Six Ways to Grow Your Emotional Intelligence

Dear reader,

Emotional intelligence is one of those evergreen skills that’s always in demand. Here’s two reasons why:

1: It’s a core leadership skill 

Leaders who excel in emotional intelligence — self-awareness, empathy, managing emotions — are better at building trust, resolving conflicts, and inspiring their teams. These are foundational skills for anyone leading people; such skills are not merely fashionable, nor will they ever go out of style. In my view, we don’t ask nearly enough of our leadership in this department.

2: It’s a competitive advantage

A lot of leadership content focuses on strategy or technical skills, but emotional intelligence is what sets great leaders apart. It’s the human side of leadership, and that’s where the magic happens — especially in a world where AI and automation are taking over more technical tasks. 

I have written previously about emotional intelligence, here. In this article I build on it and talk about six ways you can grow your emotional intelligence. I’m going to introduce to you each of the six, and then I have an action step for you to take each point further.

1. Develop self-attunement. 
2. Take responsibility for your feelings. 
3. Manage your mindset 
4. Know the difference, in daily practice, between needs and strategies. 
5. Know how to make clear and specific agreements. 
6. Learn about co-dependence. 

Ok let’s get into it.

1: Develop self-attunement

In my work I harp on about this quite a bit. But that is because it’s one of the core pieces of a healthy social and emotional inner life that you cannot ignore.

Attunement in my book is knowing what you feel, need, and being in touch with your underlying motives. 

Here’s a story to illustrate the interesting complexity of attunement.

Imagine a single person who lives alone and has a full time job that takes them out of the house every day. One day they decide to get a puppy for company. The puppy is adorable, they love it very much. They spend a week at home with the puppy, but then its time to go back to work. They leave the puppy at home alone all day long for up to ten hours, and when they come home at night the puppy is deliriously happy to see them. The person feels loved and needed!

But one day they get a call from the HOA (Home Owners Association) saying their puppy cries and barks all day long, and is upsetting the neighbors. They are very surprised by this. They hadn’t attuned to the reality of a dog, a pack animal, being alone all day long and what that was like for the puppy. They try all kinds of things in the house – stimulation toys, soft music. They hire a dog walker to come by every day. 

The dog adjusts to its new existence, but develops various mental and health ailments such as separation anxiety, excessive itching, bald spots, digestive issues, destructive habits, and other means of self-soothing. However the person never really is able to attune to the dog and its way of being. This is likely because the person was not sufficiently attuned to as a child. Usually, they were the recipient of similar lack of attunement from their caregivers, who in turn also were not adequately attuned to by theirs. 

In those cases, attunement is something that has to be learned consciously as an adult. We can learn how to do this by first and foremost attuning to ourselves, to the inner landscape of our beliefs, our needs, and how we feel about those beliefs and needs — all of which drive our motives for doing everything that we do. 

Our feeling life is a way into this world of the inner life, as feelings come and go according, not to their own mysterious ways unknown to us, but directly connected to our beliefs, unmet needs, and motives.

Here’s another example: a leader of a very experienced UX design team decides to run team meetings in a particular way. Inspired by his experiences in the military, he is aiming for uncompromising excellence.

 When one of the team members brings an update about a project they are working on (in this particular real example, its a UX re-design for a government organization website), this leader has devised a strategy for working with them: he plays devil’s advocate. He looks for points to criticize, to pick at, and undermine. He tries to challenge them in every way possible on their idea and their progress. He believes this is a quick and disciplined way toward better outcomes. 

What happens instead is his team finds the oxygen leaving their enthusiasm. They experience being undermined by his strategy, and doubt their work. They believe he doesn’t appreciate or recognize their expertise and the quality in their work. He is unable to attune to what this already highly motivated team really needs from him.

Action Step: a place to start with learning more about attunement is to listen to my podcast about attunement, here. 

Another is to download one of my journaling exercises which will walk you through a self-reflection process which is the practice of attunement. You can pick out one on my Resources page, here.

2: Take responsibility for your feelings

The feeling life is easy to ignore when you’re feeling good, and really overwhelming when you’re not. Feelings are like a storm-driven tidal wave that washes you out to sea, helpless and in its grip, until some good weather comes along and you are released. While this is true on an experiential level, when you dig quite a bit deeper into the underlying influences of your feeling life you’ll find that no one can make you feel anything you haven’t already decided to feel. My therapist mother-in-law says this is therapy 101. 

I’ll take it a further step: take 100% responsibility for your feelings. 

This is a challenging idea because we usually blame others for how we feel. “He made me feel this way!” We do this quite unconsciously and habitually; every time we get angry or resentful we are blaming something or someone else. But, what about when the emotions are justified because the other person was inattentive, destructive, or rude? 

Someone else’s feelings and behavior are their responsibility, not yours. But how you feel, and what you do with how you feel, is yours. This means you are free to feel whatever you choose to feel, and the salient point here is you have a choice. 

Now, what are you going to do with that choice?

The more I take responsibility for my feelings and not blame my husband, for example, the more free I become of my wounds. Otherwise I express feelings of angry helplessness arising from unconscious beliefs driving blame and resentment. I am not denying my feelings, I’m just seeing them for what they are: the result of a belief I’m carrying. And now I have the opportunity to interrogate my belief as it likely isn’t serving me. 

And it definitely isn’t serving my husband nor our relationship in the long run for me to hold onto feelings of resentment and blame without interrogation into where they came from, that may very well have nothing to do with my husband.

Action Step: to help get you into action about this topic, I have a podcast episode all about exploring the feeling life. It introduces to you a way of understanding your feeling life you might not have heard before and it might give you a more nuanced and empowering perspective on how we tend to engage with our emotions and feelings. You can listen here.

3: Mindset is the new essential skillset 

You have more power over your mindset than you know, and in fact mastery over your mindset is something we all need to invest more effort into. I recently wrote a long article about this, which also elaborates on attunement, the first point in this article. The action step you can take is to read it — or read it again and this time with your mind attuned to emotional intelligence and what mindset means for you in that context.

You can read it here.

4: Knowing the difference, in daily practice, between needs and strategies

Knowing the difference between needs and strategies is a fundamental concept for healthy communication. I find that we all can do with separating out our needs from our strategies. The needs we carry, such as needs for connection, to be listened to, for clarity, for understanding, for safety, etc, drives all of our behaviors. Put differently, we behave from a place of trying to get our needs met, though we often haven’t noticed this sometimes subtle driving force.

You have a need for quiet and rest, so you go home instead of to that noisy party. You desperately want safety and peace, so you are obsequious to your dominating colleague. You need order and predictability so you keep your house tidy. You need some cheering up so you call a friend.

Why is this distinction important, between needs and strategies? 

Often strategies we employ to meet a need are rather unfortunate, to the point that we are getting the exact opposite of what we really want. The more important and urgent the need, the more unfortunate our strategies tend to become. This is far more common than you might suppose. Typically, in fact, if your motives are to try and meet an unmet need in you that is being driven by a wound, a psychological wound, then chances are good that you are going to use strategies that get you the opposite.

This is how abuse in a family happens, for example. Hurt people will hurt people, not because they are evil but because they are using a terrible, distorted strategy to try and find love and connection. 

I have found that people who have lived through ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) particularly struggle with this, having very unfortunate strategies to try and connect to others. You may be familiar with people who have distorted attachment styles, where you can see an example of this enmeshing of need with unfortunate strategy. 

A more every day example could be that we have a need for psychological safety so we go along to get along as best we can and not trigger any conflict, but we keep finding ourselves in conflict because we don’t speak our truth. Instead we try and manage the emotions of the people around us, which is unfortunate because it’s manipulative and controlling. 

And quite possibly co-dependent (see point number six).

When it comes to the strategies we habitually employ, we will express unconsciously the same energetic patterns where we experienced lack of attunement as children. This is not to say we DO exactly the same thing, but that we – and I have seen this over and over again – end up, through the individual ways we internalized our experiences, with a harmonic of the same pattern being expressed. 

And we’ll express it either towards others or toward ourselves. 

For example, you’ll find that an adult who experienced abuse as a child tends to be abusive toward themselves in their thoughts, conclusions, beliefs, and self-criticisms. They don’t necessarily express the energetic pattern of abuse toward others, but they likely will toward themselves. The healing happens only once they learn to attune to themselves (see point number one) and observe how they may be perpetuating the abuse within.

Action Step: to delve more into the world of needs and strategies I made a guidebook that comes with a step by step journaling exercise, called Forbidden Needs, that you can download for free on my resources page, here.

5: Know how to make clear and specific agreements

This is surprisingly challenging because it can trigger some deep fears around vulnerability, speaking your needs, rejection, and many other difficult dynamics. While the practice of it is simple, it can be emotionally very challenging. 

Learn to make specific, clear, and do-able agreements with others — and hold yourself and them to those agreements. Here is a short and sweet guideline for how to make agreements with others. I want to give you simple and clear parameters to refer to when you find yourself struggling with cross communication issues. 

1. It must be do-able and specific, meaning, something someone can agree to. If you say for example, “in the future would you please not do that anymore”, you’ll find this a difficult agreement to adhere to. It’s vague, there’s no clarity to it, and a whole kingdom-sized variety of interpretations can be made. Do-able, therefore, means specific so someone knows to what they are agreeing to. Would you be willing to do this task in this particular way to my specifications? In that scenario a person is at least clear about what they are agreeing to, or they can adjust the agreement to make it do-able for them.
2. Make it in the present tense about an agreement for the near future, not the distant future. If what you’re asking of another is proposed for the future, how will such an agreement be tracked, followed up with, or fulfilled? In most cases this is not a practical agreement. Make it do-able in the sense that the time frame is in the near future, or in the present. 
3. Expressed in action language. Request of another what you want them to DO, and not what you don’t want them to do. If you have experience with toddlers, you know how helpful this simple idea is. “Don’t go on the road!” is exactly what they’ll proceed to do. Their little bodies respond to the words “go onto the road” and somehow don’t hear the “don’t”! When you speak of what you want to have happen, instead of what you DON’T want, it is much easier to be specific — which is the secret to making agreements that are adhered to. 

Action Step: to learn more about making requests and agreements with others, I highly recommend you read the book, Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. 

6: Learn about co-dependence

Are you familiar with the concept of co-dependence? Knowing about co-dependence will help you avoid getting emotionally entangled with others. A gifted therapist told me once that co-dependence is THE main issue she has dealt with in her long standing practice. 

I think its really important you understand this because co-dependence can pass for Emotional Intelligence all too easily if you aren’t sufficiently educated. 

Co-dependence can arise because of a tendency to be overly sensitive and attuned to what others are feeling with an unconscious tendency to want to manage the emotions around them. This tendency toward control and management is a strategy to meet a need for emotional safety – as you can probably imagine.

In my practice I’ve also seen people try to manage others emotions through anxious control, or angry control strategies. If you feel a certain way, I’ll get upset and have to try and manage your emotions by telling you what you should feel — so I can feel better.

You can suspect co-dependent tendencies when you “consistently elevate the needs of others above your own. This may manifest as self-sacrifice, seeking approval from others, or accepting blame to avoid conflict”. You can read more about co-dependency in this article I just quoted.

Action step: read the classic work about co-dependence, Co-Dependent No More by Melodie Beattie. I think everyone should read this book as investment into some basic soul hygiene.

While this list is not meant to be exhaustive, it does represent some pretty strong foundations in my view. And to these can be added further important inner skills for leadership. I hope you enjoyed this foray into emotional intelligence, and are convinced that not only is it important in your life, but that you’ll join me in insisting that we raise our standards and expectations of leaders accordingly!

Warmly,

Louisa