What is Emotional Intelligence?

If you could only master ONE SKILL for the next 10-years….

After 30 years of entrepreneurship, the question I get asked the most is, “what’s the most important skill to develop?”

My answer isn’t what upstart business owners (and sometimes seasoned ones) are looking for; it’s not marketing, sales, systems, technology, automation or management!

In fact, my answer can even leave the asker somewhat bewildered and even disappointed without any context.

So what is the answer, you ask?

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE or EQ.

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

EQ is developing the ability to positively manage emotions, communicate effectively, empathise with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict has moved the needle most over my journey.

Emotional intelligence causes the experience you’re having with the world, which is why it’s essential not to atrophy this muscle and build it.

Without developing EQ, every event gets filtered based on your lack of situational awareness and pre-existing beliefs, which means these emotions will run your life, unconsciously dictating the way you feel.

MY EQ BACK STORY

I was at the mercy of unconscious emotions for most of my early life and early adulthood despite intellectually been at a higher level.

For example, at school intellectually, I was able to cruise, put in about 50% effort and top the class.

You could say I was two years ahead of my peers in an academic sense, however, when it came to connection and making friends, I was two (or even more) years behind.

In adulthood, I suffered depression, and my emotions would swing like a turbine in the wind from overstimulated to extreme lows.

This background shows why IQ is irrelevant when handling human interaction, which is essential for connection, managing conflict, growing a business and joy.

HOW CAN EQ GROWTH MULTIPLY YOUR BUSINESS?

Developing emotional intelligence has allowed me to transition from a recurring bottleneck in each business to a leader that inspires the team to perform autonomously.

This transformation has rapidly expanded each company’s growth with or without me.

Without EQ, the ability to successfully navigate the ups and downs of business, team challenges and life is almost impossible, as illustrated in my past.

EQ AND DEALING WITH PEOPLE

Each person you interact with has their own level of emotional intelligence that you’re going to collide with and the leader will be the one with the stronger frame in this area.

This effect means as you expand EQ, so does the business’s potential to grow because you’re now a more resourceful and capable leader.

So next time you’re looking for the “magic pill” to cut through to a new level, don’t reach for the marketing or sales manual, instead, focus on becoming the person who can manage that growth to avoid sabotage when you arrive.

Can you relate to your emotional growth not keeping up with the business’s growth? 

What happened?

A PRACTICAL EXERCISE

Grab a pen and capture a list of the emotions you’ve experienced in the last 7 days.

Identify the primary emotion dominating how you feel.

Write down how this emotion has influenced the outcomes of the last week.

Is it positive or negative?

Now define the next step to work on this, what can you listen to or read, who can you talk to or what can you do to take this emotion to the gym?

WHAT TO DO NEXT

If you had one question for me about this post, what would it be?

Put it in the comments below (or if it’s personal PM me), start the work now.