Name: Emotional Intelligence 2.0
Rating: 4.1 (449 reviews)
Author: Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves

What’s in it for me? Improve your emotional intelligence and succeed in work and life.

To maximize your career potential, you need to strengthen your people skills. Even if you’re a strategy expert or tech genius, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you need to know how to interact with people, whether employees, investors or customers.

And people skills are just the start. To survive the stress of modern working life, you too need to become an expert self-manager, able to control your emotions – even under fire.

Thus success today depends largely on having strong levels of emotional intelligence, or EQ. Solid EQ is what allows you to develop strong relationships not only with others but also with yourself. These blinks provide tested ways for you to learn what it takes to become more emotionally intelligent.

In these blinks you’ll discover

why you should get to know your coworker’s nickname;
how you can embrace public shaming to get stuff done; and
why you can tell a lot about someone from just looking at their shoulders.

This is emotional intelligence: know yourself; behave yourself; know others; build bonds.

Some people are uncommonly good at reading body language, able to judge at a glance what someone is thinking – and respond accordingly. They can calm a coworker who’s angry, or reassure a friend who’s anxious.

Why are certain people so good at this? The answer has to do with emotional intelligence, or EQ.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand your own feelings and the feelings of others, and influence those feelings to your advantage. A person who's good at “reading” people has high emotional intelligence.

EQ combines four different elements.

The first is self-awareness, or the ability to understand your own feelings and behaviors.

The second is self-management. Self-management is about keeping yourself in situations in which you know you'll be able to behave correctly.

The third is social awareness. Once you know how to manage your behavior and understand your feelings, you'll know how to read the emotions of others. You'll understand what makes people feel angry, sad or excited, and you'll be able to better read body language.

The fourth and final element is relationship management. Understanding your own behavior and the behavior of others around you enables you to build stronger relationships with the important people in your life.

For example, if you know that one of your coworkers gets upset when he's criticized, you'll know how to give feedback to which he'll be able to respond more effectively.

Let’s look closer at the four elements of emotional intelligence. Read on!

To practice better self-management, you need to balance your emotional and logical sides.

Many of us find it challenging to manage ourselves. When we try to assert control, we often get sidetracked if how we feel inside pushes us to act differently. We also tend to give up if things start to get too rough.

Good self-management is a crucial part of having high emotional intelligence.

Eyes, mouth and shoulders communicate a lot. Learn how to read the signs to know what best to say.

Some waiters always seem to know what a customer wants. They instinctively know who wants to be left alone, or who wants company or special attention.

Such a person has a high level of social intelligence. To become more socially aware, there are two things that you should consider.

Key ideas in Emotional Intelligence 2.0