How to develop emotional intelligence through leadership soft skills
The value of building emotional intelligence habits is how they can transform all areas of your leadership.
Once you attain emotional intelligence maturity, it changes how you act and feel towards others and how they respond to you.
Why do emotional intelligence skills deliver life changing results? Because they amplify the power of all your other life skills, including work skills, social skills and leadership skills.
- For example, if you are not getting promoted in your current job or not getting hired for those jobs you really want, I can pretty much guarantee it’s because of a shortfall in emotional intelligence training
- If your personal relationships with those you love are strained or stressed, its very likely due to a need to better deploy emotional intelligence skills
- Emotional intelligence in leadership is a key factor for effective leaders
Luckily, with a bit of effort and determination, you can develop emotional intelligence relatively quickly.
How to ‘reverse engineer’ emotional intelligence
How? In my research into talent development, I have found that the best way to ‘reverse engineer’ emotional intelligence habits is through careful soft skills training.
Soft skills develop emotional intelligence by internalizing certain emotional traits as automatic and instinctual behavior.
It’s why I include soft skills development in both my Employee Development Plan and my Leadership Development Plan.
They are essential to both employee development and leadership development:
- Soft skills develop the emotional intelligence to make you a better communicator
- Developing leadership soft skills deepens your emotional intelligence maturity as a leader
- You increase your empathy, compassion, and understanding into others, which is the essence of communication.
I will show you the process of developing emotional intelligence habits through soft skills training in this guide.
(You can find more about my approach to leadership training and development here.)
How the concept of emotional intelligence started
Ever since the groundbreaking best seller by Daniel Goleman was released in 2006, the topic of emotional intelligence has been widely researched and written about.
Emotional intelligence in the workplace and in leadership has garnered huge amounts of attention in the business press.
There are numerous elements that contribute to increasing emotional intelligence, so let’s boil down what EI is in a practical sense, and why you absolutely want it.
But first a little bit about my background in leadership development and employee development skills development.
About the Author and Course Creator
Larry LaFata is a talent development specialist and the founder of The Modern Leadership Center.
He has a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable concepts. This provides clients with streamlined leadership skills training and employee development solutions they can implement quickly.
After 30 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Larry turned to his passion: leadership development and talent development. The core of his course creation approach is customized self-assessment and skills development templates. No psychometric tests or psychology assessments are ever used.
Larry is the author of: Employee Development Programs, Career Planning programs, Employee Rewards Programs and now his new Leadership Development Program.
Larry’s mission is to better humanity through innovative talent development strategies. His continuing efforts in talent development keeps him in the forefront of thought leadership in the industry.
What is emotional intelligence (EI)
Emotional intelligence can be said to be managing your own emotions in order to improve managing the emotions of others.
There are numerous benefits to being emotionally intelligent (EI) including:
- It makes you a more attractive relationship in all walks of life
- Increases your chance of getting hired or promoted
- Increases your people management skills
- Increases your social intelligence
- Improves your intrapersonal skills
- Reduces conflicts in your relationships
- It is an integral part of leadership development
And many other reasons, as varied as there are emotions.
So what’s one of the best ways to build this critically important skill?
You develop emotional intelligence habits through soft skills training.
How soft skills training builds emotional intelligence habits
Because emotional intelligence habits are largely an abstract concept, soft skills training is used to break them down into behaviors you can develop and control.
This Venn diagram shows how soft skills relate to emotional intelligence:
- Soft skills develop emotion self management.
- Emotional intelligence is strengthened from soft skill development. Once you can manage your own emotions, you become skilled in developing and managing theemotions of others.
You then build those behaviors into habits by programming them through affirmations until they are part of your subconscious mind.
What are soft skills? Can I have a few examples?
Soft skills are interpersonal skills that improve the emotional connections and the understanding you have with other people in your relationships.
Here is a short list of soft skills as examples:
- Communication – building empathy skills to understand others better and be better understood
- Self-awareness – being in tune with how you treat others
- Empathy – understanding and respecting the emotions of others
- Active listening – using skills and techniques such as paraphrasing and non-verbal cues
- Flexibility – the skill of looking for multiple options and solutions
- Patience – a form of respect for others and yourself
- Respect – honoring the sovereignty and legitimacy of other’s emotions
- Reliability – being dependable in your commitments
- Goal setting – the skill of setting and achieving objectives
- Delegation – giving power to others to complete necessary tasks
- Social skills – how you make others feel emotionally
- Motivation – the internal desire to achieve
You can see pretty quickly how important these skills are to improve relationships in all areas of your life.
The beauty of soft skills training is you can take your time and learn a few at a time.
I recommend only three soft skills per quarter in my leadership development programs, on a continual cycle.
Best of all, you may only need a couple soft skills to make a quantum leap in your relationships and leadership abilities.
How to set up your own soft skills training to develop emotional intelligence habits
To start your own soft skills training , simply list the skills you want to develop.
Go through the categories I give you in the soft skills examples section above.
Choose categories where you believe you have the most need, then build out a list of soft skills to develop.
For example, lets say you want to improve your interpersonal communication skill.
You could start with the skill of respect for others. Put in the form of an affirmation, such as “I am respectful in all communications.”
Repeat that soft skill affirmation each day as you go about your workday and in social interactions. Over 90 days it will become an integral part of your emotional intelligence.
Once you develop a list of skills, you affirm them each day until they become habits.
This simple affirmation process is how emotional intelligence skills become permanently integrated into your subconscious.
Once they are part of you, you will instinctively deploy them as needed in your relationships.
Summary of How to develop emotional intelligence through leadership soft skills
Soft skills training develops emotional control habits so you can manage your emotions. This in turn allows you to increase your emotional intelligence to better manage the emotions of others.
To develop permanent emotional intelligence habits, simply use soft skills training with properly framed affirmations. The skill then becomes a permanent part of your subconscious mind.
Leadership soft skills trained with affirmations become habits. This is what creates permanent leadership traits.
Why wait to develop these critically important skills?
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