Emotional intelligence at the workplace is not something we’re born with; it’s something we can learn and develop. The more emotional intelligence you have, the more stress you can avoid at the workplace.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace has four major components:

• Awareness of Self – The ability to recognize your emotions and their impact while using gut feelings / intuition to guide your decisions.
• Awareness of Others – The ability to sense, understand, and empathize to other’s emotions and feel comfortable socially.
• Managing Emotions – The ability to control your emotions and behavior and adapt to changing circumstances.
• Managing Relationships – The ability to inspire, influence, and connect to others and manage conflict.

The skill set that enables you to acquire these capabilities can be learned but requires the development of emotional and nonverbal ways of communicating that include:

• Recognize the body signals. Learn to recognize your particular stress response and become familiar with sensual cues that can rapidly calm and energize you.
• Becoming aware of what and how you feel. It will add to your self confidence, self control and understanding of others, which in turn will help you build more satisfying relationships.
• Recognize and effectively use the nonverbal cues of your communication process including eye contact, facial expression, and tone of voice, posture, gesture and touch; in short body language. It’s not what you say but how you say it that impacts others and your relationships; for better or worse.
• Get humorous. Develop the capacity to meet challenges with humor. There is no better stress buster than a good laugh and nothing reduces stress quicker in the workplace than a mutually shared joke. But, if the laugh is at someone else’s expense, you may end up with more rather than less stress!!
• Learn to navigate conflict by becoming a good listener, Be that person who can face conflict fearlessly with a clear understanding, that when differences are resolved, they invariably strengthen relationships.

To Be Continued…