If you’re reading this and you know me, you will also know my fascination and advocacy for the continuous work on our Emotional Intelligence (EI). I believe EI can have a positive impact in all areas of our lives; from being the highest performing and top-of-the-game virtual assistant for my clients, improving relationships with my friends and family and most importantly, the relationship with myself.

So What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is the skill of being able to understand your own emotions whilst simultaneously understand and be aware of the emotions from those around you.

5 Elements of Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman’s theory of EI splits the core components into five key areas:

1) Self Awareness

To be self aware is the most important component, self-awareness is the ability to tap into one’s own emotional state. Being aware of your emotional state means you are able to know what you need day-to-day in order to take of yourself and also be the best possible version of yourself for a colleague, friend, even partner to those who are in your daily circle of connections.

2) Self-Regulation

To self-regulate is to have the capability to control one’s emotional impulses. Perhaps you recieve a blunt email from a colleague at work, or a stressful phonecall from a family member, being able to control your response to that situation is a real skill. Keep reading to find a practical task to improve your self-regulatrion.

3)Empathy

To be empathetic, is to understand and relate to the emotions of others. It may be that you’re having the worlds best Monday, yet for someone else, their Monday hasn’t gotten off to a great start. Having empathy allows you to support their needs during a challenging time.

4) Motivation

To have purpose and reason behind working on your emotional intelligence, is to have motivation. For me as Virtual Assistant, the motivation for my EI is to give my clients the best tech, admin, marketing and lead generation support possible.

5) Social Skills

Social skills are the ability to connect, communicate and interact with other people with ease and confidence. It is a vital component for working in a team. Even if you’re a solo entrepreneur, you will always find yourself needing to use other people for their expertise. Connection with others is inevitable which makes this skill crucial.

Everyone can work on their emotional intelligence as it’s a skill. If’ you’d like to learn how click here.

Closing notes: 

I find Emotional Intelligence truly fascinating, and being a Virtual Assistant has meant that I have had to use and work on all 5 components. And just like the work for my clients keeps on evolving and growing, so will my journey with Emotional Intelligence, I hope this inspires yours as well.

Oliver

P.S  After reading this, perhaps you’ve realised that to improve your Emotional intelligence is to create more time to work on the areas of your business that you really care about. This is where I come in. As a Virtual Assistant my role is to reduce the time you spend on business aspects that take-away from the core purpose of your company. Please contact me at oliver@olivera28.sg-host.com to find out how I can help you.