Since we know that stress is the result of our reaction to a stressor, it makes sense that we should attempt to control that reaction with whatever tools we have available. Emotional intelligence is one such tool.

It is the ability to use your emotions as information about what you are experiencing and then deciding to use that information in a constructive way. Emotional intelligence, or EI, helps you understand why you respond the way you do and how you can affect those responses. The more you learn to use EI, the better you will be at dealing with stressful situations, communicating with others and overcoming emotional roadblocks.

EI at Work

The most commonly used and widely accepted model of EI was posited by Daniel Goleman. It involves a range of four competencies which are broken down into skill sets and which together form the picture of a person’s level of EI. Figure 3 outlines Goleman’s model.

Goleman’s EI Competencies

Self-Awareness: Knowing how we feel in the moment and using our gut feelings to help drive decision making; having a realistic understanding of our own abilities and a strong sense of self-confidence.

• Emotional Self-Awareness
• Accurate Self-Assessment
• Self-Confidence

Self-Management: Handling our own emotions so that they don’t interfere but facilitate; having the ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal; recovering well from emotional distress; translating our deepest, truest preferences into action in order to improve and succeed.

• Self-Control
• Trustworthiness
• Conscientiousness
• Adaptability
• Achievement Orientation
• Initiative

Social Awareness: Sensing what others are feeling; being able to understand situations from others’ perspective; cultivating relationships with a diverse range of people.

• Empathy
• Organizational Awareness
• Service Orientation

Social Skills: Handling emotions in respect to relationships with other people; able to read the intricacies of social interactions; able to interact in social situations well; able to use this skill set to influence, persuade, negotiate, and lead.

• Influence
• Leadership
• Developing Others
• Communication
• Change Catalyst
• Conflict Management
• Building Bonds
• Teamwork and Collaboration

Figure 3: Goleman’s EI Competencies

Increasing Self-Awareness

Becoming aware of your emotions takes practice. At first, you may have a hard time identifying the specific emotions that you are feeling. But your ability to note what you are feeling will increase in time.

Here are several suggestions for helping to increase your self-awareness.

1. “Check-in” with yourself.

To begin to identify your emotions, you’ll need to make time for doing so. Schedule particular times in the day that you can be alone and calm. Perhaps first thing in the morning, lunch time, and bed time would be good times to start. At first, you will do this at these regularly scheduled times in order to get in the habit of flexing your ‘identifying’ muscle. Eventually, you will be able to call on the skill anytime that you feel a strong, distressing, or other emotion. Sit quietly and if possible, close your eyes. Ask yourself several questions, and be sure to answer them honestly. There is no right or wrong answer. Just listen to your responses. Suggestions for questions to ask are:

• How am I feeling?
• What am I feeling?
• How long have I been feeling this way?
• Where do I notice the feeling manifesting itself in my body? Am I tense, clenching my teeth, feeling tired; do I have a headache or a stomachache?

2. Label your emotions.

Once you are able to tell how you are feeling, you will want to be able to identify what started your negative feelings. Was there a particular ‘trigger’? As you get better at identifying your emotions, you can come up with your own labels for them. Remember that not all emotions are negative – practice recognizing and labeling the positive ones too.

Some suggestions for labels might be single words like anger, joy, fear, or sadness. Or you can give shades of meaning to your labels by using phrases like ‘fed up,’ ‘tired and worn out,’ or whatever rings truest for you. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help identify your triggers:

• When did the feeling first start?
• What was happening when the feeling started?
• Has the strength of the emotion changed at all? How?

3. Be in the moment.

Try to ‘hear’ your emotions as they happen. What are they telling you? We’ve probably all experienced our emotions as warnings, say when we are walking alone in an unfamiliar area of town or when a rough looking character approaches us on the street. Our nervousness is the body’s way of putting us on alert to possible danger. Maybe you’ve experienced it and called it intuition or instinct – but this same emotional response happens in other areas of our lives as well.

For example, if you agree to go to take on a challenging new project at work but you suddenly feel angry or irritated, what does that tell you? You might really be feeling that you are taking on more than your share of work and you need to speak to revisit the decision to accept the project.

Try to verbalize the emotion. For example, you might think, ‘ok, I am feeling really angry right now. I can feel it in my stomach and my back. What is the anger trying to tell me?’ If you learn to notice your emotions as they happen and you will be able to get better at connection emotions to their causes. In other words, acknowledging your emotions as they occur gives you more opportunities to learn about yourself.

4. Get to the ‘Root’ of the emotion.

You’ve identified your emotion with a label, and you are exploring what the emotion is trying to tell you. But you need to make sure that you are dealing with the full emotional story. Often we feel an emotion that is only the ‘tip’ of everything that we are feeling.

For example, imagine you are feeling angry. What’s underneath that anger? Are you angry because you feel vulnerable or out of control? Are you angry because someone has made you look bad and you think others will laugh at you? Are you angry because you accepted that work assignment even though you really didn’t want to?

All of these ‘roots’ of your anger are different, but the resulting emotion is the same. So you will need to be willing to look beyond the initial emotion and explore what else you might be feeling in order to be able to manage your emotions. Otherwise you’ll be addressing a symptom, not the root cause.

It’s important to note that we don’t always feel only one emotion at a time. It’s possible to feel many things at once, and even for some of them to seem as if they are conflicting. But every emotion that you feel is there for a reason. Take the time to identify and acknowledge each one in order to get the most information from what you are feeling.

Remember that we often feel more than one emotion at a time. But each one of them offers information we can learn about ourselves.

Self-Management

Self-Management is also referred to in some EI models as self-regulation. It refers to the act of taking responsibility for our emotions. When we take responsibility for the way we feel, it gives us a tool for making decisions that are the most supportive for our mental and emotional health. That in turn helps us be successful in motivating ourselves to achieve our goals. It helps us to overcome stumbling blocks and remain in action towards the things that we want in life. It lets us experience emotions without being controlled by them and it aids in our ability to build strong, lasting, and rewarding relationships – both in and out of the workplace.

Self-Management, or self-regulation, refers to the act of taking responsibility for our emotions and how they impact our decisions and behaviors.

The competency of self-management has six different skill attributes:

• Self-Control
• Trustworthiness
• Conscientiousness
• Adaptability
• Achievement Orientation
• Initiative

Social Awareness

Social awareness is the ability to perceive and understand the social relationships and structures in which you and those around you are operating. It involves being able to understand how other people are feeling – and validating those feelings. It requires being able to recognize relationships and structures within your organization or your social networks. And it means understanding that individual happiness is dependent upon assisting others to achieve their own happiness as well.

Social awareness is the ability to perceive and understand the social relationships and structures in which you and those around you are operating.

The three skills comprising this competency are:

• Empathy
• Organizational Awareness
• Service Orientation

Relationship Skills

Whereas social awareness is the competency through which you become aware of emotions of others, how the organizational structure can affect them, and how you can have an impact on their feelings through service orientation, social skills are those that you have access to when participating in relationships with others. You could say that if social awareness offers understanding of others, social skills offer means of interacting with others that help boost productivity, improve relationships, and increase your general quality of life.

Social skills offer means of interacting with others in ways that help boost productivity, improve relationships, and increase your general quality of life.

Social skills can also be called ‘people skills’. People who have high levels of this competency are:

• Easy to talk to
• Good team players
• Good at resolving disputes
• Excellent communicators
• Focused on helping others
• Skilled at building relationships

There are eight skills that are associated with EI social skills. These are:

• Influence
• Leadership
• Developing Others
• Communication
• Change Catalyst
• Conflict Management
• Building Bonds
• Teamwork and Collaboration

Reducing Stress Using EI

Now that you understand what EI is and what factors are involved, you can learn to apply the information at the workplace in order to help reduce your stress. These skills can take time to learn and develop, but they can be very powerful once you are in the practice of using them. Some suggestions for practicing your new EI competencies include:

• Practice recognizing your particular stress responses and what emotions signify that you are being affected by stress
• Realize that your emotions are information about what you need to do to help yourself during a stressful situation
• Acknowledge your emotions, but know that you don’t have to be ruled by them
• Concentrate on communicating through your nonverbal means (tone of voice, gestures, body language) as well as with words
• Practice using humor as a way to fight against stress and diffuse stressful situations in groups

These skills can take time to learn and develop, but they can be very powerful once you are in the practice of using them.