There are four key components to social and emotional intelligence. These are self-awareness, social awareness, self-management and relationship management. Without these, it is hard to be an effective manager and leader.
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize what your emotions are – are you able to effectively articulate your current emotional experience? Social awareness is the ability to recognize the emotions of others. Awareness is the first step. Without the ability to manage this information, it can still be tough to behave in ways that would cohere with the definition of a resonant leader: someone who is attuned to their emotions and those around them, someone who inspires others and fundamentally makes people FEEL excited and engaged in their shared vision.
Self-management is the ability to manage one’s own emotions. That is, once you have ascertained that you are feeling angry – are you able to let go of the anger and avoid expressing it in a way that is a negative or counter-productive. Relationship management is the ability to effectively manage social situations, for example, once you recognize that a colleague is frustrated, finding a way to help this colleague to manage their experience.
Although there are some who consider intelligence to be an innate construct that one is born with, most researchers now consider that emotional and social intelligence can be learned and that we can improve!
There are a few techniques, which I employ as a coach to foster the development of these skills. The first is to establish a daily meditation practice. Meditation involves sitting with your own mind, watching the emotions ebb and flow, like the waves in the sea. This is vital for the development of self-awareness – slowing down enough to allow yourself to notice and articulate what emotions you are experiencing. The second thing that meditation does is to teach us to cultivate non-reactivity. Most of our lives involve reacting to the events around us or within us – whether it is pulling into the drive-thru at the slightest hint of hunger, or responding to the bells and whistles that signify a new tweet, FB response, email, text etc on our smartphones. This practice trains us in self-management. Pausing, noticing and considering before we react.
Social awareness can be cultivated individually as well as collectively. Just as learning basic addition provides the foundation for calculus, learning where your body is in space provides the foundation for the more advanced aspects of social-emotional intelligence. The brain evolved up and forward – the metaphor of an icecream cone (spinal cord) with icecream scoops being placed on top. Just as higher level math work draws on lower level math abilities, so the social-emotional intelligence system works. How best to learn where your body is in space? As a yoga teacher I will promote yoga as a brilliant way to learn where your body is in space. However, other martial arts such as Tae Kwon Do (I am a freshly minted yellow-tip belt!) also cultivate this awareness of body in space.
Relationship management – the ability to effectively manage your relationship with those around you and to manage the relationships between those you work with, draws heavily on the first three skills. Are you able to recognize and manage your own emotions? Are you able to recognize the emotions of others? This skill, more than the others, is cultivated through interacting with others in a mindful manner.
Leadership is a relationship, not a power differential. It is about cultivating resonance, rather than dissonance, which is achieved through the development of these four features of social and emotional intelligence: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management and relationship management.