Emotional Intelligence For Psychologists And Coaches: Why Is It Useful?
The ability of human beings to learn to adapt to challenges is what makes us the most intelligent species on the planet. This is a fact that we can verify simply by seeing the way in which we can transform societies and lifestyles to improve our fit with the world.
However, beyond this fact, there are many nuanced details about our potential that have only recently been discovered. Emotional Intelligence is part of those concepts that have emerged in recent decades that help us learn new ways of relating to others, facing problems and proposing projects.
In this article we will see why Emotional Intelligence is one of the most relevant phenomena that every psychologist and coach should know and how we can apply this knowledge both in our lives and in the professional context when we deal with people.
Before going into details and seeing examples, let’s start with basic definitions to know what we are talking about.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a set of psychological skills related to the recognition and management of emotions, both in oneself and in social interactions with others. It is, on the other hand, one of the areas of intelligence, which brings together all the psychological potential that a person has when it comes to learning and applying their knowledge and mental ability to solve problems.
Thus, someone who takes advantage of Emotional Intelligence will not be using skills completely separate from what we usually call “intelligence”, but rather a part of them.
What happens is that, for historical and cultural reasons, when most people talk about how intelligent a certain person or entity is, they tend to consider only certain forms of expression of intelligence that do not consider EI. After all, Until recently, it was believed that rationality and emotion were separate areas and opposed to each other and Emotional Intelligence serves, among other things, to refute this idea.
Examples of using EI at work
If the work context is full of challenges and a good part of these involves the management of emotions… why should we not consider Emotional Intelligence as part of professional success? The truth is that not knowing EI does not mean that it does not influence us while we work in contact with team projects and while we deal with clients or colleagues; quite the opposite, ignoring it makes us more sensitive to failures in managing what we feel (and the way we communicate it).
These are several examples of the way in which enhancing Emotional Intelligence is useful for professionals such as coaches or psychologists, who are always in contact with people.
1. Helps generate motivation
One of the things we know about motivation is that it is not based on objective criteria, but on the ability to recognize goals that are meaningful to people, which allow them to live with more enthusiasm. Emotional Intelligence helps to isolate and recognize those concepts that help motivate others both when it comes to recognizing patterns of emotion in the way others express themselves, and when it comes to setting goals that correspond to those motivations.
This is something fundamental both in coaching applied to the organizational or sports field and in psychotherapy, since in all these cases it is essential to do what is necessary for people to commit to an action plan that forces them to leave their zone of control. comfort, to break with what they had been doing until that moment.
Both in psychological assistance tasks and in teamwork situations or facing challenges under pressure (something typical in sports and competitions, for example) it is very easy to lose a lot of time and resources due to confrontations that arise from not knowing how to manage stress or frustration.
Beyond the unpleasant feeling caused by seeing that there is still a long way to go to reach a goal, these kinds of events not only do not contribute anything good, but they can cause the progress of a project to come to a screeching halt or the work dynamics as a team is burdened by the rarefied atmosphere. If something is not done to address the problem, this means not reaching the objectives, in some cases, or ending the psychological intervention and referring the patient or client, in others.
For example, thanks to Emotional Intelligence we can adopt a more neutral perspective and realizing in real time that responding in a bad way to an accusation would only fuel a conflict that we have time to stop.
3. Allows you to adopt a constructive mentality
Being able to find value even in so-called “negative emotions” allows you to use virtually any relevant experience in a learning source instead of facing bad experiences with sterile cynicism.
For example, if a person appears defensive without any reason for it, regardless of how unpleasant their responses may be, that gives information that they possibly feel insecure, perhaps because they feel exposed or unprepared for a certain class. of tasks that must be performed.
4. Improve the flow of communication
Both the work of the psychologist and the coach is based, in most cases, on communication That is why it is very important to develop skills related to detecting the emotional subtext of what those around us say, and at the same time knowing how to express oneself well through verbal and non-verbal language, taking into account the way in which the context changes the meaning of the words.
It is not the same to congratulate an employee who is happy with his job on his work performance than to another who feels overloaded by his responsibilities, and a detail as small as this can totally transform that person’s attitude towards us and towards the organization to which he belongs. that we represent.
5. Helps predict emotional response
Through Emotional Intelligence it is easier anticipate the way in which our body is predisposed to react to a certain situation, which allows us to prepare and do what is necessary to modulate that emotional torrent. This is especially useful in times of crisis and in situations where important events occur and you need to act quickly.
Where to train in Emotional Intelligence?
There are some organizations specialized in training for professionals that have interesting Emotional Intelligence courses. One of them is the European Coaching School, an organization that has a presence in several countries beyond Spain, in which the Emotional Awareness Program
This 65-hour course is aimed at coaches in training, psychologists, CEOs and managers and other positions in whose performance interaction with people on both a formal and emotional level is essential. It has both theoretical learning sessions and stages of practical exercises supervised by coaches.
If you are interested in knowing more about this Emotional Intelligence training program, you can find EEC’s contact information by clicking here.
