How social-emotional intelligence can help your career success
Mary-Anne Murphy
Emotionally intelligent people are by nature flexible, adaptable and resilient. They are inspiring as leaders with a high level of self-awareness. Their emotional intelligence (EI) skills help them to effectively balance compassion and empathy, with the ability to assertively set and communicate healthy boundaries.
EI is now not only considered a critical leadership skill set, but it is also a highly sought-after one. No matter what your career goals are, investing and developing a social-emotional intelligence toolkit have become imperative for every level of career success.
“It all starts with self-awareness. It’s not all about you, but it all begins with you. As a leader, if you’re not in a good place, not stable and not clear about what’s unique about you, then nothing’s going to flow from that.” Jeremy Darroch, Group CEO Sky.
Emotional Capital
Emotional intelligence is not a personality trait, but rather a set of emotional competencies that are developed to enhance leadership, nurture relationships and confident social skills.
Every personal interaction you have, and every decision you and your business make, is likely to be built on emotion. RocheMartin, Inspired Emotional Intelligence
Think of emotional capital as a type of skills bank. By developing these skills, you are investing in your own emotional capital bank. When you need to access these skills you can use them to transact with. Whether you are leading your team to success, getting buy-in from stakeholders or nurturing loyal relationships.
So if emotional capital was currency, have you thought about how you are spending it?
Optimism as a Strategy
People with high emotional intelligence skills are inherently optimists.
Optimists frame issues differently, they see opportunities and can adapt quickly to changing circumstances and environments. They strategically access their emotional capital, drawing on strong relationships with teams they’ve built and nurtured.
A great example of how optimists leverage their framework was during the global pandemic. They were the ones who identified silver linings and mobilised a response that would not only see their organisation survive but outperform their competitors in the end.
Empathy vs Sympathy
One of the biggest attributes of EI is empathy. Empathy requires a very deep understanding of what the other person is going through on an emotional level. While sympathy is relatable more on an intellectual level. While we can sympathise with another person's lived experience, sympathy gives us no real emotional understanding of it.
Empathy requires us to put ourselves in another person's shoes and dig deep into the emotional experience they are having.
This is done through things like being an active open-minded listener who can respond without bias in a validating and deeply genuine way.
EI competency can be learned, developed nurtured and used to improve your relationships with others, strengthen networks, broaden perspectives and ultimately clear the pathway to career success.
Do you want to know more about how to access the EI toolkit for yourself or your team? Get in touch with us, we would love to hear from you.
Work with Us
Momentum Learning has supported Leaders, Teams, Teachers, Rangatahi and their Whānau to develop their social and emotional intelligence since 2020. Talk to us about accessing this essential curriculum methodology, through Regionally Allocated PLD and other funding pathways.
Let’s work together.