I’m at the leadership summit with the team from Revolution Church. This is by far the best leadership conference of the year. This is my 13th summit and every year, God stretches me and challenges me. So much wisdom and inspiration wrapped up into two days. I always blog my notes, so if you can’t attend or missed something, I’ve got you covered.

In this session, Travis Bradberry talked about things from his book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (which is a fantastic book for leaders). Emotional intelligence has 4 skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relational management.

Here are some takeaways:

• We have an emotional reaction to events before we have a rational reaction. Emotions always go first.
• We have more than 400 emotional experiences everyday.
• 36% of people are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.

EQ is not:

• It is not IQ.
• It is not personality.

EQ Skills:

Self-awareness

• Awareness of your tendencies for responding to different people and situations.
• Accurately recognizing your emotions as they happen.
• What bothers us is when we see someone do something that reveals something in us.

Self-management

• Self-management is what you do with this awareness.
• When you lean into self-awareness, you now have a lot of wisdom and knowledge about yourself.
• Awareness of your emotions to choose what you say and do, in order to positively direct your behavior.

Social awareness

• It is recognizing and understanding the emotions and perspectives of others.
• You focus more on the other person than you do on yourself.
• This means not thinking ahead in a conversation or argument, but focusing on the other person.

Relational management

• Relational management is using the first 3 skills in concert.
• Using awareness of your emotions and the emotions of others to manage interaction successfully.
• The biggest mistake in relationships is winning the battle to lose the war.

• Relational management is seeing how you affect other people.

Business Case for EQ

• Emotional intelligence is a foundation skill for critical skills.
• Emotions are the primary driver of your behavior, if you get a handle on this, it will impact other areas (stress, response to change, in a team, how you are as a leader).
• EQ accounts for 60% of their job performance.
• 90% of top performers are high in EQ.
• 20% of low performers are high in EQ.

How to Increase EQ

• All of us have pathways the reinforce our behavior.
• Lean into discomfort.
• Get your stress under control (taking a walk, turn your phone off, breathing exercises, attitude of gratitude).
• Clean up your sleep hygiene (don’t take anything that helps you sleep, no blue light in the evening).
• Get your caffeine intake under control.