HOLD ON TO YOUR INNER SELF

Emotions are important in building your confidence because they drive your behaviour and how you feel about yourself. They also have an enormous impact on your health and well-being. When you start to get in tune with your emotions, you start to get to know them better and listen to them. As you do this you will gather vital information about what is happening to you. By becoming more self aware, you put yourself in a stronger position by being able to manage your emotions instead of reacting to other people and circumstances.

As you begin to start take control of your emotions you may be tempted to never allow yourself to get angry or fearful, it sounds sensible to drop these out of your life, right? Absolutely not! Even your most negative emotions have their place in looking after you. They confirm you are both alive and real. Your job is to notice your emotional reactions and focus the energy from them appropriately.

Assessing your emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence relates to being able to rein in your emotional impulses, to read others innermost feelings, and to handle relationships smoothly. These concepts are so important they are being incorporated into business as well education.

Emotional intelligence relates to a range of competencies of the following two aspects;

Personal Competence

How you handle yourself, your awareness of your feelings, and your understanding of your own capabilities.

Social Competence

How you handle relationships with other people, in particular how you handle unhelpful reactions, how you show empathy, and how much flexibility in dealing with difficult situations.

Remember no matter what you do it is your ability to manage both your emotions and to be able to bring the best out of those people around you that will make the difference between success or failure. If you lose your temper you risk losing a customer or damage an important relationship.

The good news is you can improve your emotional intelligence over time. Your emotional intelligence is not dictated by what you are born with. There are a number of formal tools on the market that can be used to understand the fine details of your own emotional intelligence and how you score.

These tools are very useful but to make the most use of them it helps if you have people around you who can provide you with feedback. It is best to do this with a coach as the feedback you receive can be very challenging to deal with.