Announcement:
I have started a new blog at that is focused on Personal and Career Development for Young Professionals. It can be found at www.MarcosSalazar.com. As
opposed to straight out career blogs that cover resumes, the job
search, or interviewing skills, I will taking a psychology approach to
not only these parts of your career but also will be covering the
personal, social, and workforce challenges that college graduates and
young professionals are facing in the 21st century. As I did in The
Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide, I utilize a psychological approach
to covering these topics and will be integrating important research
within real life situations to provide practical advice for people's
personal and professional development (if you have read The Turbulent
Twenties Survival Guide you know what I mean).
Some of the topics I
will be covering are:
- learning how to find and follow what you love doing
- practical steps on how to get into Flow at work
- understanding the psychology of happiness and affective forecasting
- managing the tyranny of choice
- learning how to cultivate your emotional and cultural intelligence
- networking in the internet age
- learning how to brand yourself professionally
- discovering how to use blogging as a professional tool (it is the new resume of our generation)
- how to become more of an entrepreneur
- using social-networking for professional advancement
- getting over post-college depression
- helping to answer all those questions that we work through during our 20s and 30s such as: Who am I? Who do I want to become? Where am I going? What are my passions in life? Am I making the right decisions?
So I hope you take a look at the site, subscribe, and share it with friends.
Take care!
- Marcos Salazar
www.marcossalazar.com
____________________________
This is a exerpt from The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide:
To see how emotional intelligence impacts your work life, we need a much more detailed description of what it is. Goleman defines emotional intelligence as:
… the capacity for recognizing our own feelings, and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing our emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. It describes abilities distinct from, but complementary to, academic intelligence, the purely cognitive capacities measured by IQ. Many people who are book smart but lack emotional intelligence end up working for people who have lower IQs than they but how excel in emotional intelligence skills (1998, 317).
Emotional intelligence is made up of five psychological intelligence skills: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Let’s take a look at how each builds upon another.
self-awareness and emotional regulation
The foundation for building your emotional intelligence begins with paying greater attention to what you are feeling in the moment and using your inner signals as a guide in responding to the situations you face at work. When you increase your awareness of your emotions, you can use this knowledge to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check so that they do not interfere with the tasks you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if a task or work relationship is stressing you out and you’re not aware of it, your emotions can run amok and negatively affect your performance. The more accurately you can sense your emotions and how they are shaping your view of a work situation, the better able you’ll be at fine-tuning your actions so you can deal with the stressful situation in a productive manner.
Being highly self-aware will also give you a more accurate assessment of what your strengths and weaknesses are at work. If you’re unaware of what you are capable of in your job, then you may put yourself in situations that are overwhelming and will cause you a great deal of stress and anxiety. By knowing what you’re capable of, you will be secure in your self-efficacy and only put yourself in situations where you know that your skills will not be overstretched.
Performing with Grace Under Pressure
In high school, my humanities teacher, Ken Jenkins, had us read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. In the novel, the narrator talks about Joe DiMaggio, the former baseball player for the New York Yankees. DiMaggio was one of Mr. Jenkins’ favorite players, and he seemed to bring him up in almost every single class. He loved DiMaggio so much because Mr. Jenkins admired him for playing so many years with a severe injury to his foot. DiMaggio had a bone spur, an extremely painful condition that is often debilitating, but he loved the game so much that he managed his pain and did not let it affect his motivation to become the greatest baseball player he could be. Mr. Jenkins would always tell us that DiMaggio was an example of performing with grace under pressure, and it’s this ability to stay motivated in the face of challenges and setbacks that is one of the most important emotional intelligence skills that you can develop.
Motivating yourself and staying positive when the going gets tough rests on the first two components of your emotional intelligence. As you saw in chapter 3, you use your emotions to move and guide you in the direction you want to go in life. By being aware of your emotions and learning to regulate them, you can eventually harness their power to help you take action and achieve your goals. In addition, by using the positive psychology techniques you learned in chapter 4, you can create an optimistic view of life and fend off anxiety that can come from stressful or painful situations.
One aspect of motivation that is becoming an important skill to have in today’s marketplace is your ability to adapt in the face of constant change. The economy has vastly changed in the last ten years, and the ability to adjust to a rapidly changing working world by regulating your emotions and staying motivated in the midst of obstacles and ambiguity will give you a competitive advantage over others in your field.
People Skills
Emotional awareness and self-regulation are also the foundation for the final two aspects of emotional intelligence: empathy and social skills. Today, you have to work with an array of people from a variety of different backgrounds to get your goals accomplished. This is now the norm in today’s global economy, and if you are unable to build relationships with those people and gather their expertise, it will be difficult to create and innovate. One of the major factors in building good relationships is both sensing what others are feeling and being able to see things from their perspective. This is the essence of being an empathetic person. By making an effort to better understand what other people are feeling, you will start building relationships with a broad diversity of people based on the universality of human emotions.
Being able to read other people adds to your overall communication skills, because when you understand where your coworkers are coming from, you will be better able to fine-tune your response based on what they feel about the present work situation. This ability to communicate has far-reaching effects on your work life because the ability to send clear and convincing messages is essential for social skills such as persuading others to see your point of view, negotiating and resolving disagreements, or leading coworkers by inspiring and guiding them.
Reference
Goleman, Daniel. 1998. Working
With Emotional Intelligence. New York : Bantam.
Comments