13: Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Traditional measures of intelligence consider the way in which we understand the relationships among things and ideas - but has neglected to include the way in which we understand the relationships with people, which is far more influential to our success. While the actions of people are determined by logic, their motives are driven by emotions - and it is our ability to recognize these emotions that determines our success or failure in working with people.
Understanding and working with emotions, called "emotional intelligence" (EI) is critical to success when a task requires getting the cooperation and support of other people, without whose participation the goal cannot be accomplished. And as a speaker's goal is to motivate a crowd to take an action, emotions are extremely important - more so than facts in many instances.
While it is a positive sign that the value of EI has been recognized by the business world, this has led to a great deal of confusion as many are seeking to be the guru in the snake-oil business of emotion: there are so many theories and practices, many of them quite specious, that it is difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff - and experience with a bad or ill-conceived approach to EI, of which there are many, has led some to dismiss the topic altogether. This is a grave mistake.
Given the importance of the topic and the gross volume of misinformation about it, the author will explore the basics before correlating it to the topic of public speaking.
What Is EI?
For many years, a person's IQ has been considered to be critical to his success in business and organizations - but in recent decades this has been reconsidered.
Traditional measures of intelligence consider the manner in which people interact with things: their understanding of language, mathematical skills, perception of patterns and shapes, and the like, but completely ignored the way they interact with people.
It has been suggested that intelligence is necessary for competence: the ability to understand ideas enables people to do things. But in organizations, success depends on their ability to understand people and to motivate and influence others. And doing so requires a person to understand and influence their emotional states.
It's also noted that emotional intelligence is a lot more fluid. It's widely accepted that a person's IQ is influenced mainly by a combination of genetics and early childhood experience. The way we learn to perceive and interpret information as a child often stays with us for the rest of our lives.
Emotional intelligence is more fluid, more in the nature of a skill than a trait. While there are genetic and developmental factors, it is a more complex set of behaviors that can be learned and practiced, improved over time. We may not be able to change our personality, but we can change the behaviors we adopt when interacting with others - to become more attentive to their emotional state, and more effective in influencing it.
The Four Components of EI
Surveying some of the seminal work in emotional intelligence, the author suggests that the traits defined by various theorists all seem to correlate to four basic categories: self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management. The author will discuss each in a bit more detail.
Self Awareness
To begin understanding emotions, first seek to understand your own. A self-aware person recognizes his own emotions and moods, rather than being driven blindly by them. He has a realistic perspective of himself, and understands how his patterns of behavior can be strengths and weaknesses.
The author refers to a survey of more than 200,000 people (Bradberry) that found 83% of people who scored high in self awareness (in self-assessments and 360-degree ones) were "top performers" in their organizations.
Developing self-awareness requires making a conscious effort to recognize how you are feeling, and being introspective to discover the reasons you are experiencing an emotion.
Self Management
Once you become aware of your emotions, it is necessary to recognize when they have a negative impact on your judgment and actions, and learn to control them.
For example, if you recognize that being angry causes you to make poor decisions - then you should make a self-assessment part of your decision-making process to recognize that you are angry, and delay making a decision until the emotion has passed.
(EN: This follows the typical assumption that emotions are bad - but some authors also acknowledge that emotions can have positive effects. A person may recognize that they are more attuned to details when they are feeling a bit sad - and if they are experiencing this emotion at a time when there is a task that requires attention to dental, they can take advantage of their emotional state by setting on that task.)
In that sense, self-management may require us to change our emotions when they are not supportive of a positive outcome, or to delay tasks until we gain control of our emotional state.
The key to effective self-management is simply taking time - specifically, take time before taking action to ensure that your emotions are not interfering with your ability to choose an effective action.
Social Awareness
Social awareness parallels personal awareness: it is the ability to recognize the emotional states of others - whether it is the "default" state in which we first encounter them, or a state that has been caused by something we have done or said.
Social awareness also includes knowledge of the cause-and-effect relationship between perception and emotion: knowing what makes a calm person angry or a angry person calm is necessary to interacting with others in a competent manner.
Socially-aware people are known for their service to clients and customers, largely because satisfying the needs of another person requires recognizing their dissatisfaction and its cause, as well as understanding what might be done to cause their emotional state to change.
Because we cannot possibly get "inside the head" of another person, we must use external evidence to estimate their emotional state: their words, their tone of voice, their facial expression, and their gestures all give us evidence that we must learn to interpret.
The key to having social awareness, just as in personal awareness, is merely in paying attention, though with the added difficulty of interpreting signals.
Relationship Management
The last component of EI is relationship management, which again parallels self-management: once you have recognized the emotional state of another person, you must take actions that will either change it (if it is not productive) or sustain it (if it is productive).
People react emotionally to stimuli - and while you cannot control many of the stimuli that influence their emotions, you become a source of stimulation when you interact with them. If they pay attention to you, you will affect them emotionally.
In fact, you cannot avoid affecting others emotionally - you can only choose whether you do so in a conscious and deliberate manner.
Relationship management is the ultimate goal of emotional awareness, as influencing the perception and behavior of others is the key to gaining their cooperation.
Writing and Delivering a Speech: An Exercise in EI
The process of planning a speech is an exercise in EI: you must understand the emotional state the audience brings to the auditorium, the final emotion you want to leave them with, and the way to guide them from one to the other.
In the process of delivering a speech, EI is also used in reading the feedback from the audience and making adjustments as needed when things are not going quite the way you planned. Such contingencies are best planned in advance - but even then you must at least recognize the reaction in order to know when to employ them.
In instances where a speaker is part of a series of presentations, paying attention to the audience's emotions is also critical, because the final emotion of the speaker who precedes you is the starting emotion from which you will have to work.
He mentions the value of EI in communication in general - whether you are dealing with an audience or a single individual, being aware of their emotions and the impact you have upon them is important to success in communicating and interpersonal relations.