Cultural Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence

00:06 We're getting closer now to talking about cultural intelligence by itself, but before we move into that I want you to take time to realize that cultural intelligence built upon emotional intelligence and those 2 have a symbiotic relationship. You can't have one without the other in terms of functioning in a multicultural space. When we talk about emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence together, it's important to know what these terms mean. With the emotional intelligence, it measures how aware we are, how we control and express our emotions, how we evaluate our own personal emotions and our ability to judiciously and empathetically handle interprofessional and interpersonal relationships. So, basically just being aware of what you're feeling which we'll talk about when we get to strategies for biased management and mitigating bias-influenced outcomes.

01:03 So you have to know what you're feeling and then you have to be able to control how you express what you're feeling. With cultural intelligence, it builds on that emotional intelligence and what it does is measure your cultural fluency and your ability to navigate multicultural context and going back to previous talks, remember that culture is broad. Culture doesn't just mean race, nationality, ethnicity, and those things culture means just our ways of being. So that's the simple way for you to remember that and things that influence our behaviors and attitudes. Diving a little bit deeper into emotional intelligence because I want you to know that it's important to understand what that is so that you can apply emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence together. So, what happens is emotional and social competencies are necessary in terms of application of emotional intelligence. So you have to be able to interpret and explain your emotions. I kind of just said that. And then controlling your feelings and those of others. So when I read the controlling feelings of others first, I was like "what!" Well, how you control others' feelings is how you react. So remember every action has a reaction and then reactions continue to perpetuate additional reactions.

02:24 So if you stay calm in the moment, typically people get calm and sometimes calmness just means not saying a word, just allowing people to express whatever that is and not engaging in it, and accepting the views of others. What does that mean? So that's one of the keys when I talk about cultural intelligence. I'm not trying to change myself or change other people necessarily in their views, but I'm going to accept it and think about how can I sit and have a collaborative relationship with someone when we think about it from a professional stance. And if you want to use that in your personal life, it also decreases some conflict because we're all individual human beings even if we're in these relationships. If I can accept that someone has an opposite view of mine and we agree to disagree and collaboratively determine the best outcomes for a positive relationship, then that's how we apply emotional intelligence and controlling your social relationships.

03:24 How do you do that? I kind of just explain that but just going back to those cultural values preferences knowing that they may be different but someone else's perspective is not wrong and yours is not wrong. Developing a process to effectively use your emotional intelligence skills. So, certain things trigger you and you know those things trigger you, then you need to think about how you're going to handle it. And when we think about people and we think about being realistic, there will always be people who we don't necessarily gel or align with, but we may have to still work with them. So in that case, how am I going to control how I react and interact with people who I know I might not have disalignment with.