Since Daniel Goleman wrote his landmark book on Emotional Intelligence it’s become well known that EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is more important than IQ when it comes to leadership.
IQ – knowledge and intelligence, gets you so far but it’s EQ that makes the difference. After all leadership is about connecting with others and taking them with you, so this makes perfect sense.
A fundamental part of EQ is the ability to be able to understand and manage yourself and it is my personal belief that you cannot learn to lead and manage others until you first learn to lead and manage yourself.
There are many models on Emotional Intelligence and all include self-awareness, self-management, reading others and social skills.
For the purpose of this blog I want to focus on the first two, self-awareness and self-management. You have to connect with and understand yourself before you can do the same with others.
Self-Assessment
To keep this simple I’ve listed my summary of the competencies so that you can do a mini self-assessment. Rate your self out of 10 against how consistently you are able to do these where 1 is low and 10 is high.
Emotional Self-Awareness
You understand, respect and accept yourself both your strengths and limitations and you are able to differentiate your feelings and emotions and know what caused them.
Self-Management
You can express your feelings and beliefs and defend yourself in a positive way. You are self-directed in your thinking and actions. You will listen to others input but will not me dependent on them.
Self-Learning
You recognise your own capacities and strive to make the best of them and do the work you enjoy. You reflect on your experience and acknowledge what has worked.
So how did you do? Did you score a 10 in any? If you did congratulations and I’d love to hear about the approaches you take.
If you scored less than a 10, then like me there is still some work to do, after all leadership is always work in progress.
Moving things forward
Here are some possible activities you can try out:
Emotional Self-Awareness
- Avoid comparing yourself to others.
- Identify all the things you can take pride in.
- Learn the difference between thoughts and feelings (one is in your head the other is in your body).
- Thinks of feelings as messages – ask yourself what the message is and pay attention to it.
Self-Management
- Recognise when unreasonable demands are being made and be say ‘no’ when you have to.
- Identify the thoughts and feelings that stop you from being independent and what you can do to change this.
- Decide which emotions you find hard to express and practice expressing them.
- In a meeting decide in advance what position you are going to take and how you’ll express it.
Self-Learning
- Create a vision for your life.
- Make a list of your short and long term goals.
- Identify what really interests you; find out more about it and how you can build it into your life.
- Identify your strengths and how you can utilise these more.
Self-awareness plus self-management is related to emotional management. These impact on the relationships you have and the results you get.
If you recognise that this is an area of development for you and you’d like some support email me and we can set up a complimentary discovery call and explore in detail the support that would work best for you.
“The first and best victory is to conquer self.”
Plato
