What do you know about emotional intelligence?

I attended an interesting workshop yesterday run by Aimee Teesdale and hosted by London Tech Ladies.

I remember years ago my interim Head of HR telling me that one of my team members lacked emotional intelligence and that I needed to ‘sort him out’.  Yet she was unable to give me any tools or skills to do this.

So when I saw the topic for last night’s workshop was all about Emotional Intelligence, I jumped at the chance to attend. Aimee was a great presenter.

She explained how our decisions are based on emotions, not logic or facts, even though that’s what we might tell ourselves. Our emotions affect our decisions and we then rationalise and justify our decisions based on fact.

So what exactly is emotional intelligence also known as EQ? The definition Aimee shared with us was “The ability to be aware of our own emotions and those of others, and to use that information to manage ourselves and our relationships.”

In simple terms, our emotions – our fears, our beliefs – form our subconcious. Our thoughts and behaviours present our conscious.

And if you don’t like your behaviour or the behaviour of somebody else, no matter how hard you try, until you change the emotion underneath that behaviour, you won’t be able to change the behaviour.

I shared before how my beliefs about how hard I have to work in order to succeed were in fact a reflection of a very well buried limiting belief. I have started to disrupt that belief in order to change the story. You can read more here.

I enjoyed the workshop – so much so that I invited Aimee to be one of my first guests on my soon-to-be launched podcast, Confident Conversations.