Enhance Your Strengths Emotional Intelligence

You have little time to balance between your work priorities and your personal life, which compete with one another, but the question is: where should you focus your efforts to achieve the greatest progress in the limited time you have?

There are two main factors that contribute to your ability to reach your potential away from your “IQ” and the pace at which you learn. The first factor involves knowing who you are (your character), and that includes your strengths. The second factor is your personal and social skill in dealing with the complexities of life.

This skill is emotional intelligence, which helps you make the most of who you are and what you have learned. Your strengths are the combination of emotional intelligence competence and cognitive intelligence competence.

Strengths and Emotional Intelligence

The strengths movement emerged from Positive Psychology, and the goal of this movement was to learn about your natural strengths (which you have from a young age) and develop them further, instead of focusing on your weak points.

The basic principle is that you will achieve better results if you reinforce what you really know, so those things that you don't know how to do will not be the areas where you will shine at all; therefore, instead of wasting your time and energy trying to improve average capabilities, set it up to strengthen your strengths and turn them into great things.

The simple premise of emotional intelligence has emerged from discoveries in brain science, in particular, and the discovery that the brain is programmed to respond emotionally to events before it can process things rationally. As a consequence, the purpose of emotional intelligence is to increase your awareness of your feelings, so that you can understand them and manage them for your own good. When you  develop self-awareness, you can understand and manage your feelings for you and for others, instead of running away from them or letting them control you. You can also get faster when you are good at reading emotions and dealing with them in a constructive way.

The best thing about emotional intelligence is that it is something you can develop since the areas of the brain, where emotional intelligence works, are characterized by a high degree of flexibility. So, as new behaviors develop, your brain practically turns these behaviors into habits that you can easily do again in the future.

How Emotional Intelligence Affects Your Strengths?

Everyone, regardless of their occupation and age, must develop both their strengths and emotional intelligence to make the best out of their life opportunities. For example, you might find out that your strengths include being competitive, strategic, and aspiring, but if you don't have self-awareness or the ability to manage yourself, it will be hard to use these strengths for personal or professional success.

Imagine someone who has a real vision, a motive for winning, and an ability to see how to progress and evolve, but this person always tries to win every conversation with anyone he\she meets, and he\she lacks self-awareness that allows him\her to know that he\she competes with others in every conversation, without realizing how much this hurts them. What is going to happen is that his\her desire to beat others will hamper his\her ability to reach strategic goals, and it will gradually weaken the quality of the relationships that he\she hopes to rely on in the future. However, if he\she develops the skills of emotional intelligence, this simple change in orientation will ensure that every interaction with his\her co-workers promotes his\her vision and tendency to win by supporting them and encouraging their commitments.