Defining Emotional Intelligence

Some say that emotional intelligence is bringing your souls and emotions together to make optimal decisions. For me, it’s really being smarter with emotions, using them as a strategic resource.

Fathers of emotional intelligence, Salavoy and Mayer, Six Seconds, which is a big worldwide organization dealing with emotional intelligence have all defined emotional intelligence. Actually, for me, it’s simply being clever with our emotions. I have to say that it has to be with listening to our emotions in order to take them as the messages they send to us and consider them as rational data, for us to make good intentional decisions.

So, how to help our clients deal with anxiety.

How to Help our Clients Dealing with Anxiety?

The very first step is to get them to say and to state how they feel. What do I mean here? “How they feel.” It means that they really need to name their emotions. Why that, because we know from research that by naming their emotions, people start to automatically calm down and I will share with you a very useful tools that can help you with it.

The second step is helping them give their feelings a slight evolution. What I mean here is that reformulating, that emotion. Instead of saying, oh, I’m really, really feeling anxious, get them to see how they could transform that slightly. Could that be telling exciting, for instance, and by doing that, you know, by just trying to name that emotion differently, what happened to them is that they changed that focus.

So, the point is to help our clients first explore how to actively listen. And what you need to do is actively listen. So the second one is helping him to activate his empathy. I mean asking him questions about how the other person is going to feel and what is the situation? What is the context? Why this person can have that kind of very strong emotion. All kinds of questions that you could use as coaches. Such that getting our client to ask open questions to understand better others’ points of view.

Another point here now is to understand how to deal with stress. And the question is to you guys, can stress be positive? 

How to Deal with Stress? 

In a way, stress can be positive. Let’s see what we’re saying. Yes, it can motivate. Yes. It’s a driver. Yes, exactly. What we can do is first, I think that a certain level of stress indicates something. It attracts our attention to something which is important for us. That can be in something which is unsafe for use or potential threat or something that just needs a very immediate action.

So the first thing we can do for our clients is to help them first to understand what stress does for us. I’ve seen people that were really stressed, denying the fact that they were stressed and the first step I use in that case is getting them to tell me in that situation when they think about that specific situation they are in and what are the physical signals that are coming to them.

Our body senses some physical signals and it’s up to you to really, pay attention and connect them to the current situation we’re in. So on your side, where are the kind of, physical signals you feel when you’re stressed. For me, I know that at least that’s three, actually. So one is headaches. The second one is pain in stomach and the third have to do with difficulty in eating. And sometimes to speak actually. We have a lot of physical signals that if we do not ignore them as just messages and we just can then, focus our attention on what’s going on. 

The second step is getting our clients to name the stresses. And then by stresses here, I mean, that can be fast. But not only those could be activities, that could be relationships. This could be the attitude. And difficulties at work, unclear situations, risk, sometimes stakeholders, but also kind of limiting beliefs. So here again, what we can do is really, check with our clients.The number of stresses that are around and the ones that have the strongest impact on them. 

The third one is to identify some coping strategies, and certain tactics, that are going to help our clients to minimize the impact of these stresses. And this one thing for this stuff, which is quite useful and works usually quite well.

Helping Clients Identify Their Emotion

Sometimes people find it extremely difficult to identify the emotion that they are going through, where there’s a tendency to get confused in identifying that emotion. I’m sure you would have come across those situations as well. In those situations, what is the way out for a coach? 

The way out of this is to get them really exploring the variety of emotions they have. It happens to all of us to feel happy about something that has happened, but at the same time, sad for the next thing that we lost and in sometimes as well, angry about something, but really feeling grateful for something else. All of this exactly at the same time.

What we should do is try to name all of this. And I start by giving sometimes as myself, a small example like I just did right now, and if I see that I’m blocked because I absolutely do not choose to talk about them, I used the Wheel of Emotions, the one of Plutchik, and by looking at those, we look at the combinations that can exist. We see that often the combination of two or three emotions brings to something else and we try to name it all together. And we talk about, so the consequences of the emotions, the kind of messages that those emotions are giving us. 

Getting Over Resignation

Often there is a tendency in the country to get into that resignation mode which might stem from the trigger that they have at this moment or from the past patterns that they’ve been operating from. How could we assist coaches to get over those resentments where there is the inability to trust people?

First, get them first to identify it. It is about trying to understand what is behind that resentment. What is behind the resignation? What does it mean in terms of the people? How about the people that are involved, the kind of emotions that they felt at the moment, why did they feel this way? And if it has to do with the trust pattern, sometimes people believe that the other people do not trust them actually is them not trusting those people. So trying to get them to weigh in how much do they trust them and how do they show that trust and how much the others are also showing trust. And is there something which is within the signals of trust, which is not, which is misread actually? So, I would push them really to look at the signals and say, “well, is there another way to interpret them? What would someone else say about it?”