Definitive Guide to Improving Emotional Intelligence
Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
Six years ago after producing outstanding results for my team and greatly exceeding all our goals for the year, I had an unexpected performance conversation with my manager. He mentioned that the way I handled some of the disagreements with people across different levels wasn’t as productive, and I was hurting the effectiveness of the organization. He felt I was too focused on the results themselves instead of the how we produced them as a team. He gave me examples where I came off as being too pushy with a junior PM, where I did not adequately address the concerns of my partners teams, and when I pushed back repeatedly in a leadership meeting without deeply considering the alternate points of view.
My heart was in the right place and I was advocating for what I thought was in the best interests of the company. However my intentions were not landing accurately on other people, and, as a result, I wasn’t able to drive all of the positive outcomes I wanted.
This led me on a winding journey of understanding what I needed to change and how to actually make those changes happen. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on courses and bought hundreds of books. I picked up different insights from these materials that made a significant difference in my evolution as a person. I hit many walls along the way and I wanted to give up. I would then dig into my collection of books or find another course. The universe always found a way to send me the right help. I even started to take away learnings from my tennis coach. His favorite mantra was “Your technique is aggressive, You are not!” and I thought about all the ways it applies to my work. I would eventually view the wall as a speed bump in my rear view mirror. A few people who were close to me were inspired by the inner work I was doing and leaned in to help me.
I started to see the impact of my inner work in my performance review feedback I was receiving from other people in the company. My greatest joy was when one of my peers wrote in a recent performance review, “I'm pretty sure I would have flipped a table and started screaming at least a couple of times if put through what he had to go through, but he stayed calm and collected and worked each problem as it arose without any apparent consternation.”
I have come a long way from six years ago. The improvements I made from each of the individual courses or books were small pieces of the greater puzzle that I had to put together. In hindsight, I wish someone had shown me a more direct path to improving my emotional intelligence.
I am sharing my learnings so that you can get there 10 times faster than I did.
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to drive positive outcomes in high stakes situations without letting anyone’s hijacked emotions get in the way.
Improving emotional intelligence require intentional work in a few areas:
Mitigate Emotional Triggers by identifying the childhood experiences and our perception of reality that lead to emotional hijacking.
Develop Self Compassion to forgive ourselves for our past and radically accept and love who we are at this moment even though we want to grow.
Develop Mindfulness Skills to identify when we are getting triggered by listening to the signals being given by our body and using breathing/other techniques to move to more rational thinking.
Listen Deeply and Speak Intentionally to understand perspective, content, and needs of the other person/party and speak intentionally to ensure that your message has the right effect on the other person.
Prepare for tough conversations by setting outcomes, intentions, planning the words to use, identifying potential triggers, how to de-escalate when things go wrong.
Execute on the conversation by working through an agenda, checking if you are on track at frequent intervals, identifying when conversations are going down the wrong path, thinking about how to reframe the conversations, focusing on the pre-established outcomes, asking for a recess/circling back if we can’t get to alignment etc.
Below are brief summaries of each of these areas. I will tackle each of these in detail in future posts and will share resources that helped me.
1. Mitigate Emotional Triggers: We need to identify our emotional triggers whether they be specific people, situations or behaviors. In addition we need to dig deeper and identify the root causes of those emotional triggers which are based on childhood experiences, and how we perceive reality. For example: My parents taught me that anything less than a 100/100 in a test was a failure, which resulted in me becoming a perfectionist. The challenge with being a perfectionist is that I used to hold others to an unreasonable standard even about small things and would get triggered when my expectations weren’t met.The Having that realization helped me be more judicious on the things that I wanted to hold myself and others to a high standard and improved my happiness as well as my relationships. There are a number of ways I mitigated triggers:
Feedback from people who spent a lot of time with you at work or home
Participating in T-group based classes like Stanford’s COM19 where strangers interact with you for a few days and give you feedback on your interpersonal skills.
Taking a Saboteur survey from Shirzad Chamaine to identify your saboteur traits and identifying childhood experiences that caused them as well as examples of those traits in action. This coupled with the book Four Agreements helped me understand the lens through which I was looking at the world.
Take an emotional intelligence survey to identify weak areas and using them as dimensions for brainstorming your triggers.
2. Develop Self-Compassion: Once we start identifying our mistakes and growth areas it is easy to get stuck in a cycle of self-judgement and punishment. It is extremely important to find a way to radically accept yourself as you cannot move forward without it. I used to be extremely hard on myself and never forgave myself for mistakes. This led me to live in a world of what ifs and constantly self flagellating myself for mistakes I made years ago. It took me a long time to understand that unless I forgave myself and accepted myself for who I am I cannot move on and be happy. I credit three things for helping me develop self compassion:
My executive coach who constantly repeated to me that I was good as I am and that if I didn’t improve any bit it was alright. I am forever grateful to her.
The book “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It” by Kamal Ravikant which taught me that sometimes a simple mantra of “I Love Myself” is extremely powerful and absolutely needed.
Playing tennis matches in leagues that taught me to have a short memory, to let go of a point and move on to the next one. I developed the mantra “Just this point” from it. It was reinforced by going to OrangeTheory Fitness where I would apply the same principle that the only thing that mattered was the exercise set right in front of me.
3. Develop mindfulness skills: Identifying your triggers helps you blunt them, but you still need to develop skills to not get emotionally hijacked or calm yourself down. The secret is that your body sends physical signals that you are having negative emotions way before your brain realizes it and before you do something you will regret. The key then is to listen to your body more actively and recognize patterns that are tied to emotional hijacking. For example, I start to lean in my chair, my breathing gets shallow, my face frowns up etc. There are a few ways to build mindfulness skills:
Practicing simple body sensation techniques. Shirzad calls them PQ reps: rubbing two fingers together, touching different surfaces for texture, temperature, looking at objects for color/texture, listening to sounds that are far away/near, doing body scans to identify sensations in different parts.
Intentional breathing: My experience with breathing is from Art of Livings Pranayama programs where you learn to breathe in a number of ways. I learnt two key skills from it, intentional fast breathing taught me to recognize shallow breaths when they happen during a touch conversation and intentional deep breathing taught me that I can easily calm myself down by just taking a few deep breaths. Breathing was also the only way I could calm my mind down.
Finally journaling was another way for me to understand my simmering emotions that would stay with me long after an interaction. Using journaling to Identify the actions of others/situations caused them helped me pivot to dealing with the situation and resolving it.
4. Listen Deeply and Speak Intentionally: Even if you have your emotions under control the conversation can derail if the other person is triggered by your works or your misunderstanding of their intention. If you can make a person feel truly heard and if you speak in a way that makes them feel good about themselves, you can get positive outcomes in any situation. A number of resources tied together helped me improve my listening and speaking skills:
Listening & Speaking courses by Julian Treasure opened my eyes to the reasons why I wasn’t as good a listener and as powerful a speaker as I could be.
Taking Dale Carnegie’s course reminded me of timeless rules of communication like “Don’t Criticize”, “Give honest, sincere appreciation”, “Talk in terms of the other person’s interests” etc.
The killer secret was “Taking improv lessons”. It helped me stay present in conversations, slow down my mental chatter and respond to the other person. Improv was like going to the gym for listening skills.
The books Just Listen, Humble Inquiry and The Coaching Habit taught me to listen for what the other person wants at that moment and offer it.
5. Prepare for tough conversations by setting outcomes, intentions, planning the words to use, identifying potential triggers, how to de-escalate when things go wrong.
Crucial Conversations, Difficult Conversations, and How to Have a Good Day taught me to prepare instead of just winging tough conversations. It all starts with setting the intentions for each conversation: what problem do you want to solve, How do you want the other person to feel, and How you want to feel. Then realizing that there are different perspectives on the same situation: yours, the other persons and the real situation. Being open to understanding them is necessary to work through tough issues.
Books and courses on negotiation like “Getting More of What You want”, and “Getting to Yes” taught me that the key is that a problem can be resolved by many different solutions so don’t get tied to only one going into a tough conversation. You can work together with the other person to find a solution that works for both of you. This helps with not pushing the other person to accept something that does not work for them when there may be perfectly acceptable solutions that would work for both of you.
Preparing for the words you will choose, what you are willing to accept and triggering topics to stay away from all help when the rubber hits the road.
Finally don’t take anything personally and don’t make any assumptions about the other person. The book Four Agreements drilled home these habits and helped me stay focused on my goal instead of triggering negative emotions.
6. Execute on the conversation by working through an agenda, checking if we are on track at frequent intervals, identifying when conversations are going down the wrong path, thinking about how to reframe the conversations, focusing on the pre-established outcomes, asking for a recess/circling back if we can get to alignment etc.
I will dig deeper into each of these topics in upcoming posts and share resources that helped me improve in each of these areas. Eventually I want to package all of these into a book.
Signup from my newsletter if you want to get updates on followup posts from this WIP book.