Do you ever forget about something that’s been in your toolkit all along, because you haven’t used it for a few years? It’s good to have the occasional reminder – a little shock of rediscovery – that you know more than you think you do.
Recently I interviewed Wendy Burton, an amazing change agent working in the NHS, for episode 23 of the Positive Change Methods Podcast.
Often the teams that Wendy works with are dysfunctional, cynical, or exhausted – so they’re not easy to handle. How do you prepare for working in a situation like that?
Wendy told me she prepares using an emotional intelligence process I shared with her over 20 years ago, and which I hadn’t even thought about for at least 5 years (since I moved from NLP training and emotional intelligence coaching into being a full-time Appreciative Inquiry practitioner).
The aim of the process is to bring your innate emotional intelligence (EI as it’s abbreviated in academic research, EQ – for ‘Emotional Quotient’ – as it’s usually referred to when used in a business context) to bear in any interpersonal situation that might be hard to handle or stressful. These might include dealing with difficult people, preparing for an important presentation, job interviews, or even (I hope you’ll never need it for this one) court appearances. You can also use it for predicting the effects of decisions on other people, or of course as a format for coaching other people through preparing for any of the above situations.
The process is built around the four quadrants of the Goleman/Boyatzis model of emotional intelligence, that underpins the ESCI (Emotional and Social Competence Inventory) 360º leadership assessment. Other models exist, but this is my favourite because a) it’s just about the simplest research-backed model available, and b) it’s the one I was trained to use.
The axes of the ‘EQ Quadrants’ are ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and ‘Awareness’ and ‘Action’ (or ‘Management’). So this gives us four domains or ‘competency areas’ of emotional intelligence:
- Self-Awareness – being aware of your own emotions, and understanding why they have arisen and what they’re trying to tell you
- Self-Management – being able to manage your own emotions
- Relationship Awareness – being able to recognise emotions in others, and why they might be feeling that way (essentially, empathy)
- Relationship Management – being able to handle and inspire emotions in others
We can turn this into a coaching model for exploring our own feelings about an upcoming event or decision, managing our emotional state where necessary, predicting how the other stakeholders involved may react, and thinking about how we want them to feel and what we can do to assist them to feel that way.
How? Very simply, by asking questions that explore each of the four competency areas in turn. To increase your understanding of this model and get practical use out of it right now, why not think of an upcoming situation or decision that also involves other people, and use these questions to explore it?
Questions to Increase Self-Awareness
It’s best to start in the Self-Awareness quadrant, using the following questions:
What are you feeling about this situation? Label the emotions if possible, rather than just saying ‘good’ or ‘bad’. You might have mixed feelings, or a primary feeling and then a feeling about that feeling (for example, apprehension accompanied by anger at yourself for feeling it, or irritation and guilt). You could also notice what sensations you feel in your body, where you feel them, how strong they are, and how long they last.
Why are you feeling that way? Do you understand where these feelings came from (it’s OK if you don’t)? Are they familiar, or new? Do you recognise them as part of a pattern that you’ve experienced before?
What is this feeling trying to tell you? Emotions carry information about our situation and relationships with others. For example, a feeling of anger might be a signal that your boundaries have been crossed. Guilt might be telling you that you have done something that goes against your moral standards.
Of course, the signal may not be 100% reliable – a feeling of hurt, for example, might be much stronger than the current trigger incident would logically justify, because it’s really related to unresolved emotional baggage from the past. If this turns out to be the case, realising it is itself a step forward.
Ask yourself this question: if this feeling is trying to give me a message, what is it trying to tell me? Leave some time and space for the answer to emerge, in whatever form it comes up.
Questions to Improve Emotional Self-Management
In most cases, you will probably want to move to the Self-Management quadrant next. The questions here are about where you want to go, and how to get there.
How do you want to feel in this situation? This question is aimed at finding the emotional state that is going to serve you best. Got a big presentation coming up that you’re nervous about? Maybe ‘determined’ would be a more useful thing to feel in this situation.
What do you need to do in order to feel that way? It may be that there are actions you can take to change the situation which is causing or triggering the emotion. For example, if you’re nervous about an upcoming test of skill, practice and preparation generally help.
If there’s nothing to be done about the situation, there are a variety of methods that can be used to change one’s emotional state. It helps if the emotion you want to change is not too intense.
If the desired emotion is fairly close to what you’re feeling at the moment, it could be that relabelling the emotion may help. The butterflies you feel in your stomach before a job interview – is that nervousness, or could it be excitement?
Otherwise, there are a variety of self-help methods to change emotional states, such as those listed in this article. The best methods for you are whatever has worked well for you (without side effects such as weight gain, debt, or addiction) in the past.
Questions to Explore Social Awareness
Who else is involved? This question is to identify the other stakeholders involved in or affected by the problem. If you don’t know the person individually, or if it’s a collective (e.g. the audience members for a presentation, when you don’t know who will be there), you can imagine a representative figure or figures.
What are they feeling? Ask this question for each person or representative figure that you identified in the previous question. If you know the person well, remember that the question is not ‘What would I be feeling if I was in their shoes?’ Rather, because not everyone responds in the same way, you would do better to base your guesses on how you’ve observed them behaving in similar situations in the past.
Remember that the answers you get will always be guesswork, not fact, so be prepared to update your guesses in real time when you interact with the person, based on how they actually behave.
Why might they be feeling that way? This is an attempt to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and see things from their point of view. Because it’s easy to forget that the way we see things is only one point of view, and not the same as reality (when people get the two confused, psychologists call this ‘naive realism’), you may be surprised at how differently you or your actions come across to others.
The better you know the other person, and the more aware you are of their history, the better chance you have of your guess being accurate – but always bear in mind, it’s still just a guess and should be open to modification in the light of new evidence.
Questions to Improve Relationship Management
How do you want the other person to feel? Ask this question for every separate stakeholder that you’ve identified in the Social Awareness section. If you’re going to have a continuing relationship with them, you would want the desired emotional state to be good for them as well as helping you to achieve your outcome.
For example, a presentation audience might reasonably be expected to feel sleepy (if yours is the first presentation after lunch), so it would be good for you, as well as them, if they were to move to a state of interest, then thoughtfulness as they consider what you’re saying, then eagerness (to take the action you want them to take).
What do you need to do in order for them to feel that way? Of course, you can’t make someone feel a certain way, and attempting to do so through manipulation or cliched rhetorical tricks may well arouse resistance and make your job harder.
What you can do is make it as easy as possible for the other person to feel the way you want. For example, you could aim to move your presentation audience to a state of ‘interest’ by grabbing their attention with a surprising or emotionally resonant opening, put yourself in their shoes so that the stories you tell and the information you convey makes sense to them and fits the cognitive frames that you can reasonably expect them to hold, and make your pitch or request in a way that appeals to their values and interests so that they are motivated to assent.
If you use this model in your coaching, or indeed as a self-coaching model or to prepare for a big event or make a difficult decision, let us know about your experience of it in the comments below!
If you like the idea of using an emotional intelligence model as a basis for coaching or self-coaching, but the Goleman / Boyatzis ESCI conceptualisation that I’ve used above is not your preferred model, bear in mind that you can turn pretty much any model of emotional intelligence into a coaching tool by asking questions that explore the areas that it covers.
I got the idea for turning the ESCI model into a coaching tool when I attended a very engaging talk by Chuck Wolfe at an emotional intelligence conference about 25 years ago. Chuck had done exactly the same thing, but using the Mayer and Salovey model of emotional intelligence as his starting point.