Self Care

How I Learned Emotional Intelligence

For those who are reading this and are not familiar with emotional intelligence, it’s used in corporate or professional settings often. Paraphrasing, it means having the ability to control yourself; your emotional responses to conditions, people, and situations. It also goes a little further in some ways by managing other people’s responses to you. It’s like an IQ for your emotions. That’s actually a thing.

We all have a pretty good idea of whether or not we have emotional control over ourselves. This was something I had to learn about and how to do. Honestly, I’m still working on it. I’m not easily triggered, unless by something I find insanely funny, there’s no filter; but I digress. I keep my tender emotions private unless you’re family or my best-good-close friend, so people won’t usually see my reactions to things or people on first experience. Usually.

There is one area of my life where I really had to learn emotional intelligence and that place is where I work. Maan! Did I have to learn it. My issue was, not that I flew off the handle or had a bad attitude, or anything like that. I had to learn to be more expressive, more vocal, more interactive with people, more visible. I was so emotionally contained at work that my co-workers wanted to have the “tea” on me. They wanted to know who I was on a personal level. I feel that a few of them intentionally pushed some buttons just to see how I would react. I gave them little to nothing. Which maybe frustrated them to no end and made my colleagues more determined to see me lose it. It seemed that way to me.

Well, one day, it happened. I had a meeting with my manager and she was telling me about how she felt about my lackluster participation in a meeting. I had inadvertently offended her. That was never my intention. I didn’t even think about how my posture would be perceived. Anyway, we were talking and the next thing I know I’m apologizing and I’m getting choked up because her feelings were hurt and she felt disrespected. I shed tears. I was mortified. Not only because of the showing of strong emotion, but because someone I liked was upset. I felt like I was being unprofessional, so I sucked up real quick and continued on with my explanation. She never had that problem again and I never shed tears in front of anyone at work, no matter how I felt in the moment.

After that incident, I resolved to find a balance that would allow people to get to know me without me sharing anything privately personal. Some things are simply nobody’s business. My philosophy has always been work is work and that’s all they get from me. That has relaxed with certain individuals, but not with everyone. So establishing some emotional intelligence became a priority for me, especially in the workplace because if I could do it there, I could do everywhere else in my life. Balance.

Here are some of the things I gradually started to do:

• When someone asks me how I am in the morning, tell them. I usually just say, “I’m well” and keep it moving. Now, I give a little more about how the morning is going. I tell a Kaiser story, or talk about their morning. How about this North Texas weather, that’s always a good one to get people going.
• Instead of sitting at my desk all day, I made an effort to visit with my co-workers at their desks and visit. I want to show an interest in how they are doing or what they’re working on. It’s not that I ignored them before, I just kept to myself more. People really need someone to talk to sometimes. It made me feel good that they wanted to talk to me.
• I began to participate in the project meetings more by offering my opinion or asking questions. Even if I already knew the answer, I wanted to speak out loud. It’s nerve wrecking to have everyone’s attention on me, but that’s how I had to start engaging.
• I sought out different members on the project teams I worked with to be more visible and to start establishing real relationships with them outside of the project.

These were just my start. I had to learn to give more. I am a brilliant, intelligent, humorous, and witty woman. I’m magical, lol. Why shouldn’t I share some of that, right? The most important aspect of developing emotional intelligence for me is how it helps to change my feelings and thoughts about people generally. I’ve realized that by making these small internal changes, I give relationships a solid chance to grow into something substantial. Am I hanging out with people outside work hours? Not yet, but I have opened up more, and the rewards are more successes in my work.

So, what are some ways you think you can become emotionally intelligent? Do you think that you need to be? Are you humble enough to admit that maybe it could be something you could start working on improving about yourself? Comment and let me know what your experiences and thoughts are or have been.