BSS: The New Rules of EQ. Using emotional intelligence to get ahead

The acronym SABRE may help you to analyze the events that come to mind:
• Situation – what was the situation?
• Action – what actions did you take? What emotions did you display?
• Behavior – how did others behave? How did they respond to you and any others that might have been involved? What emotions did they show?
• Result – what happened as a result of your actions and their behavior? What was the outcome and what emotions did it leave everyone with?
• Evaluation – looking back on the whole event and evaluating it, what could you have done differently (i.e. better)?
Some people like to take notes to help them evaluate events properly. Even if you can only set aside 10 to 20 minutes a week to start with, try it to improve your ability to critique your own behavior and emotional life.

vital step in becoming emotionally intelligent is to think about how your behavior may impact on others.

A vital step in becoming emotionally intelligent is to think about how your behavior may impact on others.

When it comes to strengths and weaknesses, there is no absolute reality. It is all a matter of perception. And, often, what we perceive to be our greatest strength – the skill that we are proudest of – is exactly what others perceive to be our greatest weakness. The reverse can be true too – sometimes we think we aren’t very good at something when others may see it as a real strength of ours.

Learning to distinguish between the facts and your interpretation/feelings will help you to become more actively aware of your emotions as a precursor to controlling them.

only facts that exist are what you pick up through your five senses – seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Everything else is either a thought or a feeling.

Training yourself to distinguish between fact and feeling will further enhance your selfawareness.

Whenever you can, ask yourself the following questions:
• What emotion did I experience? (If you struggle to identify the precise emotion or feeling that you were experiencing, then take a look at the list in the next section – “Label your emotions”).
• What physical sensations did I experience? Think of a racing heart, sweaty palms, quickening of the breath and so on.
• What were the thoughts that were going through my head at the time?
• Was the emotion appropriate or inappropriate? Was it helpful or hindering me from doing what I wanted to do?

we feel nervous going into a crucial sales meeting, we are probably going to fail to impress the customer. If we feel miserable before going to a party, we won’t want to talk to people – and that will just reinforce our feelings of unhappiness.

And the big problem is that we experience emotions without really considering whether they are appropriate or not.