Stephen Covey Emotional Intelligence

[Anjali Reyome]

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Stephen Covey was one of the most influential philosophers on relationships, emotional intelligence, and communication. His seven habits promoted emotional intelligence in a wide array of areas. In his own words:

In this article we will explain what emotional intelligence is, why it is so crucially and vitally important and the five steps we can take to increase it. Each of these take persistent, dilligent time and effort so they are not a quick fix! The best way to increase your emotional intelligence is to associate with or be mentored, coached or trained by those who have a high EQ.

It is the vital emotional development that we need to thrive in life and through this article we will show you how you can increase your Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to have greater control over your emotions to be more effective in life. There are five components to emotional intelligence:

Motivation is something we are told we need to have at work, school or in family life. But this is only a false outer shell produced by an understandable lack of self-awareness about how we find motivation. We speak about intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation but both have at the root our personal motivation.

Once we are becoming more self-aware, we can find our innermost values and begin to think about what it is we want to achieve if there were no barriers, financially, in time available to us and we were able to put a ton of effort into it. What would you do?

Once we have a clearer idea of who we are by really digging deep into what we stand for, we can begin to make the plans to make the best use of our time. Then we can decide how we respond emotionally in the most effective way in a given situation to achieve our goals - whether that is challenging someone with deliberate anger without losing control of yourself or inspiring someone through praise and imparting your joy to them.

From a willingness to empathise we can now understand the person but also work out what would be a meaningful win-win agreement. Good social communication means all people involved experience a benefit. By having the courage to not give up on what would also benefit you avoids a lose-win situation. The opposite is true that going to get what you want without consideration for the other person would lead to a win-lose result.

In today's fast-paced world of competitive workplaces and turbulent economic conditions, each of us is searching for effective tools that can help manage, adapt, and be more successful with communicating. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 delivers a step-by-step guide for increasing your emotional intelligence using the four core EQ skills-self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management-to exceed your goals and achieve your fullest potential.

Drs. Bradberry and Greaves developed this revolutionary guide to help people identify their EQ skills, build these skills into strengths, and enjoy consistent performance in the pursuit of important life objectives. This book contains proven strategies to accurately measure and increase emotional intelligence.

"Gives abundant, practical findings and insights with emphasis on how to develop EQ. Research shows convincingly that EQ is more important than IQ."-- Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The newly updated book also includes a new edition of the world's bestselling emotional intelligence test, the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal. The assessment results report will show you where your EQ stands today and what you can do to begin improving it immediately. The book edition of the assessment provides you with your overall EQ score, your four core EQ skill scores, suggested EQ strategies to practice, and four Hollywood movie clips which illustrate the four core EQ skills.

So, if I know this, why do I keep repeating actions and behaviours that are not serving me well? Well, it turns out that a lot of my actions and behaviours are to do with emotional intelligence. In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman discusses the 5 essential elements of emotional intelligence as being:

Whatever my underlying emotional reasons for repeatedly choosing to leave the barn door unlocked, the reality is that I am left with the consequences of having to chase after the bolted horse. Every. Time. Until I am willing to identify my emotional triggers and admit that my unexamined emotions are driving my patterns of behavior, I will keep getting what I am getting.

I remember a mini-Paradigm Shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly — some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene. Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry. Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.

Many people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role, such as that of husband or wife, parent or grandparent, manager or leader.

It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.

In the words of Thoreau, “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.

Compromise vs 3re Alternative and Synergy - With compromise each person gets less than they wanted. With synergy or a "3rd alternative", they each get more than they thought possible and something different than they were hoping for or imagining.

"The word paradigm means pattern or model of thinking that influences how we behave. It is like a map that helps us decide which direction to go. The map that we see determines what we do. If we shift paradigms our behavior and results change as well. "

p 11 Then he explains that if I only see my mental map of the situation, "the only way to solve the problem is to persuade you to shift your paradigm or even force you to accept you to accept my alternative.

p 12 He suggests people try saying this: "Maybe we can come up with a better solution than either of us has in mind. Would you be willing to look for a third alternative we haven't even thought of yet?"

In 1964, the freedom fighter Nelson Mandella began serving a 27 year sentence in South Africa's desolate Robben Island prison. As a young lawyer, he had rebelled against the apartheid system that repressed black Africans like himself. "A thousand sleights, a thousand indignities, and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me in anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people," he explains. In prison he experienced more of the same, and at first he grew even more bitter.

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