This is Part Six in our series on Emotional Intelligence.
Part 1 – Why it is Essential to Develop Emotional Intelligence
Part 2 – Self-Awareness: The Foundation of Emotional Intelligence
Part 3 – Managing Emotions for Success
Part 4 – 3 Keys to Social Awareness
Part 5 – Relationship Management

Like it or not, stress is part of our lives. We work in a world where people feel overwhelmed by long hours, struggle to keep up with the pace of change, and cope with the constant threat of down-sizing. Most people I talk with say they feel pressure to perform at higher and higher levels. Anyone hoping for a magic formula for getting rid of stress will be disappointed because there isn’t one.

There are, however, proven strategies that you can use to manage your stress and keep your performance consistently high even in the most challenging circumstances. Developing resilience is a significant part of our course, Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence. Four key things to know about stress to help you build resilience are below. Each one of them will help you manage stress and bounce back faster to keep your performance high.

1. Know your optimal level

We tend to perceive stress as negative, but that isn’t always the case. At the right level, stress can work for us as a catalyst for high performance. The impact of stress on a person’s performance can be illustrated by a bell curve. The levels of stress on the left side of the highest point provide us with energy and focus that help us perform. Low levels of stress can lead to complacency or low performance. The highest point on the graph is our optimal level of stress. This is the level where you perform at your best. You’re energized and “in the zone”. We’ve all been there. The levels of stress to the right of that optimal level begin to hurt performance again. It is at these levels that we start to make mistakes, forget things, struggle to express ourselves effectively, etc. Chronic stress at these levels can seriously impact health over time. That’s why it is important to know your optimal level. When you can plot your stress level on this curve at different times of the day, you can manage it more effectively. There are times you may need to increase the positive stress and times you’ll need to decrease the negative stress to get to that optimal level. The only way to do that is to know your optimal level.

2. Know your signs

We all experience the effects of stress differently. Some people get headaches, some people can’t sleep, and others get snippy with co-workers. Although many people think they know when they’re experiencing stress, a study by Bradberry and Greeves found that only 36 percent of people tested were able to accurately identify their emotions as they experienced them. Thinking through your physical, emotional, and psychological signs will help you identify and then manage your stress more effectively. Know your signs of stress.

3. Know your plan

You can’t passively manage your stress. It’s important to have a clear plan and make a conscious effort to execute that plan. Emotionally intelligent people have a plan for managing stress in the moment, during short breaks, after work, on weekends, and annually. Breathing, exercises, meditation, vacations, and a 5- minute walk, are all examples of strategies you can add to your plan. If you don’t plan to manage your stress, it will manage you. People with clear simple strategies to manage stress are able to implement those plans quickly and bounce back from setbacks faster than those who don’t plan. Make sure you know your plan.

4. Know you can bounce back

Optimistic people believe that they will find a way out of even the most difficult circumstances. They understand that setbacks are temporary and believe their actions will impact the future. They develop effective coping strategies and supportive personal and professional networks both inside and outside of work, which helps protect them from the negative impact of stress. The good news is that optimism can be learned. The sooner you make a conscious effort to find the good in circumstances or take steps to move through a negative situation into a more positive situation, you’ll find your stress decreasing as you begin to bounce back. It is important to know that you can bounce back.

For better or worse, stress is part of our lives every day. We have more control over it than most people think. Knowing your optimal level, your plan, your symptoms, and that you can bounce back are a great start to managing it and developing the resilience you need to get through any circumstance.

If you would like more in-depth information and practice developing emotional intelligence, contact Dr. Heather Johnson about bringing a course in-house to your team.

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

This is Part Five of Six in our series on Emotional Intelligence.
Part 1 – Why it is Essential to Develop Emotional Intelligence
Part 2 – Self-Awareness: The Foundation of Emotional Intelligence
Part 3 – Managing Emotions for Success
Part 4 – 3 Keys to Social Awareness

There are few things that give leaders a better return on their investment than building and nurturing relationships. Relationship management is the 4th characteristic of emotional intelligence in this series.

Leaders need to build relationships within their team, with their direct reports, across teams, and with stakeholders in order to maximize their effectiveness and efficiency. These relationships don’t just happen; they require insight and effort to be mutually beneficial. Emotionally intelligent leaders understand this and prioritize building relationships because they know these relationships are essential to:

• Influencing effectively
• Driving change
• Managing conflict
• Navigating organizational politics
• Collaborating
• Building and nurturing a professional network
• Assembling the best people for projects

Emotions play a role in every interaction you have whether you are aware of them or not. Leaders who identify emotions during an interaction, understand their impact, and respond effectively, work well with and through others to achieve results. This takes a conscious effort and the integration of the three characteristics we addressed in past articles: self-awareness, self-management, and social-awareness.

One very important concept of relationship management is emotional contagion. This is the phenomenon of emotions spreading from one person to another, often without any awareness that it is taking place. Emotionally intelligent leaders know when they are catching emotions from others and consciously choose which emotions others catch from them.

• A leader can use emotional contagion to energize a complacent team and get them moving in the right direction.
• A leader who does not allow the melancholic team member bring him down is actively avoiding catching a negative emotion.

Influencing another person’s emotional state for better or worse is perfectly natural; we do it constantly and automatically. Although we are often unaware it is happening, it significantly impacts our relationships.

The question is, “What emotional impact do you have on others?” When you ask someone for help, do they feel delighted to help or pressured to help? When you assemble a small group to collaborate are people more likely to be enthusiastic or apprehensive?

Keep the words of Maya Angelou in mind…

People will forget what you said; People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou.

We know that people perform better in a positive, high-energy environment, than in a negatively charged environment. You can positively impact the emotional climate of your organization by consistently applying the three principles below:

1. It is the leader’s responsibility to influence the emotional climate of the organization.

The leader has the greatest impact on the emotional climate of the organization and needs to own this responsibility. People watch leaders constantly and look for clues for how to respond to different situations. Even a small change in the facial expression or tone of voice can trigger emotional contagion and send positive or negative emotions quickly through a team.

A leader who is able to project a calm demeanor in the midst of a crisis is likely to have a team that feels safe and continues to perform. On the other hand, anxiety projected by a leader quickly spreads from one person to the next resulting in a variety of negative outcomes.

What kind of emotions are you spreading through your organization?

2. You have to express the emotion if you want others to catch it

I have worked with leaders who said they are passionate or excited; they just don’t express it. That really isn’t very helpful in the context of using emotional contagion to create a positive, high-energy work place. If a leader is passionate about an idea, but doesn’t express passion as he shares the idea, it is unlikely that listeners will become passionate and buy into it.

We don’t typically express our emotions verbally. We express them through our body language and our tone. Saying you are excited in a flat voice will come off as flat and not energize anyone around the idea. If you want to convey excitement, it is important to look and sound excited. This doesn’t mean jumping up and down, but it is important to have some energy in your voice as well as your face and body.

Are you expressive enough to transfer emotions to others?

3. Expression of positive emotions is powerful

We know that a person’s emotions or mood impacts their productivity. People in good moods are significantly better at solving challenging problems that require insight than people in bad moods. Given that and the fact that the biggest influence on the emotional tone of an organization is the leader, it makes sense for the leader to make a concerted effort to create a positive culture.

Positive emotions originating from the leader bounce around the team and create a positive energy in the workplace. When the leader is able to channel that energy into achieving goals, problem solving, and innovation, everyone benefits. A positive organization is easier to lead and promotes a more open exchange of ideas.

As a leader, some of the positive emotions it is important to put out there are:

• Gratitude
  People get energized when they feel appreciated and are more likely to repeat the behavior that elicited the gratitude. A leader who neglects to express gratitude will see a decline in discretionary effort from the team.
• Pride
  The pride we feel in our work directly impacts our results. It is important that everyone from customer service rep, to sales rep, to regional president has a strong sense of pride in what they do. Because leaders set the emotional tone, the pride starts with you.
• Passion
  If you are passionate about what you are trying to accomplish, those around you are more likely to get energized and excited and that spills over to the customers.
• Optimism
  Optimism impacts much of what we do including how we respond to setbacks. Again, as the leader, it is important to model optimism. Setbacks are part of life. You can help your people become more resilient by focusing on what can be done to bounce back rather than how awful the setback is. Doing so not only gets people back on track, it raises the positive energy of the team.

Keep in mind that when it comes to expressing positive emotions, they must be genuine to be transferred. Expressing insincere positive emotions can do more harm than good because people see right through it and it has a negative impact.

How often do you intentionally express genuine positive emotions?

Understanding how emotions spread from person to person is one important component of relationship management. Emotionally intelligent leaders not only understand emotional contagion, but they intentionally use it to create a positive culture and spread the most beneficial emotion for what needs to be accomplished in specific situations. Emotional contagion is just one part of relationship management, but it is a very important part.

If you would like more in-depth information and practice developing emotional intelligence, contact Dr. Heather Johnson about bringing a course in-house to your team.

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

This is Part Four of Six in our series on Emotional Intelligence.

Consider the following questions:

Affirmative answers to these scenarios reflects potential lack of social awareness, the third characteristic of emotional intelligence in this series of articles.

Individuals with well-developed social awareness accurately read others and pay careful attention to how their own communication impacts the feelings, perceptions, and behaviors of other people.

People with fine-tuned social awareness notice things that others don’t. They can walk into a room and feel tension or pick up on subtle changes in how others feel as they talk with them. They are also very good at understanding another’s perspective even when it is very different from their own.

Well-developed social awareness helps leaders communicate more effectively, build trusting relationships, and collaborate more fluidly with diverse teams. Social awareness comes more naturally for some than others, but everyone can develop it by applying the three exercises below and practicing them consistently.

1. Empathy: the foundation of social awareness

Empathy gives us insights into what others may be feeling or thinking, helps us build trust, helps us understand why people react the way they do, and influences our decisions.

Empathy involves listening with the goal being to clearly understand someone, not necessarily agree with that person. During our Maximum Influence course, we teach 5 approaches to listening. Of the 5 approaches, evaluative listening is the most likely approach to undermine empathy. The primary purpose of evaluative listening is to judge what is heard. Empathy requires that you suspend judgment as you listen and simply try to understand the other person. If you’re not careful, your evaluative listening will inhibit your ability to empathize.

After attending Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence, Tim chose to focus on developing his social awareness. One opportunity he saw to practice empathy was during a national sales meeting. He spoke with a leader from a different part of the company who had been driving an initiative that wasn’t going over well, and that Tim didn’t buy into. As Tim spoke with this leader, he prioritized listening without judgment over addressing his own agenda. He said the impact was immediate and significant. He not only understood this initiative for the first time, he saw an opportunity to help get others in his region on board. Tim’s focus on empathy was the catalyst for what will likely be a mutually beneficial partnership across two teams that would not have happened if Tim had gone to that meeting pushing his agenda instead of understanding others.

There are countless opportunities throughout the day to empathize that will help you be more effective and help save you time, whether you are negotiating, engaged in a high-stakes conversation, meeting new team members, or delivering a difficult message.

In addition to listening without judgment, asking questions is another powerful and effective tool you have to understand others.

• “I’ve never tried that approach. Can you walk me through how it worked for you?”
• “What is your greatest concern with this approach?”
• “Can you help me understand what your team needs to do to make this happen so we can find the best way for our teams to work together?”

The more you ask questions with the goal of gaining a clear understanding, the more open others will be and the faster you will build trust and get things done.

2. Become fluent in body language

The vast majority of communication is conveyed through body language and tone. People rarely tell us how they really feel, especially in a business setting, so we may miss that they are overwhelmed, skeptical, disinterested, etc. unless we listen beyond their words. What tone of voice are they using? What is the person’s facial expressions and body language telling you? In order to increase social awareness and pick up on this information, it is important to become fluent in body language.

• If you’ve talked with someone who tells you they understood what you said, but they look confused, do you take their words at face value? Or do you use their facial expression as a cue that more communication is needed?
• If your team looks bored in your meetings, do you press on and assume they are really attentive? Their boredom may indicate that it is time to change your approach.
• If one person on your team looks excited about a change, do you leverage that nonverbal excitement to help get others on board?

Keep in mind that when it comes to understanding others, especially how they feel, it is important to pay attention to their nonverbal communication in addition to what they say.

3. Remember that social awareness includes both your interpersonal and online presence

Leaders are always being watched interpersonally and online. Are you aware of the emotional impact you have on others? Do you intimidate them? Do they feel valued? Do they perceive you as a leader with high integrity that they want to perform at their best for?

• One regional manager I worked with had no idea that the way he carried himself, looked at people, and sounded came off as intimidating. The impact was that his team was very reluctant to come to him with questions, problems, and even ideas. Your overall effectiveness is impacted by how others perceive you and feel about you. Are you aware of the impact you have?

Our online impact has become just as important as our interpersonal impact. I recently read a post by someone on LinkedIn that was very disrespectful of a former employer. Was that person unaware that a post like that would make him look childish at best and compromise his integrity at worst? Most people will lose at least some respect for a person who makes derogatory, rude, or distasteful comments on social media toward others, and that can have a lasting negative impact. Again, I would ask you, “Are you aware of the impact you have on others?”

I have coached many leaders who have been oblivious to how others think or feel about them. They simply had no idea that their behavior shut people down in meetings or that online comments caused people to view them as insensitive or unprofessional. Paying attention to how others respond to you both interpersonally and online will give you important information to help guide your interactions for greater success.

Social awareness, like the other characteristics of emotional intelligence, can be developed. Our course, Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence, focuses on very practical ways to begin developing social awareness immediately for increased effectiveness personally and professionally. If you would like more in-depth information and practice developing emotional intelligence, contact Dr. Heather Johnson about bringing our course in-house to your team.

This is Part Four of Six in our series on Emotional Intelligence.
Part 1 – Why it is Essential to Develop Emotional Intelligence
Part 2 – Self-Awareness: The Foundation of Emotional Intelligence
Part 3 – Managing Emotions for Success

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

This is Part Three of Six in our series on Emotional Intelligence

Part 1: Why It Is Essential To Develop Emotional Intelligence
Part 2: Self-Awareness: The Foundation Of Emotional Intelligence

In this third segment of our series, we are focusing on managing emotions. Consider the following three situations:

• You feel personally attacked by a peer in a meeting. Can you effectively manage your anger and continue to participate productively in that meeting?
• You and your team feel overwhelmed and you are headed into a meeting to talk to them about moving a deadline up. Are you able to rally for them?
• You are about to talk with three leaders one and two levels above you about a serious mistake your team made last quarter, and you’re nervous. Can you summon the confidence you’ll need to succeed in that meeting?

These are just a few examples of times leaders need to manage emotions to be effective. At times, they need to reign in the expression of a strong emotion and at times they need to summon an emotion they don’t currently feel.

There are many specific strategies leaders can use to effectively manage their emotions throughout the day. Following are three of the strategies we teach in our course on emotional intelligence.

1. Take ownership of your emotions.

Your emotions and how you express them are your responsibility and no one else’s. Whenever you say “He made me feel…”, you are giving someone else control over your emotions. We’ve all said at one point or another, “She makes me so mad!” or “He drives me crazy!” From this point forward, erase these phrases from your vocabulary.

For example, Sara and Joe work together. Sara becomes impatient and frustrated working with Joe because his pace is slower than hers and he is more detail-oriented than she is. Toward the end of a one-hour meeting, Sara could no longer contain her frustration and snapped at Joe. The last 15 minutes were strained and unproductive in the aftermath of her outburst. They ended the meeting in awkward silence. Sara blamed Joe for her frustration. As long as the responsibility for the emotion remained with Joe, so did the responsibility for change. When Sara owned her emotional response to Joe’s communication style, she was able to apologize and intentionally change her response in subsequent meetings. By focusing on the strengths Joe brought to their working relationship rather than the behaviors that frustrated her, Sara had a more productive emotional response . This wouldn’t have happened if Sara hadn’t owned her emotions.

It’s important for leaders to take ownership of their feelings toward those with whom they work. Leaders are people too, and they will like some people more than others. If a manager has automatic or persistent negative feelings about an employee, the manager may fail to notice the employee’s positive contributions to the team and only notice the employee’s areas for improvement. Those negative feelings would also bleed into every interaction with that employee if the leader is not conciously managing them. The first step is to own those feelings.

2. Manage your thoughts.

Our thoughts drive our emotions and our emotions drive our behavior. Uncovering automatic thoughts and changing those thoughts can change the emotion that follows and result in more productive behavior.

For example, most stress comes from how we perceive or interpret events. The person who goes into a presentation for senior leadership thinking, “I hate presenting; they are going to annihilate me!” is likely to experience a destructive level of stress. The person who goes into that same meeting thinking, “I have an opportunity to prove myself. I am prepared for whatever they throw at me” is likely to be energized and ready to perform.

In order to effectively reframe a situation, it is essential to identify the thought causing the emotion. Once the thought is identified, it can be changed. That will in turn change the emotion making you more effective.

3. Escape the emotional hijack.

We experience emotional hijacks when the emotional part of the brain takes over or hijacks the part of our brain that houses the executive functioning. This leads to difficulty with concentrating, problem solving, and memory lapses. A person experiencing an emotional hijack often says or does something regrettable. Once they calm down, it is typical to hear, “What was I thinking?” The answer is, they weren’t.

Some of the signs of a person has been hijacked include:

• They don’t listen to others.
• They become very defensive.
• They lash out or withdraw.
• Their mind goes blank and they are unable to access information they thought they knew cold.

There are several effective strategies self-aware leaders use to escape the emotional hijack. They focus either on calming down from the intense emotion or reengaging the executive functioning so they can think again. For example, four by four diaphragmatic breathing sends a message to the emotional center of the brain that the stress response is unnecessary and calms people down. Simply inhale for four counts and exhale for four counts and you will calm down. A second strategy requires labeling the emotion you are experiencing. Research shows that labeling the emotion reduces the intensity. Forcing yourself to think is a third strategy that has been shown to be effective in escaping the hijack. This can be something as simple as focusing on an easy math problem. Doing this shifts the brain’s focus from the emotional to the executive center of the brain allowing you to reengage and concentrate once again.

Managing emotions is a critical skill that emotionally intelligent people exhibit. Those who have developed it earn the respect of others by remaining even keeled in difficult situations, responding effectively in a crisis, and treating others with respect in all circumstances.

Stay tuned for our next installment in our Emotional Intelligence series. We’ll focus next on increasing social awareness to better understand individuals and teams.

If you would like more in-depth information and practice developing emotional intelligence, contact Dr. Heather Johnson about bringing our course in-house to your team.

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

This is Part Two of Six in our series on Emotional Intelligence.

In our first article in this series, we discussed how emotional intelligence is the primary differentiator between superior and average leaders. This is because emotions contain valuable information that directly impacts our thoughts and actions. If leaders want to leverage this information, they must first tune into what their emotions are telling them.

Self-awareness is the degree to which a leader is aware of and understands his or her thoughts, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses. It is as critical for long-term planning as it is in high-pressure negotiations and presentations. In fact, the very ability to make a decision requires not only raw data and intellect, but also emotional information. The more quickly you can identify your emotions and those of others, the more proactively you can respond and take control of a situation.

How important is self-awareness? A study done at Cornell found that self-awareness was the strongest predictor of a leader’s success. It isn’t hard to understand why when you consider just 3 of the areas emotionally intelligent leaders exhibit heighted awareness.

The first two areas require focusing specifically on emotions.

Tuning into Emotions:

Being aware of our emotions may seem simple, yet in a study by Bradberry and Greeves, only 36 percent of people tested were able to accurately identify their emotions as they experienced them.

While some people are not in tune with their emotions, others ignore them because they don’t understand the relevant information they contain. We all experience “gut feelings” at times. Self-aware leaders don’t ignore them; they identify the emotion and the information it provides. Our emotions come from a part of our brain that gets a constant feed of information directly from our senses. It happens far faster than we can consciously think, so the information is relayed to us in the form of emotions. It is now up to us to decipher those emotions and use the information we get from them to make better decisions and solve problems faster and more effectively. People who aren’t aware of their emotions are at a tremendous disadvantage because they are missing out on an important source of information.

Become aware of your emotional reaction to people and situations:

Do you feel anxious each time a certain phone number appears on your caller ID? Are you more likely to feel a sense of dread or excitement when asked to give a presentation?

It is important for us to understand the emotions certain events and people trigger in us as well as the why behind them so we can take control of our response. Keep in mind that our emotions drive our behavior. A lack of emotional awareness leads to mindless behavioral reactions. Once you are aware of the emotion, you can control the behavioral response.

A good example of this is the emotional reaction to different people we work with. Consider Mary who is a manager with 5 direct reports. There is one person, Tina, she really clicks with and one, Chris, she would just as soon have off her team. It’s not because his performance is poor, but because their personalities clash. Given that our emotions drive our behavior, Mary is likely to treat Tina and Chris very differently if she is unaware of her emotions. When talking with Tina, she would be likely to make more eye contact, smile more, talk with her more, be more positive, give her the preferred tasks, etc. Again, once we become aware of our emotions and our behavior, we can make a conscious effort to mange it.

Three ways to increase your emotional awareness:

• Tune into the physical cues. Our emotions are reflected in our bodies. Do you tap your feet when you’re impatient? Do you clench your fists when angry? Do you fidget when you’re nervous? People often find that they don’t realize how they’re feeling until they see these physical signs. Pay attention to your body and you will increase your emotional awareness.
• Ask yourself regularly how you feel. This doesn’t have to be a time-consuming activity. Simply check in regularly throughout the day and ask yourself how you feel. Record the feeling and the reason you feel that way. You may find some surprises along the way.
• Journal. Journaling is a very effective way to increase awareness. Simply reflecting on various experiences at the end of the day and describing how you felt and why will increase your awareness. Take the time to uncover the reasons you felt a particular way. This will make you more cognizant of your emotions going forward which will in turn help you use that information for greater effectiveness.

Remember, emotions give us information. Leaders with greater awareness of their emotions are able to make better decisions, solve problems more successfully, and manage business and personal relationships effectively.

Know your Strengths and Weaknesses:

Interviewing 125 authentic leaders, we learned that the essence of Leadership comes not from having pre-defined characteristics. Rather, it comes from knowing yourself — your strengths and weaknesses.” (Bill George, Former CEO of Medtronic).

A leader’s success depends in large part on his or her ability to leverage strengths. If you were asked right now to write down your top three strengths, how long would it take? A self-aware leader would be able to do this very rapidly. I have worked with many leaders who have not been able to answer that question without a lot of thought. Simply reciting your strengths isn’t enough. A leader is most successful when he or she regularly finds new ways to apply strengths.

While self-awareness includes knowing what you are good at, it also includes knowing what you are not good at and admitting when you don’t have the answer. Those who operate under the assumption that they have to know everything and be good at everything are doing themselves and their teams a disservice. They miss opportunities to elicit ideas from others and leverage team members who have strengths they lack. The leader who is unwilling to admit weaknesses and mistakes also sets the tone for the organization that it is unacceptable to have weaknesses and make mistakes. That is not only unrealistic, it prevents people from asking for help and causes them to take risks they shouldn’t take.

Two effective ways for a leader uncover strengths and weaknesses are:

• Take a validated leadership assessment. A comprehensive assessment that reveals how one’s natural tendencies impact leadership competencies can give a great deal of insight into strengths and weaknesses. With those results, leaders can find new ways to use natural strengths and decide whether to develop weaknesses or compensate for them.
• Complete a 360 multi-rater assessment. Have you ever wondered how others perceive you? You can’t know for sure unless you ask. A 360 is a survey taken by the leader as well as his or her boss, peers, and team. This is a great way to help uncover any potential blind spots and help the leader get a clearer understanding of how others perceive him or her. It is common in a 360 report to see that one group of people has a different perception of a leader than another group. That can be valuable information to have.

Emotionally intelligent leaders have a clear understanding of their strengths and how to leverage them to maximize their effectiveness. They also have the courage to explore their weaknesses and understand how those weaknesses impact performance. This awareness not only leads to faster promotions, as one study in a large telecommunications company found, it also helps build trust and credibility among team members.

The first step to developing your emotional intelligence is increasing your self-awareness in these three areas: emotions, reactions to be people and situations, strengths, and weaknesses. Once aware of emotions, the challenge is to express them effectively so they don’t inhibit your ability to negotiate, present, manage conflict, etc. That is often where leaders run into problems. I will offer specific strategies to manage emotions in the third article in this series coming next month.

During our course, Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence, participants take a validated assessment to measure their emotional intelligence. They also learn specific ways to improve their effectiveness by increasing their self-awareness in these three areas as well as two more critical areas.

If you would like more in-depth information and practice developing emotional intelligence, contact Dr. Heather Johnson about bringing our course in-house to your team.

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

Many people I’ve worked with over the last few weeks have expressed concern about Holiday gatherings this year. No matter where they turn, it seems, it’s been difficult to escape continual chatter about multiple current events – including politics, and emotions across the board have been running especially high. The good news is, differences of opinion don’t have to ruin your holiday. Leverage your emotional intelligence with the following tips, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Tap Into Your Self-Awareness

Disagreements often happen when people get frustrated with what others say or do. At the same time, they can be oblivious to their own impact on the conversation. Stop and check your emotional state. Are you angry, defensive, overwhelmed or something else? It’s important to know because emotions drive behavior.

Awareness of emotions makes for more purposeful rather than impulsive behavior. As soon as you identify what you’re feeling, you can make more conscious choices. Pay attention not only to what you say, but to your body language and your tone of voice when you say it. Remember, disagreements take two people. Are you aware of your part?

Guard Against the Emotional Hijack

It is easy when we feel attacked to go into what’s called the emotional hijack. During a hijack, emotions take over and compromise rational thinking. This often leads to saying and doing things we later regret. You can prevent this if you know how to stop it.

Don’t let a hijack ruin your Thanksgiving. Once you realize you’ve been emotionally hijacked, escape by taking a break from the situation, taking deep breaths, or reframing the situation.

Turn on Your Emotional Radar

People from the same family have different experiences, opinions, and communication styles. Generation gaps can exacerbate all of that. Instead of judging others and trying to convince them to see things your way, try listening first. Listen and genuinely try to understand why they see things the way they do.

Nothing bad ever came from trying to understand another’s point of view. Practice empathy this Thanksgiving.

Prioritize Relationships Over Being Right

Disagreements get prolonged when the focus is on being right rather than finding common ground or simply understanding one another. The need to be right closes minds and shuts down communication. It can also temporarily or permanently damage a relationship.

Before engaging in conversation with a family member that could become contentious, consider your priorities. Is being right worth damaging a relationship?

The holidays are a time to focus on things for which we are grateful. There is likely something about every family member you appreciate. Taking the time to focus on those things will elicit positive emotions that will impact how you greet and interact with everyone – even those with whom you most disagree. Make it a Happy Holiday Season.

From Thanksgiving to New Years, many exist in a constant state of chaos. There are parties to plan, presents to buy, and family to visit. All the while, we have to meet the expectations of work. It is easy to lose sight of what we are grateful for. The stresses of this season make it an ideal time to practice gratitude, but the many benefits of expressing gratitude are year-round.

There is power in gratitude that we can all harness very easily to help us through the season. A focus on gratitude elicits positive feelings and a greater sense of satisfaction. That focus changes our outlook from perceived scarcity to feeling good about what we have. Not only does gratitude increase our well-being, research shows it also boosts energy, generates optimism, increases resilience, improves relationships, and even increases earnings.

Gratitude is about noticing and appreciating what is going right in our lives. By doing so, we have many more chances to feel joy in the moment. Gratitude does not suggest we ignore problems or lower our aspirations. Just the opposite – gratitude helps us feel good about ourselves and our lives as we pursue goals, and it provides the positive energy, optimism, and resilience we need to achieve them. Gratitude holds a great deal of power waiting to be harnessed.

Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can do just that.

1. Choose to be a grateful person

   A grateful person is someone who sees everything in their lives, good and bad, as gifts. It is easy to see something good as a gift. Grateful people look at setbacks and adversity in their lives as gifts as well. From their perspective, setbacks or challenges bring with them some lesson they wouldn’t have otherwise learned, and they are grateful for that.

2. Write down each morning or evening what you’re grateful for

   This takes just 5-10 minutes and is an extremely powerful exercise. From the perfect parking spot you found to everyone showing up to your meeting on time to your family, what are you grateful for today?

3. Make it a practice to say “thank you” throughout the day

   Thank the person who makes your coffee. Thank the person who holds the door open for you. Thank the person who promptly gives you the information you needed. Thank the person who offered their support.

4. Give back

   Gratitude comes from acknowledging the good fortune you’ve received. Sharing that with other has a positive impact on everyone involved. Remember how you feel when you do something good for someone else, with no strings attached

5. Express your gratitude to important people in your life

   We often get so busy that we forget to tell people who much we appreciate them. Whether you’re grateful for a peer’s responsiveness at work or a friend’s support, tell them. The more specific you are, the more powerful the impact for both of you. This has an immediate impact on your emotional state and a long-term impact on your relationship.

Harnessing the power of gratitude doesn’t mean that your life is perfect or that you ignore problems; it is simply a means of impacting your energy level and emotional state for increased satisfaction and productivity. What are you grateful for?

This is the first in a series of six articles from Klassen Performance Group that will focus on giving you specific, practical ways to develop the primary characteristics of emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence is the key differentiator that sets the best leaders apart from the rest.

“Emotional Intelligence accounts for nearly 90% of the differences between star performers and average performers in leadership positions.”
Daniel Goleman

This isn’t to say that IQ isn’t important; it is. There is a certain level of intellectual ability required for every position. Beyond that, it is the ability to understand and work with others that sets the best leaders apart and leads to success. That is where emotional intelligence comes in. Leaders who think they can succeed by relying soley on their intellect are missing a huge opportunity.

The reason emotional intelligence has such a significant impact on success is because leaders with strong EQ:

• Demonstrate interpersonal skills that earn them respect and enable them to effectively influence, implement change, negotiate, manage conflict, and bring people together to accomplish goals.
• Keep cool under pressure and quickly bounce back from setbacks.
• Manage impulses and keep a steady long-term focus.
• Set the most effective emotional tone during meetings and interpersonal conversations.
• Actively listen and understand others’ needs and motivations.
• Express emotions productively and elicit emotions when needed.
• Understand how emotions impact their decision-making and problem-solving and consciously use emotional data to increase their effectiveness.
• Accurately read emotional cues from others and discern how what they say and do impacts others.

Consider how important all of this is for the safety manager who needs to eliminate accidents, the sales person who needs to increase sales, the leader in a constantly changing culture, or the manager who wants to advance.

The good news is that unlike IQ that remains relatively stable over time, EQ can be developed. When you consider all of the skills emotional intelligence impacts, how can you afford not to develop it?

If you would like more in-depth information and practice developing emotional intelligence, contact Dr. Heather Johnson about bringing our course in-house to your team.

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

We all make mistakes from time to time that damage personal and professional relationships. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or in the wrong way can have lasting negative impacts. Maybe you can relate to one of these situations:

• During a disagreement with a co-worker Liz yelled, “I can never count on you!” before leaving the cubicle in a huff.
• Jay broke the “no politics” rule at Thanksgiving. He and his dad both said some cutting, hurtful things to each other.

When important relationships get damaged, we need to begin repairing it sooner rather than later. Things don’t get better by waiting for the other person to apologize to you. It isn’t always easy to swallow your pride and take the first step, but with important relationships, we need to do exactly that. The five steps below can help you navigate these high-stakes conversations and begin to rebuild those relationships.

1. Manage your emotions before attempting a conversation.

It will do no good to go into a conversation still feeling intense negative emotions. Whether you are angry, hurt, or feeling something else, calm down first. When intense emotions take over, they compromise our thinking, memory, and problem solving. The first step is to take the time to calm down.

2. Determine your purpose.

Remind yourself why the relationship is important and determine the purpose of your conversation. Do you need to rebuild an effective working relationship? Do you need to rebuild a relationship with a sibling so you can work together to make decisions for aging parents? Keeping your purpose in mind will help keep you focused on what is important rather than getting sidetracked by irrelevant comments.

3. Identify your role in what happened and own it.

Identifying why you are angry with the other person is the easy part. Identifying your role is harder. Assume that you played a role and dig deep, if necessary, to identify it. Maybe you fired back defensively and said something that made things worse. Or maybe you didn’t say anything, but your hostile body language exacerbated things. In either case, you can’t blame that on the other person; you have to own your part.

Owning your part will go a long way toward rebuilding the relationship. Don’t allow yourself to believe you were just a victim and did nothing. Dig deep to find your part in it.

4. Apologize

Once you’ve identified your role, sincerely apologize for it. Without a sincere apology, negative emotions fester and continue to erode the relationship over time. An apology goes a long way because it validates the other’s experience of wrongdoing. It then allows them to move past the negative emotion and move forward with the relationship.

5. Listen

The first four steps will go a long way toward having a productive conversation. Keep in mind that two people can see the same situation in two very different ways. You know your experience, but you don’t know theirs. Listen with an open mind. It is very possible that the other person experienced something you didn’t realize. In fact, once you listen with an open mind, you may find you need to apologize again.

Although you can’t undo the past, you can take steps to rebuild the relationship. Relationships are important in both our personal and work lives. Don’t allow damage to fester. Begin to rebuild relationships as soon as possible and move forward.

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Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.