Episode #132: Emotional Intelligence – The New Success Superpower

Finding Your Groove With Kathleen Thompson

Financial acumen, programming, storytelling, empathy. All traits people tell us are or were a success superpower. On today’s episode, we explore a superpower that is stronger and more comprehensive than all of them put together: Emotional Intelligence.

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On This Episode

Rhythm of Life – The First Big Test of my 2020 Word “Believe”
Random Riffs – What if You Could Choose Your Own Groundhog Day?
Feature Segment –The New Success Superpower

Today’s Quote

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. –Pablo Picasso

Rhythm of Life – The First Big Test of my 2020 Word “Believe”

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m praying. I have a mental picture of me worshiping God in the midst of millions or billions of people. I feel completely invisible.

Except that God tells me I’m not. He sees me and loves me just as I am. I believe it in my head. It doesn’t seem to reach my body.

So here’s the first big test of my 2020 word – believe. Can my belief extend all the way to my heart? My full body? The answer to that has physical and emotional implications.

Have you already been tested with your 2020 word? I guess we should expect it, right? Growth means stretching beyond where we’ve been before. Testing is part of the process.

Random Riffs – What if You Could Choose Your Own Groundhog Day?

We just had Groundhog Day in the US. That day just happened to also be the Super Bowl. And Jeep aired a commercial that redid parts of the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and others. And THAT got me thinking….if I could repeat any one day over and over, what would it be?

I thought of a few possibilities and settled on one that might surprise you a bit. Listen to the episode to find out more.

If you could repeat any one day again and again, what would you choose? Leave a comment.

Feature Segment: The New Success Superpower

We’ve all seen them – articles about “the one thing Warren Buffett looks for that determines success”. “Crack the success code with this one thing.” “Do this for massive success.”

Over the years, people have touted different skills as the new superpower for success: financial acumen, programming, collaboration, agile, grit, abundance, empathy. All are great. I think ever greater, is this – Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence, or EI, includes more than empathy. That’s what makes it a superpower. And we’ll discuss different facets of Emotional Intelligence in a series alternating with our Self-Improvement Experiment Series.

Six dimensions of EI are discussed in Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley’s book “The Emotional Life of Your Brain”. Because we can have unique combinations of these 6 dimensions, they call it our Emotional Style.

1. Resilience
2. Outlook
3. Social Intuition
4. Self-Awareness
5. Sensitivity to Context
6. Attention

Is EI really that important? And if so, why? Well, work has been evolving over time. We’ve had 3 different models thus far:

Model 1.0: Command and control. Army, Nobles vs. Serfs, Dictator, Factory model. It’s all about compliance and order.

Model 2.0: Carrots and sticks. It seems to give people a choice. But when you look at it, it’s rewarding the worker if they do what those in power want, and punishes them if they don’t. It’s really a disguised version of command and control. Dan Pink talks about this in his book Drive.

Model 3.0: Internal motivation – autonomy and interdependence. An entrepreneurial way of operating. Creativity, working together, agile teams. This model depends on enough people exercising emotional intelligence. Those who do will be more successful in Model 3.0.

Your actions:

1. Remind yourself that EI is a success superpower. However you choose to define success.
2. Think about definition of EI: the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. Ask yourself this question: how can I further develop this skill? And then don’t actively think about it. Just let your mind do the work.

This hasn’t come natural to me. It’s a skill we each can and should learn. I keep working on it. Because Emotional Intelligence is the new success superpower. What do you think about Emotional Intelligence? Do you think it's the new superpower, or not? Leave a comment.

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The post Episode #132: Emotional Intelligence – The New Success Superpower first appeared on Kathleen Ann Thompson.