How You Can Increase Your Emotional Intelligence Today

hi there I'm Dr Travis Bradberry I'm the president and co-founder of talent smart I'm also the co-author of a book called emotional intelligence 2. 0 I've been asked to speak to you today uh a little bit about what you can do to increase your emotional intelligence today well the first thing you need to keep in mind is that increasing your emotional intelligence requires self-awareness we've tested close to a million people now and we consistently find that those who are the most self-aware are emotionally intelligent uh if you think about this you can't change something you can't manage an emotion or you can't respond to someone more effectively unless you're aware of what's going on so to increase your awareness you need to really lean into your discomfort a little bit and as you move through your day today look for the moments where your emotions get the better of you now often times we we just put the blinders on we are it's a lot more comfortable to not recognize all the things you could be doing differently but the beauty of emotional intelligence is when you bring something to your awareness and you actually practice a different response you can actually change your brain our brains are wired such that as we increase the flow of traffic between the lyic system where emotions are created and the prefrontal cortex where we think rationally you can actually increase your ability to respond rationally to your emotions so find something that you can do differently and practice doing so just try to uh respond differently and try over and over again until you do it well and you'll physically change your brain now another thing you can do to increase your awareness is to test yourself there are a lot of great emotional intelligence tests out there and they will increase your awareness they will change your perspective and the really important thing is they'll give you an objective look at your behavior another thing you can try if you don't want to spend money on an emotional intelligence test is you can ask for feedback talk to people that you work with and gather their feedback on what you can do differently I want to show you a graph that for those of you who are tasked with uh increasing the emotional intelligence of entire organizations will really give you some perspective as you move through your day okay so I want to show you this graph because those of you who are tasked with increasing the emotional intelligence of your organization or at least you're responsible for it because you work uh training and development um or human resources we'll find this piece of data really interesting um what you're looking at is data we collected that was published in the Harvard Business Review that looks at emotional intelligence against job titles so in this First Column here you have individual contributors and we find that as people move up the corporate ladder in middle management emotional intelligence scores go up so companies are promoting people because they're good with people because they have emotional intelligence well once people move Beyond uh middle management into director uh executive positions uh the SE suite and finally CEOs um emotional intelligence scores go down it's a ski slope and CEOs on average have the lowest emotional intelligence in the Workforce Now within each of these job categories the best performers are those with the highest levels of emotional intelligence so we find that companies are they're promoting people for the wrong reason they're uh Beyond management they're only looking at the metrics and they're undervaluing the how the role that emotional intelligence plays for these leaders um and they're hindering their performance so this is something that I hope will influence your perspective today as well all right well I hope that's helpful and I wish you luck in your quest to uh improve your emotional intelligence and thanks so much for your time