The term “Emotional Intelligence”, which appeared in the early 90s, is gradually ceasing to be the topic of trainings exclusively for the top management of global corporations.
We asked the teacher of the course "Emotional Intelligence in Creative Business" Tatiana Strashnenko, what is the reason for the current popularity of EI, why people in creative professions also need it and whether it is ethical to manipulate others.
Emotional intelligence is, first of all, the ability to understand your emotions and be able to work with them. Often we try to ignore or suppress them, but in this way we only postpone the solution of the problem, which comes back to us later with more serious consequences.
Any emotion that arises is a signal, a message.
If we do not notice it, it means that the intellect does not read some part of the communication, which is signaled by the subconscious. In addition, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and read the emotions of others.
Well, aerobatics - the ability to work with them, to influence, to influence.
The psychologists who introduced the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) relate its emergence to the development of neuroscience and research into the business environment. Before the advent of EI, society lived for many years under the stereotype that IQ is the main indicator of success. But now scientists, in particular Daniel Goleman, author of several books on the topic, are talking about emotional intelligence as the new standard of mind.
This means not that academic knowledge has suddenly become less important, but that one high IQ does not guarantee anything at all. It is undoubtedly important to be smart in an intellectual way, but if we analyze modern success stories, for example, in business (who takes the lead, who successfully gets a job), we will see that such qualities as adaptability to change are coming to the fore today, the ability to work in a team, resistance to stress, the ability to cope with conflicts, work under pressure. And these are the signs of developed emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence and post-industrial society.
The traditional division into physicists and lyricists in modern culture is no longer observed as sharply as before. But the idea that business is created exclusively for strict, rational people in gray jackets, and creativity is for exalted disheveled artists, is still alive.
Unfortunately or fortunately, this is a misconception.
To be competitive in today's marketplace, creative people need business skills as well as creativity. Now, not only what you do with your hands plays a role, but also how you can present yourself and your work, are you able to understand the customer's needs (what he really needs from you, and not what is said aloud), are you able to do it right use your emotions and channel them in a creative direction, do you know how to convince others to support and help you.
The topic of emotional intelligence is still mainly raised in the business environment: in large corporations and mainly for top managers, for whom the issue of managing emotions is one of the key ones.
In fact, a developed emotional intelligence is required for any person. There are not so many professions where teamwork is completely absent, and this trend continues to grow.
We live and work in a post-industrial society where the level of manual production is decreasing every year, and more and more goods and services are the product of cross-disciplinary teams.
Another feature of today's world, including the labor market, is the approach to education. I found the time when we entered the institute for the sake of obtaining a very specific specialty, that is, the prospect of a working career was already visible in my youth.
Today, a person enters the university and, perhaps, even immediately realizes that, most likely, he will work in a different specialty, change several areas, that all the time he will have to finish learning something, acquire new skills.
Interesting fact: in the list of the ten most in-demand professions of 2014, there is none of the same list of 2004. No corporation can guarantee you a permanent job, even if you do a great job.
Perhaps, at some point, the work that your department was doing will be entirely outsourced to third-party contractors, because this is more profitable for the company. And this will not be your fault, it is just that business and the labor market are arranged this way at the moment. For people of the old school, this is a huge shock. And here the flexibility and adaptability that a developed EI provides is absolutely necessary.
Emotional intelligence and business success.
The success of the company directly depends on the level of emotional intelligence of employees. Proponents of this theory (and myself among them) even believe that a high level of EI in some cases is more important than IQ.
It is my personal experience that problems with a single solution are rare in business. There are always several options and your task is to make a choice, justify its reason, convey the idea to the team and implement the project. All these tasks are not so much from the cognitive as from the emotional sphere, and the ability to convince, inspire, organize, support, and so on, are often more important for a leader than a correctly calculated solution left on paper.
Don't get me wrong: Of course, academic knowledge is important, but in most activities in the modern world, it takes strong communication and influence skills to put it into practice.
The most important resource of any leader is people.
If you are a conditional Grigory Perelman and solve purely abstract problems that several people on the planet can understand, then, probably, your communication skills are not so important. But this is rather an exception to the general rule.
The world is changing, technologies are developing rapidly, and today the scenario of a successful loner who invented something unique, patented and lives the rest of his days on the profit from his invention is almost impossible. The main breakthroughs are now taking place at the intersection of sciences, which implies interaction with people, openness, the ability to create a multidisciplinary team with a clear understanding of your goal.
Emotional intelligence and creativity.
Creative people have more developed empathy, the ability to observe others, and other similar qualities. These are the traditional components of a creative person. But when it comes to interacting with our own emotions, we often get a reaction like, "Nobody understands my subtle artistic nature."
In general, creative people often have difficulties with the perception of feedback, any, sometimes even the most benevolent, feedback is perceived as criticism, very close to heart, because often creative people do not know how to separate themselves from their work.
Also very common among creatives is the idea that their emotionality is the source of their creative energy: “Do you want me to put on a suit, tie and get serious? So I will lose myself. "But, of course, this is not about depriving a person of emotionality. It's about teaching him how to interact with her correctly." I cut off my ear, it means I'm a creative person "- a stereotype. This is called limiting belief.
People often hold on to him, because at some level, rather even unconscious, it seems to them that otherwise they will become “like everyone else”: gray and boring Kafkian officials. One of my teachers gave me a wonderful formulation: "Only when you can be like another, you can be yourself." It is in this case that you develop empathy and understanding of a wider range of emotions that are inherent in other people and not usually inherent in you. So, in the advertising world there is a stereotypical division into businessmen, serious people who are called suits ("suits"), and creatives, crazy people in different colored socks.
But the value of a conscious approach to emotions is that today I can be a "suit", and tomorrow with dreadlocks, and there will be no contradiction in this.
Real freedom comes when there is a choice.
People are often scared to find out who they really are. But it's scary only because our culture has stereotypes "good" and "bad". This gives rise to an attitude to behave in such a way that no one would know how boring, stupid, freak I am, ”substitute what you want. Such a battle with oneself takes up a lot of energy, because a person begins to see the world around him through the prism of experiences like “does everyone guess who I really am?”.
Emotional intelligence and decency.
Do not confuse these concepts. On the one hand, a person who reads others well will certainly receive tools for manipulation. But if those around them are able to observe and understand others, they can easily distinguish sincere intentions from play. Yes, of course, EI provides methods of influence, but the moral code of each person is still an ethical category, psychologists do not work with this. And this is certainly not a reason not to engage in the development of EI.
Yes, developed skills of influence in the hands of a scoundrel can be dangerous, in fact, this is exactly what scammers from the category of “a thief on trust” use, but, on the other hand, high empathy helps us to feel another person, to get into his skin. In the system of Nazi propaganda, the enemy had to be “dehumanized”, convinced that he was “subhuman”, “inferior race”, because in the same person like me, who has a mother, who was once small and played with the same toys is much harder to shoot. This is how our psyche is programmed. In this sense, EI gives a kind of human maturity: you realize that there are the same people around you who make the same mistakes, who, like you, have advantages and disadvantages. Emotional intelligence helps you accept yourself and others.
Emotional intelligence and self-improvement.
It's never too late to develop EI. In any case, we have been doing this all our lives in one way or another: usually maturity is the result of how a person, by trial and error, without any training and psychologists, gradually learns and begins to understand himself.
EI is a universal and important topic, it needs to be talked about, it needs to be clarified.
For example, we often refer to different emotions with the same words. Familiar dialogue: "Are you mad at me?" - "No, I'm not angry" - "I can see that you are angry." We often don't even have a language to discuss our emotions. Most people don't have many words and definitions to explain what they are going through. There is also the topic of non-verbal communication - posture, intonation, tone of voice, breathing, facial expressions, gestures, posture. How do you yourself perceive the world around you, depending on what posture you are in? And how do others read it? There are no right and wrong answers, there is only a process of observation and self-knowledge, which also needs to be learned.
Everyone understands that the development of technology makes us more autonomous. A recent example: a selfie stick. Looks somewhat comical, right? But before there was no problem asking a passer-by on the street to click you on the camera.
Now other people are not needed.
Of course, this is a trifle, but it has a direct bearing on the dynamics of the development of society. We are social beings by nature, and such things deprive us of another opportunity of contact, which we absolutely need. Hence, depression, states of anger, anger, inability to communicate. But after all, such an important hormone oxytocin, which is sometimes called the hormone of love, we get precisely from benevolent communication.
Therefore, it is probably possible to live autonomously in headphones in front of the screen, but I'm afraid it will be a very sad existence.
We asked the teacher of the course "Emotional Intelligence in Creative Business" Tatiana Strashnenko, what is the reason for the current popularity of EI, why people in creative professions also need it and whether it is ethical to manipulate others.
Emotional intelligence is, first of all, the ability to understand your emotions and be able to work with them. Often we try to ignore or suppress them, but in this way we only postpone the solution of the problem, which comes back to us later with more serious consequences.
Any emotion that arises is a signal, a message.
If we do not notice it, it means that the intellect does not read some part of the communication, which is signaled by the subconscious. In addition, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and read the emotions of others.
Well, aerobatics - the ability to work with them, to influence, to influence.
The psychologists who introduced the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) relate its emergence to the development of neuroscience and research into the business environment. Before the advent of EI, society lived for many years under the stereotype that IQ is the main indicator of success. But now scientists, in particular Daniel Goleman, author of several books on the topic, are talking about emotional intelligence as the new standard of mind.
This means not that academic knowledge has suddenly become less important, but that one high IQ does not guarantee anything at all. It is undoubtedly important to be smart in an intellectual way, but if we analyze modern success stories, for example, in business (who takes the lead, who successfully gets a job), we will see that such qualities as adaptability to change are coming to the fore today, the ability to work in a team, resistance to stress, the ability to cope with conflicts, work under pressure. And these are the signs of developed emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence and post-industrial society.
The traditional division into physicists and lyricists in modern culture is no longer observed as sharply as before. But the idea that business is created exclusively for strict, rational people in gray jackets, and creativity is for exalted disheveled artists, is still alive.
Unfortunately or fortunately, this is a misconception.
To be competitive in today's marketplace, creative people need business skills as well as creativity. Now, not only what you do with your hands plays a role, but also how you can present yourself and your work, are you able to understand the customer's needs (what he really needs from you, and not what is said aloud), are you able to do it right use your emotions and channel them in a creative direction, do you know how to convince others to support and help you.
The topic of emotional intelligence is still mainly raised in the business environment: in large corporations and mainly for top managers, for whom the issue of managing emotions is one of the key ones.
In fact, a developed emotional intelligence is required for any person. There are not so many professions where teamwork is completely absent, and this trend continues to grow.
We live and work in a post-industrial society where the level of manual production is decreasing every year, and more and more goods and services are the product of cross-disciplinary teams.
Another feature of today's world, including the labor market, is the approach to education. I found the time when we entered the institute for the sake of obtaining a very specific specialty, that is, the prospect of a working career was already visible in my youth.
Today, a person enters the university and, perhaps, even immediately realizes that, most likely, he will work in a different specialty, change several areas, that all the time he will have to finish learning something, acquire new skills.
Interesting fact: in the list of the ten most in-demand professions of 2014, there is none of the same list of 2004. No corporation can guarantee you a permanent job, even if you do a great job.
Perhaps, at some point, the work that your department was doing will be entirely outsourced to third-party contractors, because this is more profitable for the company. And this will not be your fault, it is just that business and the labor market are arranged this way at the moment. For people of the old school, this is a huge shock. And here the flexibility and adaptability that a developed EI provides is absolutely necessary.
Emotional intelligence and business success.
The success of the company directly depends on the level of emotional intelligence of employees. Proponents of this theory (and myself among them) even believe that a high level of EI in some cases is more important than IQ.
It is my personal experience that problems with a single solution are rare in business. There are always several options and your task is to make a choice, justify its reason, convey the idea to the team and implement the project. All these tasks are not so much from the cognitive as from the emotional sphere, and the ability to convince, inspire, organize, support, and so on, are often more important for a leader than a correctly calculated solution left on paper.
Don't get me wrong: Of course, academic knowledge is important, but in most activities in the modern world, it takes strong communication and influence skills to put it into practice.
The most important resource of any leader is people.
If you are a conditional Grigory Perelman and solve purely abstract problems that several people on the planet can understand, then, probably, your communication skills are not so important. But this is rather an exception to the general rule.
The world is changing, technologies are developing rapidly, and today the scenario of a successful loner who invented something unique, patented and lives the rest of his days on the profit from his invention is almost impossible. The main breakthroughs are now taking place at the intersection of sciences, which implies interaction with people, openness, the ability to create a multidisciplinary team with a clear understanding of your goal.
In service businesses, EI is the number one requirement. In the advertising industry, for example, which I can talk about based on my own almost 20 years of experience, there certainly does not exist one correct scenario, in any situation there are many. From the point of view of brand communication, the winner is not the one who endlessly conducts some kind of research, every six months builds a new communication strategy or rebrands (which is the IQ approach), but the one who knows how to choose the right language for communicating with the audience, inspire her in a new way, to share certain values with her (which is the EI approach). The consumer, the real person, is completely lost in the first approach. Better yet, your strategy is not so brilliantly mathematically calculated,
Emotional intelligence and creativity.
Creative people have more developed empathy, the ability to observe others, and other similar qualities. These are the traditional components of a creative person. But when it comes to interacting with our own emotions, we often get a reaction like, "Nobody understands my subtle artistic nature."
In general, creative people often have difficulties with the perception of feedback, any, sometimes even the most benevolent, feedback is perceived as criticism, very close to heart, because often creative people do not know how to separate themselves from their work.
Also very common among creatives is the idea that their emotionality is the source of their creative energy: “Do you want me to put on a suit, tie and get serious? So I will lose myself. "But, of course, this is not about depriving a person of emotionality. It's about teaching him how to interact with her correctly." I cut off my ear, it means I'm a creative person "- a stereotype. This is called limiting belief.
People often hold on to him, because at some level, rather even unconscious, it seems to them that otherwise they will become “like everyone else”: gray and boring Kafkian officials. One of my teachers gave me a wonderful formulation: "Only when you can be like another, you can be yourself." It is in this case that you develop empathy and understanding of a wider range of emotions that are inherent in other people and not usually inherent in you. So, in the advertising world there is a stereotypical division into businessmen, serious people who are called suits ("suits"), and creatives, crazy people in different colored socks.
But the value of a conscious approach to emotions is that today I can be a "suit", and tomorrow with dreadlocks, and there will be no contradiction in this.
Real freedom comes when there is a choice.
People are often scared to find out who they really are. But it's scary only because our culture has stereotypes "good" and "bad". This gives rise to an attitude to behave in such a way that no one would know how boring, stupid, freak I am, ”substitute what you want. Such a battle with oneself takes up a lot of energy, because a person begins to see the world around him through the prism of experiences like “does everyone guess who I really am?”.
Emotional intelligence and decency.
Do not confuse these concepts. On the one hand, a person who reads others well will certainly receive tools for manipulation. But if those around them are able to observe and understand others, they can easily distinguish sincere intentions from play. Yes, of course, EI provides methods of influence, but the moral code of each person is still an ethical category, psychologists do not work with this. And this is certainly not a reason not to engage in the development of EI.
Yes, developed skills of influence in the hands of a scoundrel can be dangerous, in fact, this is exactly what scammers from the category of “a thief on trust” use, but, on the other hand, high empathy helps us to feel another person, to get into his skin. In the system of Nazi propaganda, the enemy had to be “dehumanized”, convinced that he was “subhuman”, “inferior race”, because in the same person like me, who has a mother, who was once small and played with the same toys is much harder to shoot. This is how our psyche is programmed. In this sense, EI gives a kind of human maturity: you realize that there are the same people around you who make the same mistakes, who, like you, have advantages and disadvantages. Emotional intelligence helps you accept yourself and others.
It would certainly be great if EI development became part of the school curriculum. In many ways, our education and upbringing is a layering of superfluous and unnecessary on pure human perception of each other. We learn and learn many skills for dealing with emotions from childhood by observing the adults around us who are happy or angry depending on the situation. But over time, we are faced with the limitations and stereotypes of society like "boys don't cry" or "a girl should always be affectionate." A person forgets what he is and remembers what he should or should not be. Without the ability to hear and understand yourself, express your emotions in an environmentally friendly way, hear others and allow them to be themselves too, the burden of meeting other people '
Emotional intelligence and self-improvement.
It's never too late to develop EI. In any case, we have been doing this all our lives in one way or another: usually maturity is the result of how a person, by trial and error, without any training and psychologists, gradually learns and begins to understand himself.
EI is a universal and important topic, it needs to be talked about, it needs to be clarified.
For example, we often refer to different emotions with the same words. Familiar dialogue: "Are you mad at me?" - "No, I'm not angry" - "I can see that you are angry." We often don't even have a language to discuss our emotions. Most people don't have many words and definitions to explain what they are going through. There is also the topic of non-verbal communication - posture, intonation, tone of voice, breathing, facial expressions, gestures, posture. How do you yourself perceive the world around you, depending on what posture you are in? And how do others read it? There are no right and wrong answers, there is only a process of observation and self-knowledge, which also needs to be learned.
Everyone understands that the development of technology makes us more autonomous. A recent example: a selfie stick. Looks somewhat comical, right? But before there was no problem asking a passer-by on the street to click you on the camera.
Now other people are not needed.
Of course, this is a trifle, but it has a direct bearing on the dynamics of the development of society. We are social beings by nature, and such things deprive us of another opportunity of contact, which we absolutely need. Hence, depression, states of anger, anger, inability to communicate. But after all, such an important hormone oxytocin, which is sometimes called the hormone of love, we get precisely from benevolent communication.
Therefore, it is probably possible to live autonomously in headphones in front of the screen, but I'm afraid it will be a very sad existence.
