What Is The Role Of Emotional Intelligence In Our Career Path?

Emotional Intelligence is one of the most important concepts in the world of Psychology, but, nevertheless, many companies and professionals make the mistake of assuming that it only exists in the world of self-help or, perhaps, in that of psychotherapy.

The truth is that Emotional Intelligence has implications that go far beyond each person’s private life, and therefore, Work projects and career paths in general are greatly influenced by our ability to harness the potential of these kinds of skills Let’s see why.

Why is Emotional Intelligence important in our career path?

Let’s start with the most basic: what is Emotional Intelligence? Its about set of skills that allows us to detect, identify and adequately modulate emotions in all areas of life

It is a type of intelligence that goes beyond what we usually understand by “being intelligent”, because it is not based on elements of logical or mathematical reasoning or on the use of words to solve concepts, but its subject is the emotions, something that cannot be expressed directly in words or numbers. On the other hand, It is present to a greater or lesser extent in all people although in some more than others, and it can also be trained.

Thus, Emotional Intelligence allows us to know what we are feeling at a given moment, what a person with whom we interact is feeling, what situations trigger certain emotions and feelings, what are the consequences of certain emotions and feelings arising in a specific situation, and how we can alter the environment or ourselves to promote or hinder the appearance of an emotional state.

And although Emotional Intelligence It does not give us the power to fully control our emotions (ultimately these come before our decision-making capacity), we can gain a certain power of influence over the situations that give them wings, intervening in what surrounds us, exposing ourselves to certain contexts and not others, or even inducing us to certain physiological states that bring us closer to some emotions and distance us from others.

However… Why is Emotional Intelligence relevant when developing a career path that satisfies us? Mainly for the following reasons:

Emotions are innate and universal elements and, therefore, they are present in all cultures (and are expressed in a very similar way in all of them). This is because after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, our body has adapted to take advantage of these survival tools to increase the chances of not being harmed by sources of danger. But after decades of scientific development, today we are able to look beyond the spontaneous and innate use of emotions and include them in our most important and strategic decisions, to make them part of our tools to develop professionally, and not simple obstacles or inconveniences. that we should avoid because it is not a product of reason.

An opportunity to grow professionally

As we have seen, Emotional Intelligence is applicable in all kinds of situations, because there is no area of ​​life that we do not experience through emotions. However, this simple fact is something that many people and even organizations overlook: the idea that the only emotionally relevant element of workers is their desire to get paid at the end of the month is surprisingly resistant and continues to hinder both the progress of many companies and the well-being of many professionals

It must be taken into account that underestimating Emotional Intelligence not only implies wasting many motivation strategies that can be applied individually or in groups; It also causes us to lose the ability to prevent and resolve conflicts in companies, to cause job prospects to focus on short-termism and immediate productivity goals, to lose the ability to retain talent in companies, and to generate a worse climate. organizational.

Therefore, we must know how to see beyond the logic of short-term economic gains and losses to get out of that dysfunctional loop in which workers and collaborating professionals are treated as if they were robots, even though if something Several decades of research in Psychology have taught us that we are very far from it. Luckily, being aware of the importance of Emotional Intelligence at work not only helps us prevent avoidable obstacles and difficulties; also It opens the door for us to take advantage of many opportunities that we would not have even considered otherwise

Therefore, in coaching we accompany people in the challenge of modeling and facilitating the emotions they need to achieve what they have set as their work objective. It is a process that includes recognizing the emotion we are feeling, the actions we have available from that emotion, and investigating what actions we would have from a different emotion, among other things. In this way, you gain the ability to identify and understand emotions, and also the ability to apply this knowledge on a daily basis and make it give rise to results in practice.

Do you want to train key skills in Emotional Intelligence?

As we have seen, Emotional Intelligence is not a static and innate element with which we are born and to which our experience and our learning do not count for anything: it is transformed over time according to the experiences to which we are exposed and the skills that we are acquiring. Therefore, we can train it in all areas of our lives, which offers us many opportunities to grow and improve.

If you are interested in enhancing your Emotional Intelligence, contact us. In European Coaching School We have been accompanying people and organizations for many years, both in the field of training and in accompaniment in coaching processes and consulting for companies.