Emotional Intelligence (EI) involves a set of skills that define how effectively you perceive, understand, reason with and manage your own and others' feelings.  These skills are important at work because, whether we admit it or not, we all have feelings and, as the saying goes, 'if we don't have our feelings, our feelings will have us.' 

Emotions influence our decision-making, our performance and our behavior. Think about your tone of voice, body language and facial expressions - these are all part of how we communicate and present in a business environment.  Current EI research has demonstrated the emotionally intelligent leader will always be a more effective leader than a leader with a high IQ and low understanding of their emotions.  Probably worth paying attention to your emotions! Here are this month's tips for self management - getting a grip on your emotions, even after you have lost your cool.

Emotional Self-Management

Effectively managing your own emotions.

Tips:

• Think before you react! You may need to take a deep breath or count to ten when something begins to set you off.
• Engage in activities that make you feel positive at work and, if you need to distract yourself instead of reacting negatively to something,  make it something positive.
• Explore the causes of things that upset you at work.
• When someone specific irritates you, think about one thing you can value in that person.
• Move on from situations that bother you quickly, rather than letting issues fester.
• When someone at work frustrates you take time to think about the cause of your frustration from three different perspectives: yours, the other person's, and a neutral observer's.  Understand what frustrates you and then appropriately express that frustration.