You believe professional outcomes depend on your cognitive skills and results you deliver. Then where does emotional intelligence or EQ (emotional quotient) fit in? Since you are dealing with your internal emotional state as well as that of other human beings, an inability to understand and manage emotions slows you down or prevents you from achieving outcomes you desire.
Thus, your success is driven not just by your intelligence and skills but also by the emotional tools at your disposal. Your emotional intelligence lies in self-awareness/perception, self-regulation/control, motivation, empathy and social skills. However, the following negative behaviours could be holding you back at work, reducing your productivity.
1. Finding meaning
Human brains are meaning making machines. You are meant to seek meaning and patterns in random events. Take this to the workplace and you can assign a lot of meaning to the money you earn and link it to your confidence, social status and personal judgments of good and bad. With this inbuilt prejudice, it is easy to get biased where you take everything personally and attribute intent to people and incidents where none exist and thus take wrong decisions.
Recognise that everyone is too focused on their own world to think about you or plot how to make you fail. Each time you are agitated by others, remind yourself of your bias and subtract intent from your calculations to take better decisions.
Source: Economic Times
