EI: Emotional Intelligence Skills

Emotional Intelligence Skills: A checklist

Emotional Intelligence is not just one skill but a whole set of skills.

(Just as Cognitive Intelligence or IQ is a set of skills.)

	Which Emotional Intelligence skills do you have consistently across situations?
	Which ones do you have sometimes?
	Which ones are you lacking?

The seven levels of emotional intelligence, as described on the GENOS Emotional Intelligence model, are detailed elsewhere.

However, there are still many specific skills involved that you might like to observe in yourself. I encourage you to print the following list and use it as a checklist to guide your observations of your own emotional intelligence.

The skills involved in Emotional Intelligence include the ability to:

	Understand the significance of emotions.
	Have significant levels of knowledge about emotions.
	Understand the difference between emotions and behaviour.
	Recognise the difference between emotions and thought and the interplay between the two.
	Understand the influence that emotions have on other cognitive functions such as memory.
	Recognise the relationships between emotions.
	Predict the transitions that may occur from one emotion to another.

Emotional Intelligence Level 1: Be aware of your emotions:

	Recognise how you are feeling from moment to moment.
	Be aware of when your feelings change.
	Understand why you are feeling the way you do.
	Identify the strength of your emotions.
	Differentiate one feeling from another, in other words, know which feeling is which.
	Stay open to your own emotions, (rather than repressing, avoiding or ignoring them).
	Have significant levels of insight into the emotional drivers of your behaviour.
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

Emotional Intelligence Level 2: Clearly express your emotions:

	Accurately use a widely differentiated vocabulary of feeling words, i.e. have emotional literacy.
	Clearly express your own emotions rather than just hinting or implying how you feel.
	Talk about how you feel in a variety of situations.
	Talk about how you feel to a variety of people.
	Express affection, love and joy to others.
	Express anger, irritation and frustration without dumping on others or hurting people.
	Take responsibility for your own emotions without unfairly blaming others for them.
	Select appropriate times to express your feelings.
	Select appropriate ways to express your feelings verbally and non-verbally.
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

Emotional Intelligence Level 3: Understand others' emotions:

	Accurately understand how someone else is feeling.
	Stay open to others' emotions.
	Understand the emotional drivers of other people's behaviour.
	Tell whether someone is lying to you or not.
	Listen to, acknowledge and accept others' emotions without dismissing them or brushing them off.
	Respond with understanding to others' emotions in 1-1 situations.
	Respond with understanding to others' emotions in group situations.
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

Emotional Intelligence Level 4: Reason with emotions:

	Use emotional data and knowledge to help you choose the best decisions and ways of communicating.
	Predict accurately how other people may react and feel in response to decisions you have made or views you will express.
	Incorporate accurate emotional knowledge and data into decisions involving yourself and other people.
	Integrate emotional knowledge with cognitive data to make balanced decisions, (rather than factoring all emotions out of decision making or making emotional decisions).
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

Emotional Intelligence Level 5: Manage your emotions:

	Manage your own emotions safely.
	Feel comfortable with uncomfortable emotions so you don't avoid what you need to do.
	Generate behavioural options when responding to your emotions and avoid knee-jerk reactions or repeating the same mistake over and over again.
	Manage your own emotions even in high pressure and complex situations.
	Move through emotions without getting stuck in ones that are unhelpful to you.
	Know the best emotions for different tasks.
	Cultivate pleasant emotions.
	Facilitate your own emotional shifts so you are in the best emotion for a task or situation.
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

Emotional Intelligence Level 6: Manage others' emotions:

	Manage the emotions of those around you.
	Increase emotions such as feeling valued, appreciated or confident in people who are feeling unappreciated or disengaged, e.g. so there is an increase in employee engagement.
	Soothe people when they are agitated or anxious so they become calmer, e.g. a mum with her children, a person calling a crisis line or the emergency services.
	Ease people's anger so they stop yelling and talk more quietly, e.g.in customer service situations, or during an arguement.
	Choose the right words or actions to ease an awkward moment.
	Relax people when they are tense.
	Increase people's feelings of happiness, pleasure or pride.
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

Emotional Intelligence Level 7: Control strong emotions:

	Use self-calming techniques successfully when experiencing strong emotions, such as high levels of anger, so they don't hijack the situation for you.
	Manage high levels of anxiety without it crippling you.
	Be able to focus and concentrate even when experiencing high levels of excitement.
	Use all these skills to arrive at the best possible personal and organisational outcomes.

There are other skills but this is a good start!

The hierarchy described by Mayer and Salovey outlines a developmental sequence of emotional intelligence skills that is also really useful.