It had only been about 48 hours that I was working at Swift Kick full time. I walked in the office on the third day of my first week and didn’t even make it to my chair when Sabina asked, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Trapped. Couldn’t shake it off like I had planned. I woke up to a message that my grandmother passed away in the night. (Her passing was not sudden. She had been deteriorating for some time.) When I told Sabina and Tom what happened, Tom’s response was “Wow, Sabina, some really great emotional intelligence.”
Emotional intelligence is being able to recognize your emotions and what they are telling you about how they affect the people around you. Having someone on your team who is so in tune that they can offer support before you know you need it offers a great dynamic. Emotional intelligence has the capacity to deepen the connection of team members, offering understanding for others in moments of stress, frustration, sadness, but, sometimes, more importantly, in times of joy.
Have you ever known someone was in a bad mood before they even said a word? How did you treat them? What did you say or do to make them feel better?
Here are some ways to get better at recognizing your emotional intelligence for yourself and your team:
Pay attention to your feelings and behavior
Set a timer for three hour increments. Take a few deep breaths and evaluate yourself. How you are feeling? How you have behaved in the past few hours? Do your actions reflect the emotions that you were feeling? Elephant Journal writer, Alex Myers, cites Pema Chödrön and Jill Bolte Taylor in their description of a 90 second emotion. They say if you let an emotion exist for 90 seconds without judging or suppressing it, the emotion will disappear. (While our brains are a bit more complicated than that, this framework provides a good exercise.) Give yourself the time to feel whatever it is you feel. Acknowledge it and…
Accept Responsibility for each emotion.
Other people cannot make you do or feel something. Your reaction to the world around you is yours alone. Only you can decide to continue to sit with an emotion or to accept it and learn from it. Once you do, understanding people and yourself will get a little less confusing.
Practice empathy!
Start with yourself. Now that you have started paying attention to your emotions, start asking yourself why you feel that way. Sometimes, the answer may be “I don’t know.” And that’s okay. Just remember, in order to build a strong campus culture, we must first start with ourselves. When you are able to answer that question for yourself, you can start to ask, “Why is {Jane} feeling this way?” Your internal answer can provide a lot of cues as to how to interact with that person.
No matter what, stay positive.
Sometimes, other people’s negative emotional pulls can be hard to resist. They may pull us down to their mood. But imagine that same emotional pull from someone who is empowered and enthusiastic! Be that person.
Team development, campus culture, self-improvement…whatever your goals are when developing your Emotional Intelligence, remember it is a lifelong process. Whether your are student body president or an advisor, everyone can benefit from a little emotional reflection. And as you master it, you too can become as in tune with your team as Sabina was with me so early on in our working relationship. Thank you, Sabina. <3
