Have you ever heard of EI or EQ?

EI = Emotional Intelligence.

EQ - Emotional Quotient.

The term EQ is a bit like IQ, the difference being EQ measures your Emotional Quotient, the measure of how emotionally intelligent one is.

Emotional Intelligence (according to Daniel Goleman - EI guru) consists of:

Self awareness - Awareness of others - Self Management - Relationship Management

To allow oneself to even move through the latter 3 stages, one must master stage 1 - Self Awareness and really get close to the truth of who you are and the impact you have on others.

So, I’m going to give you a gift, here is a nice little N.L.P. model which will allow you to explore yourself further in relation to self awareness. You will need 3 chairs for this exercise - it’s essential to success.

• Firstly, recall a situation where things didn’t go as well as you’d have liked; an interview where you didn’t get the job, an argument with a partner or child, a bad meeting at work??

• Now, sit in chair 1, this is ‘you’ going back to the situation, picture yourself back in the situation, allow yourself to hear the words being spoken. What are your feelings? What are your thoughts?

• Stand up, take a look out of the window or open the door and have a look around.

• Next sit in chair 2, this time you are going to ‘be’ the other person in your recalled situation, get into their mind and when recalling the situation remember you are ‘being’ them, so you see things through their eyes, use words like “I” as if you were them. Ask the following questions. What’s going on here in this situation? What am I seeing/saying? What is the person in chair 1 saying? How am I feeling? What am I thinking?

• Stand up, go and take a look in another room or focus on an object in the room such as an ornament/photo.

• Ok, final stage, sit in chair 3 and this time you are an independent detached observed, take on a view as if you were a passer by noticing this situation and speak from their standpoint. Watch the situation between the person in chair 1 and 2, what’s going on? What’s their body language telling you? What advice would you give to the person in chair 1 and chair 2?

Well done, that part of the activity is now complete.

Next, to get a clear view of yourself, consider what you have just learnt from that exercise, if you were in that situation, what would you stop, start and continue in terms of your behaviour?

By doing this activity you have increased your self awareness and you now have a choice, you can continue as before if it’s getting you the results you’re looking for, or you can choose to change your behaviour if you think it will help you get better results.

This is a flavour of Emotional Intelligence…just type it into any search engine and you can keep yourself entertained for hours, weeks, months or even years learning more on this topic!

One final comment I often get asked on this topic is, what’s the point, I can’t change the other person’s behaviour? Let’s think about that and ask if you change your behaviour, does the other person change theirs? In my experience more often than not…they do.

Thanks for reading my blog, I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learnt something new, wishing you a long and happy life

Zx

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.