1-Sentence-Summary: Emotional Intelligence 2.0 explains what Emotional Intelligence is and how you can use it to build fantastic relationships in your personal life and career by utilizing the powers of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
Have you ever wanted to have better people skills? Interacting with those around us is such a huge part of our lives, particularly when it comes to our career potential. Even if you have a job as a tech expert who doesn’t interact much with others, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you need to learn how to interact well with others.
But being good with people is just the start. To survive the stresses of work-life, you aso need to be good at self-managing and be able to control your own emotions in stressful situations.
This is why success in the workplace today is largely dependent on having a good amount of emotional intelligence, also known as EQ. In the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0: Discover how to Increase Your EQ Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves give expert advice on how you can improve your emotional intelligence.
You will not only learn how to read others but also how to build better relationships with those around you, and most importantly, yourself. In doing so you will become more successful and happy in your personal and work life.
Let’s see how much we can discover in just 3 lessons:
- Emotional intelligence means being self-aware, managing yourself well, reading others’ emotions, and connecting with others.
- Managing yourself means finding a balance between your logical and emotional sides.
- If you want to become a great communicator, you have to learn how to align your body language with what’s coming out of your mouth.
Bothered by anger? Struggling to connect with people? Want more friends? This book will help! Let’s dive in and learn how!
Lesson 1: Become emotionally intelligent by developing self-awareness, self-management, emotional understanding, and connection skills.
If you want to improve your EQ, you need to know there are four basic components. First is self-awareness. This is the ability to understand both your feelings and behaviors. When you are self-aware, you know why you feel a certain way. This means you don’t have to become overwhelmed with your emotions.
Second is self-management, which means keeping yourself in situations where you can behave properly.
Third is social awareness. The author explains that once you understand your own emotions, you can start to understand if others around you are mad, sad, or excited. You will be able to take cues from their body language.
Fourth is relationship management. When you understand both yourself and the people around you, you are finally able to build strong relationships in your life.
For example, if you recognize your co-worker reacts badly to criticism, you can find different ways to give feedback. This will in turn improve your relationship.
Lesson 2: Balance your logical and emotional sides to become excellent at managing yourself.
A big part of self-management is learning to balance your logical and emotional sides. One way you can do this is by making an emotion vs. reason list.
For this draw two columns. In the first column, write what your emotions want you to do. In the second column, write down what logical reasoning tells you to do. This exercise will help you keep both sides balanced so one doesn’t dominate over the other.
When you compare them, take note of which side has the stronger points. You might realize maybe your emotions are clouding your judgment. Or other times, there can be holes in your logic.
For an example of a situation you can use this in, imagine you have an employee who you like a lot, but he isn’t great at his job. You are considering firing him, and you can use the emotion vs reason list to sort out what the best course of action is.
Another way to improve your self-management is to let family and friends know what your goals are. They can help you stay on track. Having someone to be accountable to is a great source of motivation.
Lesson 3: Great communication means saying the same thing with your body that you are with your mouth.
The author teaches that a core part of EQ is the ability to build maintain strong relationships. One way you can do this is by checking your body language to make sure you aren’t sending mixed signals. Not just your voice but your body and your behavior convey a lot about how you feel, so make sure you’re sending the right signals.
For example, say you need to thank your employees for all the hard work they’ve done. However, this morning you and your spouse got into a big fight. If you rush through your speech without smiling, you probably won’t come across as sincere. This is because your body language and the message don’t match.
Another great way to improve your relationships with those around you is to ask those close to you for feedback. It makes sense because how can we ever really improve if we don’t get feedback about the things we are doing right and wrong?
This can be difficult because it’s easy to take feedback as criticism and ignore it. But it’s key to learn to take constructive criticism. It makes it easier when you remind yourself that the person giving feedback is really just looking out for your best interests.
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Review
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is a great book! I’ve been hearing this phrase thrown around all over the place these days and was excited to learn what it meant. I think this is something that all leaders, workers, and people in general need to know if they want to have a good career and life!
Who would I recommend the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 summary to?
The 33-year-old that has a hard time connecting with other people and wants to fix it, the 59-year-old manager who wants to learn how to work better with their team members, and anyone that wants to know how to manage their emotions and relationships better.
Last Updated on September 21, 2022
