The Value of Adaptive Skills

Building your Emotional Intelligence Tool Box

Emotional intelligence is critical in developing your management skills in two areas:

1. managing others and your relationships with them.
2. managing yourself in terms of self-awareness of strengths and emotionally, your impact on the people around you in terms of self-knowledge and self- control.

If you are a change catalyst, building the adaptive skills of emotional intelligence is imperative. Good leaders must do this to build trust. It is both important and critical to your company's bottom- line. Here is an overview of some of the skills required:

• Knowing your feelings and using them to make life decisions you can live with.
• Managing your emotional life without being hijacked by it -- not being paralyzed by depression or worry, or swept away by anger.
• Persistence -- in the face of setbacks, and channeling your impulses in order to pursue your goals.
• Empathy -- reading other people's emotions without their having to tell you what they are feeling.
• Influence and persuasion -- in negotiations. I
• nspiring and motivating others to take on difficult challenges.
• Intuition -- using your instincts and inklings to make hard decisions.
• Handling everyone's feelings in relationships with skill and harmony -- being able to articulate the unspoken pulse of a group, for example.
• Resolving conflicts -- to change the relationship from win/lose to the idea that for me to win, you don't have to lose.

These are no longer luxuries for people with unpressured lives and lots of free time. These adaptive skills are essential for every leader in any size organization. When you build your emotional intelligence skills, you develop balance, which positively affects not only your success, but also your health and happiness.