Reasons Why High Emotional Intelligence Benefits Your Career

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Let’s talk about emotional intelligence. But what is it and how can it help you? Simply put, emotional intelligence is an individual's ability to recognise, understand and manage their emotions effectively. When it comes to emotional intelligence, it’s not just about an individual's ability to understand their own feelings but being able to understand and emphasise with the emotions of others. It can be split into 4 key components:

1. Perceiving emotions: The first part of emotional intelligence is an individual's ability to comprehend and identify the emotions of themselves and others. It’s about being aware of their own emotional state, whilst also being able to sense emotional cues such as expressions and verbal communication.

2. Reasoning with emotions: Emotions play a huge role in both our personal and professional lives, which makes it essential that we can reason with them, and incorporate them into our thinking processes as motions can influence things such as critical thinking and decision-making.

3. Understanding emotions: To have good emotional intelligence, you need to be able to understand and comprehend the nature of emotions, including the reasons and patterns. It’s about being able to analyse different emotions and distinguish variations.

4. Managing emotions: The final component of emotional intelligence is being able to manage your own emotions and appropriately respond to the emotions of others. This includes how you adapt to situations, maintain emotional balance and control responses.

Emotional intelligence is key for your professional journey and career success, coming with several benefits to help you go further in your career. In this article, we will be discussing how emotional intelligence can help you in your career and how you can improve your emotional intelligence skills.

The Benefits of Emotional Intelligence

People who possess high levels of emotional intelligence, see incredible results. From improved communication to enhanced empathy, emotional intelligence can help you find success within your career. Listed below are some of the benefits seen by professionals:

1. Emotional Intelligence Improves Relationships

Emotional intelligence plays a critical role in improving relationships, including professional ones. Strong emotional intelligence allows you to understand and emphasise the emotions of others, which will lead to better relationships with your colleagues, managers and clients. This skill is particularly important in roles that require teamwork, collaboration or being client-facing. Here’s how emotional intelligence plays a role in improving your relationships:

• Emotional understanding: High emotional intelligence allows you to understand your own emotions and the emotions of your co-workers. Having this understanding allows you to easily navigate the complexities of relationships by being aware of your emotional responses and the emotions of others.

• Compassion and empathy: A part of emotional intelligence is empathy, which is all about being able to understand the feelings of individuals you connect with. When you’re empathetic, you can connect on a deeper level, showing compassion. This improves relationships by creating a sense of support.

• Effective communication: Relationships are built on effective communication, which is an area where having emotional intelligence can help you. Emotional intelligence allows you to communicate better by preventing misunderstandings, allowing for honest conversations and improving active listening skills.

• Increased intimacy: Unsurprisingly, emotional intelligence can enhance emotional intimacy within relationships. When you’re able to understand others' emotions and needs you’re able to build a deeper sense of connection with your professional relationships.

• Better support: Emotional support is a vital part of building relationships, which can happen easier if you improve your emotional intelligence. When you understand the feelings of others, you can offer better comfort, support and validate them.

2. Emotional Intelligence Enhances Communication

People who possess high emotional intelligence are the most skilled communicators. They know exactly how to express their emotions and thoughts, listen effectively and resolve conflicts with ease. Improving your emotional intelligence improves communication by:

• Self-awareness: Self-awareness is a key part of emotional intelligence and it’s all about the understanding and management of one's emotions. Improved self-awareness, improves communication by allowing you to recognise your own reactions, emotional states and bias, allowing you to express yourself clearly.

• Empathy: As mentioned, emotional intelligence helps improve relationships by allowing others to be more empathetic. Empathy also plays a key role in communication as it allows you to acknowledge others' feelings and respond with sensitivity and compassion, building trust and rapport.

• Nonverbal communication: Emotional intelligence isn’t just about verbal communication and listening skills, but the ability to interpret nonverbal cues such as expressions and tone of voice. This allows for better communication and connections with others.

• Conflict resolution: Emotional intelligence allows you to handle conflicts and disagreements more effectively and constructively. When you can understand your emotions and others, you can engage in more productive dialogue and help defuse tense situations.

• Collaboration and teamwork: As discussed, emotional intelligence helps collaboration and teamwork by improving the communication skills of an individual. Communication is key to teamwork and emotional intelligence can encourage you to consider things such as diverse perspectives and how you communicate your thoughts and ideas respectfully.

3. Emotional Intelligence Helps The Decision-Making Process

Emotional intelligence allows you to make better decisions. It helps you consider both logical reasoning and emotional factors, which is essential in a professional setting. Emotional intelligence allows individuals to make well-informed decisions, considering the impact it can have on themselves and those involved, here’s how:

• Emotional strength recognition: If you have strong emotional intelligence you can recognise your own emotional strengths and understand how your emotions can have an impact during the decision-making process. It allows you to use your emotions effectively, which will help guide you towards decisions that align with your own values and aspirations.

• Understanding motivations: Not only does emotional intelligence allow you to be more empathetic, but it also allows you to understand the motivations of others. This is essential in decision-making, as it means you consider the perspectives and needs of others, allowing for more inclusive and collaborative decisions.

• Environmental awareness: A crucial part of decision-making, is being able to recognise the influence the environment has on the final outcome. Emotional intelligence creates awareness, helping you understand how things such as the organisational culture and societal norms can influence your decisions.

• A balanced approach: Decision-making needs to be done using a balanced approach and emotional intelligence can help achieve this, helping you find a balance between logic and emotions during the deacon-making process.

• Improved relationships: We know that emotional intelligence helps build better relationships, which can have a positive influence on decision-making. Strong relationships allow for feedback and perspectives, providing the opportunity for you to make more informed decisions.

4. Emotional Intelligence Improves Leadership Ability

If you want to become a more effective leader, then you need to improve your emotional intelligence. This is how emotional intelligence can enhance your leadership skills which is essential for career success:

• Self-awareness: The most effective leaders are the ones who possess self-awareness. If you are in tune with their emotions, you can manage your behaviour, make better deacons and respond effectively to challenging situations.

• Self-management: Emotional intelligence allows leaders to manage their own emotions, which is essential for self-management. Leaders with self-management skills can demonstrate resilience and remain calm and composed, an essential skill that leaders need to possess.

• Social awareness: Social awareness is improved with emotional intelligence as if you can empathise with the feelings and thoughts of others. If you're a leader who possesses social awareness, you can create a more inclusive and supportive work environment.

• Decision-making: Leaders need to make good decisions if they want to manage their teams effectively and as mentioned, emotional intelligence leads to better decision-making. Leaders who can consider both logical and emotional factors can truly understand the impact their decision can have on their team, leading to a more balanced decision-making approach.

• Team-building: The role of a good leader is to build great teams. As a leader, if you possess high emotional intelligence, you can create a supportive and inclusive environment. This is critical for fostering trust and collaboration, leading to better teams with higher productivity.

How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence Skills

Now that you know the impressive benefits of having emotional intelligence skills, you’re probably wondering how you can improve your own. Here are 7 steps you can take, to improve your emotional intelligence:

• Pay attention to empathy and social awareness: If you want to improve your emotional intelligence skills then you need to pay attention to the emotions and needs of others. Make sure to practise listening, social awareness and empathy to build better relationships and connections with the people around you.

• Take responsibility: If you want to improve your emotional intelligence, then you need to make sure that you take responsibility for your actions. For example, if you hurt someone's feelings, don’t ignore them but instead, apologise directly.

• Be more self-aware: Be self-aware and take the time to become conscious of your own emotions and responses to those around you. Knowing your emotions and the things that trigger you can help you express and process your feelings more successfully.

• Seek feedback: Ask for feedback from those around you, whether it’s your family members or your managers, you can gain constructive feedback from those who know you best. They can provide you insight into your behaviours and identify blind spots for improvement.

• Self-management: Learn how to regulate, monitor and control your emotions in more optimistic ways. Things such as better managing your stress or working on your impulse control are all great ways to improve your emotional intelligence, helping you develop better strategies to overcome challenging situations.

• Find a mentor: Mentors are there to give you advice and guidance in your professional career, another thing they can help with is improving your emotional intelligence. Mentors can share their best tips and guidance to help you improve, and also provide you with the feedback you need to advance.

• Continuous learning and development: To constantly improve your emotional intelligence, then you need to make it a lifelong journey. You need to commit to ongoing learning, growth and development by seeking out things such as books, resources and courses that focus on helping you gain a better understanding of emotional intelligence and help you develop the skills you need.

Conclusion

In conclusion, emotional intelligence is something we all should work on continuously. It’s a key component in ensuring professional development and career success. From helping you build better relationships to improving your communication skills, developing your emotional intelligence can have a significant impact on your career.