How Has Learning and Teaching Emotional Intelligence Influenced My Life? | Tips Tuesday for Leaders feat. Nancy McLeod

Nancy McLeod is back! This week, she’s delving in to how Emotional Intelligence has had an impact on her.

There are 3 highly effective EI strategies laid out in here. Have you used any of these 3 before? If so, how did it go?

How Has Learning and Teaching Emotional Intelligence Influenced My Life? | Video Transcript

Nancy McLeod: Emotional Intelligence has had an impact on me personally is that it’s really helped me realize that my emotions — my actual feelings — and how I respond to them have a huge impact on other people. So, if I can become more self-aware, pay attention to my emotions, and then allow myself to regulate them so that I am actually in control of them, then I’m going to get along with other people and other people are going to respond to me so much better. 

One of the things we think about with Emotional Intelligence is empathy. And while empathy isn’t everything in Emotional Intelligence, it is an important piece. If I can imagine what it’s like to be in somebody else’s shoes then I’m going to reflect and I’m not just going to go off and respond from however I’m feeling. I’m going to be able to sit back. For instance, if I ask somebody to stay and work late at night and I notice that they have a bit of a reaction to that, instead of just lowering the boom and saying, “Well, we all have to work hard. Suck it up, Buttercup!”, I can say, “Yeah, I really get it. It’s a real drag to have to work late, and there are probably many other things that you would much rather be doing. But if we can dig in and work together, then maybe we can take a break next week and we can all go home early.” So that sort of thing where we can actually understand what’s going on for other people — an Emotional Intelligence helps us do that — and we can learn about Emotional Intelligence and all of the different strategies to become more empathic, aware of our emotions and to regulate our emotions. There are specific strategies that we teach in EI that anybody can learn if they’re willing. 

Now I would like to talk about a couple of strategies that — until I got more involved in Emotional Intelligence — I hadn’t quite figured out. I hadn’t really learned. One of them is something that we hear more about these days, and that’s breathing. There are lots of courses and lots of research and lots of times where we say, you know, just take a breath, but it’s actually a little bit more complicated than that. The reason I love to focus on breathing is that it’s something we are all doing automatically, anyway! It’s available to us. But what happens is, under stress, I tend to breathe a little bit more in my chest which isn’t going to get as much oxygen to the brain and it’s not going to actually help me relax. However, breathing is a technique that is readily available ’cause we’re all doing it anyway, it’s super convenient (we can do it anywhere) and…it’s free! So, when I talk about breathing, Karin, what I’m talking about is that deep diaphragmatic breathing (belly breathing) because under stress, our breathing becomes more shallow and our sympathetic nervous system — that part of us that, you know, the fight or flight mechanism — gets triggered. But the wonderful thing about deep breathing is that when we take a breath from our diaphragm, we are actually inviting the parasympathetic system to become involved, so it’s the easiest way to instantly invite relaxation. One of the things I’ve found is that if I’m in the middle of a busy work day and I start to feel stressed, I can remind myself to take a moment and to take a really deep breath from my belly…and it works! It works instantly. So I really like that. 

Another thing that we hear a lot about in our environment and our world these days is we hear about gratitude. We actually know because research tells us that the happiest people are people who have a daily practice of gratitude. We’ve sometimes tended to think it’s the other way around — oh, you know, people are grateful because they’re happy. Wrong! People are actually happy because they take the time to be grateful. There are many ways we can practice gratitude. We can write it down in a journal and that’s fantastic. We can also do it when we’re having a shower, doing the dishes, brushing our teeth — something we have to do anyway that we can kind of do mindlessly so we can bring our focus of attention [on what we’re grateful for]. There’s another one I think that’s really fantastic: being grateful moment to moment, so that in any moment during the day, we can notice something that can actually make us feel more happy, joyful or grateful. It might be when I’m going for a walk and I notice the birds singing, I take time to notice that I’m really lucky that I get to be out in the woods in nature. It can be something like somebody smiles at me unexpectedly, so I can take time to really appreciate and enjoy that. 

I do believe that Emotional Intelligence has so many techniques and strategies like the two that I’ve just described that can make us so much more successful in the workplace. It can make us better people to work with — leaders that people want to spend time with. Emotional Intelligence can also make us happier and more content and less stressed in our daily lives.