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Hey there, Maureen Chana here, founder of the MindSight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you deliver results by learning to work smarter, be in control of your brain, manage yours and others' emotions, change behaviors, flourish, and exceed expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel Podcast. I am so excited about this episode today because today we're going to be looking at the role of emotional intelligence in leadership and business success. Now, for those of you that have been listening to me regularly or follow me on social media, you know how passionate I am about empowering people to improve or develop their emotional intelligence. So today we're gonna dig a bit deeper into the importance of developing your emotional intelligence. So without wasting any more time, get settled, get your cup of tea or coffee or drink or whatever that might be, put your feet up and listen in. I'll start with this quote that I found in Fast Company magazine. Emotional competence is the single most important personal quality that each of us must develop and access to experience a breakthrough. Many businesses are facing a crisis of morale, engagement, and productivity now. High emotional intelligence is a very strong predictor of success, but despite all the research that has been done on this topic, many people still downplay its importance. In fact, high emotional intelligence bolsters hard skills, helping us think more creatively about how best to leverage our technical abilities or skills. Daniel Goldman reported that 80-90% of the competencies that differentiate top performers are in the domain of emotional intelligence. So, what is emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence is a learnable, measurable skill set for being smarter with your feelings. Emotional intelligence is a social intelligence that enables people to recognize their own and other people's emotions. It's an intelligence that may be learned, developed, and improved, and it's your ability to use your awareness to discern the feelings underlying interpersonal communication and to resist the temptation to react impulsively and thoughtlessly. Instead, it allows you to respond authentically. Ryback is quoted as saying, Emotional intelligence is about influence without manipulation or abuse of authority. It's about perceiving, learning, relating, innovating, prioritizing, and acting in ways that take into account and legitimize emotions rather than relying on logic or intellect or technical analysis alone. So it's your ability to use your emotions to intentionally guide your behavior and thoughts in ways that enhance your results and life. These skills will provide you with the ability to understand and manage your emotions, increase your self-worth, your self-confidence, enable you to develop resilience to challenges in business, in your role as a leader, and in life generally. It will also enable your ability to develop positive and rewarding relationships and increase your team's engagement. I have come across so many leaders that lack emotional intelligence and have as a result struggled to get the best out of their teams, achieve their goals or targets, or even build good personal relationships with their people and customers. Many are stuck feeling anxious, overwhelmed, their self-sabotaging and underperforming. Many people still ask why is emotional intelligence important? Studies have shown that people who are intellectually the brightest are often not the most successful, either in business, in leadership, or in their personal lives. In a recent survey, 89% of leaders identified emotional intelligence as highly important or essential to meeting the organization's top challenges. Emotions serve as the single most important source of human energy, authenticity, and drive. It provides us with vital and potentially profitable information every minute of the day. Our emotions comprise the feeling of who we are even more than our bodies and minds contain our memories and histories. Having good emotional intelligence involves optimal functioning of your brain functions. The parts of the brain that help keep vigilant to danger and opportunities are very important in ensuring that you react appropriately to everyday stresses and opportunities. By moderating your action to challenging people and situations, reading them correctly, you learn to moderate your fight or flight response into more socially acceptable responses. Being smart combines knowing what to do as well as how to do it best. So let's now look at some of the ways in which emotional intelligence can help your organization or your team achieve high performance. The first thing we'll look at is emotional self-awareness. CJ Junk says, who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes. We are raised to doubt ourselves, to discount intuition and to seek outside validation for virtually everything we do. We are conditioned to assume that people other than ourselves know best and can tell us the honest truth more clearly than we could ever tell ourselves. Emotional self-awareness is your ability to be aware of and understand yours and other people's feelings and their impact. It's your ability to accept and respect your strengths and weaknesses with the ability to improve and pursue meaningful objectives. Being able to identify and manage your emotional brain will empower you to hold yourself and others accountable to your best effort in all things. It's the ability to discover your calling and face hardships and problems but not live inside them. Developing your ability to truly understand your deep thoughts, values, and beliefs in your subconscious brain will enable you to respond to situations and adapt your behavior accordingly to achieve the results that you desire. For example, understanding that your frustration comes from thinking that you can manage your circumstances, such as your leadership role or departmental targets, you may try channeling this frustration into a more motivating emotion, such as excitement for a new challenge, which thereby frees up your mind from worry and allowing you the mental space to solve problems or to identify people within your team that can come up with the solution, or even the ability to give your people the time and space to come up with solutions, and not you feeling that because you're the leader, you have to have all the answers. Executives and leaders that don't develop their self-awareness risk falling into an emotionally deadly routine that will have a detrimental impact on their performance, their motivation, and the ability to inspire others. And E. Hoffner says, we laugh loudest when we lie to ourselves. The second one we look at is better management of emotions. There are so many challenges on the path to success for any leader, such as increased work responsibilities with less resources and finances, lack of time to do an adequate job, now managing remote workers in different geographical regions, managing increasing work complexity, competition, and regulations. Our current climate is evidence of the world we live in now. Great uncertainty, constant change and volatility, but with high emotional intelligence, you can get better at driving through these challenging and ambiguous times. High performing leadership requires your ability to have increasing creativity, energy, collaboration, intuition, which you will get by developing high emotional intelligence. Mounting evidence shows that how you feel about yourself and your work and how open you value yourself and others depends on how effectively you manage emotions and tensions. Being able to control your emotions and help others control theirs is key for building positive relationships with your team, with clients, with investors and other important allies to your organization or business. Next is effective communication. Communication means the ability to create understanding and not merely sending information. Your ability to communicate clearly and effectively is important for any leader to ensure that the right message is being given and received. If people do not understand you, then you have not communicated your message effectively. It's difficult to have a deep conversation with someone if you don't empathize with them. If you can't perceive and identify with the emotions of others, communication will be more difficult and the message that you're trying to relay will get compromised. Leaders with high emotional intelligence can leverage empathy, problem solving, and social skills to come up with solutions, create strong positive relationships, and ultimately win people over. We'll now look at decision making. Our brains require emotions to evaluate our decisions, and this is why, when stressed, anxious, or fearful, your ability to make effective decisions is affected massively. Emotions can lead to your worst decisions or your best ones. The difference is emotional intelligence. Next is internal motivation. High emotionally intelligent people are self-motivated, they're driven to excel in everything they do, and they find more room and reasons to improve. They have an ability to keep striving to be a better version of themselves. Now, empathy. This is your ability to recognize, understand, and feel the emotions of others. It's having an understanding of the plight of others and being able to show compassion in the midst of your difficulties. Empathy, unlike sympathy, involves actually sharing the emotional experience another person is having. When a friend loses a family member, sympathy is sending flowers and giving a hug. Empathy is shedding tears alongside that friend due to an emotional connection. Now, if you want to know more about all these things I'm talking about, you can visit my online academy, the MindSight Academy, and I've got a fantastic course on emotional intelligence in leadership. I'll put the link in the description below. And I'm also going to give everyone that listens to this podcast that wants to do this course a discount. So I'm going to put a coupon code into the description as well. If you want to do this course, everyone that comes on this training gets coaching from me as well. Because developing emotional intelligence requires you to be able to require your brain to be able to manage the emotions, and you need help along the way, which you will get alongside this training. So while you're doing the training, you're also getting a lot of support from me and from other leaders in the community. So the next thing we're going to look at is knowing what your people need. It's so easy to make assumptions what your people want, or sometimes you find a lot of managers and leaders completely ignoring what their people need or their feelings and just focusing on the results that they want to achieve. But to be able to really understand what your people need, you have to be an active and attentive listener. The amount of times that I've been into Teams and listening to leaders complain about their people's lack of engagement or their people underperforming and on discussing with the individual people in the team, you find that the problem is really from the manager or leader that hasn't spent time to understand what the people actually need. The key is once you, as a leader, take time to really care about your people, you find that you get the best out of them because they're willing to bring their whole self to work and do what needs to be done to achieve the goals for your organization and for the team. The next thing we're going to look at is productivity. The emotional behavior of a leader plays a major role in team performance. The leader's mood influences the mood of the team and this drives performance and effort at both the individual and group level. Finally, stress management. Enhancing managers, our leaders' emotional intelligence, will have a positive influence on key drivers of your organization's performance. The brain mapping diagnostic assessment that we use at the MindSight Academy is used to help determine individuals and teams' current behaviors, and then we use this to design an intervention based on the assessment results that focuses on learning and developing new habits. Leaders with high emotional intelligence rise and thrive in times of stress. So now the question is how do you manage change? Because we know that in this environment we're going through, there's a lot of change occurring. And because of this, we know that leaders cannot afford not to cultivate high emotional intelligence. Because research has shown that is the primary key to achieving success and high performance. Leaders are driven and motivated individuals with an eternal drive to succeed, but many often neglect the skills needed to manage their emotions and relate well to others. It's difficult to improve emotional intelligence, but it's absolutely possible. As long as you have an open mind and a willingness to put the tough work in, you will achieve excellent results. And these results, as much as having a massive positive impact on your work, you will also find it having a massive beneficial impact on your personal life. So, how do you increase your emotional intelligence? I'm going to give you a few points here. Emotional intelligence can be developed and increased through practice. And that's why I said that everyone that comes on the training, you get extra coaching from me to help you put in the practice that you need to achieve the results. So here are some ways that you can do this on your own. Listen to others. Listening allows us to better understand the needs and emotions of others. Listening takes the focus of your own needs and shifts it to those of others, enabling better solutions that benefit more people. Avoid jumping to quick conclusions and over-generalizing. Be open to receiving feedback. Feedback can sometimes be hurtful, but it can always be helpful as it exposes us to objective outside perspectives. In the face of feedback or criticism, ask yourself how can I improve and grow from this? Next is pay attention to body language. Much of communication is non-verbal. So if you only pay attention to verbal communication, you could be missing out on how a person really feels and efforts to help them will thereby be misinformed. And this is one area that we go into so much detail on the training in the MindSight Academy. Be perceptive. Intentions get misunderstood and feelings get hurt regularly. Being allowed to other people's emotions and actions will help you develop stronger connections and help build trust. Finally, manage stress and boost your resilience. To overcome obstacles like stress, you need to change your response to this situation. Our perspective of stress actually determines how we experience it. When you look at a stressful situation as a challenge, it motivates you, increases your confidence, and allows you to learn from the experience. Resiliency consists of maintaining hope in the face of adversity that things will eventually get better while doing what it takes to make things happen. So, in summary, emotions drive people, and people drive performance. Leaders with high emotional intelligence are more likely to make better decisions, engage and influence more effectively, and create the right mood and climate for the team to thrive. They are able to improve teamwork and manage conflicts more effectively. Higher emotional intelligence for leaders links to high outcome achievement, which links to increased work engagement during transformational change. So improving your organizational emotional intelligence is within reach and the return far exceeds the investment. So I hope you've got a lot of takeaways and actions that you're going to start putting in place from this podcast. This is a topic that I am so passionate about. I do a lot of coaching on it, I do a lot of training on it because I know it's one area that once you can get hold of, understand, and implement, it's completely life-changing in terms of your personal life and your professional life as well. It's your key to success, it's your key to thrive, it's your key to breakthrough, it's your key to flourish and exceed expectations. Do everything you can to develop your own emotional intelligence and also help others do the same. So if you've not subscribed to this podcast, please subscribe wherever you listen to it and also give a fantastic review so that other people can find the podcast to also help them change their own life and achieve the excellence that they truly desire and deserve. Do stay safe, and I look forward to catching up with you again in our next episode. Bye for now.