As a leader, you find yourself in a variety of situations every day.
Whether that's having a difficult conversation with an employee, leading a core team meeting in your ministry, or a thousand other scenarios — you must know how to relate effectively to others, manage yourself, and master your emotions. If you don't, decisions and relationships get ugly, fast.
There is one thing that every leader needs more of to better handle those types of scenarios — that thing is called Emotional Intelligence (or EQ). Every leader could use a lot more EQ in their life.
In the book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Drs. Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves define emotional intelligence as:
Your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.
It's one of those intangible sides of every person.
Our EQ determines how we manage our behavior in a given moment, navigate social settings, and make personal decisions. The ultimate goal is to recognize our emotional "triggers" and build the skills needed to master those emotions in real-time.
An observation that Drs. Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves make in their book is an important one—our brains are wired for our first reaction to an event to be an emotional one.
You have no control over this (your first reaction) part of the process. You do control the thoughts that follow an emotion, and you have a great deal of say in how you react to an emotion—as long as you are aware of it.
Continued:
Some experiences produce emotions that you are easily aware of; other times, emotions may seem nonexistent. When something generates a prolonged emotional reaction in you, it's called a "trigger event". Your reaction to your triggers is shaped by your personal history, which includes your experience with similar situations.
Imagine finding yourself in a life-or-death situation. In the book, they give the example of a man who was attacked by a Great White Shark while surfing.
Right when he saw the shark, he was physically paralyzed and mentally racing. He couldn't think or do anything. His limbs were like concrete and his body ice cold. But in the story, the man was able to reason with himself until his paralysis went away and he was able to paddle to shore.
The key learning in this story? The man's thoughts didn't make his feelings of fear, terror, sadness, or dread completely disappear. Actually the opposite—they were still very much present. The difference was that his ability to think clearly kept his emotions from hijacking his behavior at the moment he needed to act the most.
Apply this to our everyday life as leaders, we need to be aware of how our emotions are triggered and seek to hijack our behavior so that we can find more productive ways of responding instead.
This is the purpose of building emotional intelligence.
When I first heard of the term "EQ", I immediately thought of IQ, or "Intelligence Quotient". There are distinctions that should be made between these two.
Another reason why EQ should be emphasized is that anyone can grow in their ability to handle their emotions and become aware of themselves.
The short answer: Absolutely.
A crazy statistic that Drs. Bradberry and Greaves share that,
Emotional intelligence accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs.
What does this mean for you?
Your ability to grow your emotional intelligence is the single biggest predictor of performance in your work and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.
We do so by empowering ministry leaders like you to build thriving groups and communities in 3 key ways: