Applying Emotional Intelligence

00:05 When we talk about emotional intelligence, there are 5 domains. And these concepts are some you've heard me mentioned before. Self-awareness, very key.

00:15 If you're not in tune to your emotions, how can you control them. Self-management, another one. If you don't know how to manage those emotions, then you can apply emotional intelligence. Self-motivation, you have to have the drive to want to do something differently, the want to control your emotions to have healthy relationships. Empathy, you've seen that word before you've heard that word before. It's a part of developing those humanitarian principles and operationalizing and embodying those and then handling relationships. So we have to care about those relationships to want to operationalize emotional intelligence. Will you mess up? Absolutely. I'm Angela, I've been there and I've done that. But that's okay, learn from your mistakes. Benefits of applying emotional intelligence include that you do become more self-aware. So it improves it because you're practicing it all the time. It improves your ability to identify potential for conflict and that's very important for people in these leadership roles. I mentioned before some people have a goal of becoming nurse leaders so you have to be able to identify some potential conflict because being proactive is always better than being reactive.

01:37 And then when you're able to identify, then you're able to employ your conflict management skills and not only as a leader but when you talk to other people and help with conflict resolution, you're able to see the behaviors of each of the parties and help to be more of a mediator. It improves your communication skills because again you won't act or communicate out of anger or even out of fear or hurt.

02:03 When we talked about assertive communication, that's one of the keys in effective communication, having some level of emotional intelligence. Again, as we move forward and I start to talk more about cultural intelligence, if I'm not in tune to all these things, I cannot develop any level of significant emotional intelligence.

02:25 And then when we talk about organizational outcomes and improving how we get along on teams, so somebody might say something you don't like. You don't necessarily have to lash out about it even if it's something that's very offensive.

02:40 When you apply your emotional intelligence, you take a moment to breathe and become attuned to how you're feeling. You might have to walk out of the room, but that also requires emotional intelligence but you do have to address it in a very intelligent way and that may take in a day or so to cool off. Talking to someone else to help you to get into the right head space to have conversations. And then it improves your ability, as I said already, to develop and to apply cultural intelligence.