What is the role of Emotional Intelligence in the career path?

Emotional Intelligence is one of the most important concepts in the world of Psychology, but, nevertheless, many companies and professionals make the mistake of assuming that this only exists in the world of self-help or, perhaps, in that of psychotherapy.

The truth is that Emotional Intelligence has implications that go far beyond the private life of each one, and therefore, project work and career paths in general are heavily influenced by our ability to harness the potential of these kinds of skills. Let's see why.

• Related article: "What is emotional intelligence?"

Why is Emotional Intelligence important in our career path?

Let's start with the most basic: what is Emotional Intelligence? Its about set of skills that allows us to detect, identify and properly modulate emotions in all areas of life.

It is a type of intelligence that goes beyond what we usually understand by "being intelligent", because it is not based on elements of logical reasoning or mathematics nor in the use of words to solve concepts, but that its subject is emotions, something that cannot be directly expressed in words or in numbers. On the other hand,

is present to a greater or lesser extent in all people, although in some more than in others, and it can also be trained.

Thus, Emotional Intelligence allows us to know what we are feeling at a given moment, what a person with whom we interact is feeling, what situations trigger certain emotions and feelings, what are the consequences of certain emotions and feelings arising in a situation concrete, and how we can alter the environment or ourselves to promote or hinder the appearance of a state emotional.

And it is that although Emotional Intelligence does not give us the power to fully control emotions (ultimately these are ahead of our decision-making capacity), we can gain a certain power of influence over the situations that give them wings, intervening about what surrounds us, exposing us to certain contexts and not others, or even inducing us to certain physiological states that bring us closer to some emotions and distance us from them. others.

However… Why is Emotional Intelligence relevant when developing a career path that satisfies us? Mainly for the following reasons:

• It helps us to identify and recognize what really motivates us.
• It helps us better communicate what we are and what can be expected of us as professionals.
• It helps us regulate feelings through thoughts, giving them frames of interpretation of reality that adjust to the constructive mentality that we need and without allowing us to fall into paralyzing pessimism.
• It is key to avoiding avoidable conflicts and finding common ground when negotiating our job prospects.
• It allows us to create workspaces in which we feel comfortable and help us focus on our goals.
• It helps prevent us from throwing it all away in the most stressful moments, when we have already made significant progress in the desired work direction.

Emotions are innate and universal elements and, therefore, they are present in all cultures (and are expressed in a very similar way in all of them). This is so because after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, our body has adapted to take advantage of these survival tools to increase the chances of not being harmed by sources of danger. But after decades of scientific development, today we are able to look beyond the spontaneous and innate use of emotions and include them in our most important decisions and strategic, to make them part of our tools to develop professionally, and not simple obstacles or inconveniences that we must avoid because they are not the product of the reason.

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An opportunity to grow professionally

As we have seen, Emotional Intelligence is applicable in all kinds of situations, because there is no area of ​​life that we do not experience through emotions. However, this simple fact is something that not a few people and even organizations overlook: the idea that the The only emotionally relevant element of the workers is their desire to get paid at the end of the month. It is surprisingly resistant. and continues to hamper both the progress of many companies and the well-being of many professionals.

Keep in mind that underestimating Emotional Intelligence not only implies wasting many motivational strategies that can be applied individually or in groups; it also means that we lose the ability to prevent and resolve conflicts in companies, that job prospects are centered on the short-termism and immediate productivity goals, that the capacity to retain talent in companies is lost, and that a worse climate is generated organizational.

For this reason, it is necessary to know how to see beyond the logic of short-term economic gains and losses in order to get out of this dysfunctional loop in which workers are treated and collaborating professionals as if they were robots, despite the fact that if several decades of research in Psychology have taught us anything, it is that we are very far from be. Fortunately, being aware of the importance of Emotional Intelligence at work not only helps us prevent avoidable obstacles and difficulties; as well It opens the door for us to take advantage of many opportunities that we would not have even considered otherwise..

For this reason, in coaching we accompany people in the challenge of modeling and facilitating the emotions they need to achieve what they have set as a work objective. It is a process that includes recognizing the emotion we are feeling, the actions we have available from that emotion, and investigating what actions we would have from a different emotion, among other things. In this way, you gain the ability to identify and understand emotions, and also the ability to apply this knowledge on a daily basis and make it give rise to results in practice.

• Related article: "Psychology of work and organizations: a profession with a future"

Do you want to train the key skills in Emotional Intelligence?

As we have seen, Emotional Intelligence is not a static and innate element with which we are born and before which our experience and our learnings do not count for anything: it is transformed over time according to the experiences to which we expose ourselves and the skills that we go acquiring. Therefore, we can train it in all areas of our lives, which offers us many opportunities to grow and improve.

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If you are interested in enhancing your Emotional Intelligence, Get in contact with us. On European School of Coaching We have been accompanying people and organizations for many years both in the field of training and in accompanying processes of coaching and consultancy for companies.