Have you ever sat in a movie and cried unexpectedly because of its content? This doesn’t always happen to viewers because there is something extremely happy or sad that has just occurred on the big screen. It could be that the film’s creators added subliminal messages or that a certain kind of music was what elicited your emotions. For example, you might have been manipulated into crying without even realizing it. The reaction of your body was more related to thoughts or emotions in your unconscious mind than in your conscious mind. We actually have experiences like this every day, especially in response to advertising (whether mobile, digital, or on TV). So, we want to ask this question:
“What would you do if you could recognize cues from other people during everyday interactions and control your behavior in response to them?”
This is a question that we get often, and we believe that the answer is that people will get more training in emotional intelligence.
The Background on Emotional Intelligence
People who have high emotional intelligence are able to recognize what others are feeling based on cues such as their tone of voice and their nonverbal language. For people who are born with much of this kind of intelligence, it’s a no-brainer to understand others and to adjust one’s professional behavior accordingly. For everyone else who isn’t born with high emotional intelligence, it’s easy enough to receive coaching on the subject.
Why Millennials are a Good Generation to Watch
We know that you may not have heard about The Everest Academy emotional intelligence coaching program, but you may have read about Millennials in the news. In case you weren’t sick of them yet, we thought this was a good time to bring up how these children born in the 1980s and 1990s (who are now adults in the workforce) are bringing back a resurgence of emotional intelligence. They seem to be very needy on the one hand (if you could classify an entire generation of people as such) and high in emotional intelligence on the other hand. They are, in fact, becoming quite a force to reckon with for older generations who may not exceed in this skill set in the workplace. Their emotional needs as well as their insights into other people’s emotions are an interesting dynamic to have on any modern work team.
Building More Skills in the Area of Emotional Intelligence Matters
If you are in any kind of leadership role, especially at the helm of a work team with members from different locations, you would want to spend time understanding your level of emotional intelligence. One way would be to take a survey. Another way would be to read different scenarios that would require this kind of intelligence, or understanding your emotions and those of others, and choose how you’d react. Would you react in a way that the scenario writer recommends or in a different way? We think that you would want to be able to control your behavior, but some scenarios would be hard for you to deal with, much less keep your mouth shut.