Be intentional on time allotted for regular creativity. Some people prefer to lie fallow for a while, gather up their energy and finally be creative in a big way. For others, it’s better to be a little bit creative, take a short break and then go back to drawing board. You know which method works best for you. The idea behind creativity is to make efforts to consciously increase your exposure to the world.

Five Tips to Take Your Productivity to the Next Level

October 3, 2014October 1, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

In life, you want every advantage you can get. One of those advantages comes from your personal level of productivity. These five tips will help you discover a new, higher level of productivity based on your values.

Always add value. Deciding what to do each day can be difficult, doubly so when there are more things to do. Start each day by thinking about which of your tasks adds value to your life and goals. If there is something on the list that doesn’t, cross it off and forget it.
Save your energy. Too often do people put too many tasks on their lists. Save your energy by putting only 3 to 5 things on your list and concentrating on getting those done. Concentrating on fewer tasks actually gives you the energy to see them through to the end.
Do one more task for you. Who said life has to be all about work? After you get your few tasks done, add one more for yourself that aligns with your interests. If you’re doing it right, your interests will overlap your values and it won’t feel like work anyway.
Have a system. According to Natasha Vorompiova, a professional systematizer for corporates and individuals, creating a system for everything can make the difference between running in place and always moving forward. The reason why it works is because you can fall back on the system you’ve created when something inevitably comes up unexpectedly.
Embrace technology when needed. In today’s world technology is front, center, and often on the peripherals of everything we do. Why not make it easier on yourself by using technology which syncs your tasks from one platform to another? Startup entrepreneurs at Insanitek Research and Development highly recommend Zapier for it’s ability to cut across platforms to sync tasks no matter what you are doing.

Productivity should not be a word that saps your energy and creativity. It should be a word that makes you excited to get up in the morning to see what you can do. We can help you with that ➳ contact us. We’re listening!