Goleman's first three dimensions of emotional intelligence are focused on improving yourself from within. These dimensions are self-regulation, self-awareness and discovering what personally motivates you. The second two dimensions, which have to do with building interpersonal skills, are developing empathy and social skills. Goleman and his colleagues lay out five steps you can do to improve on all five emotional intelligence dimensions. It's important to note that these exercises can uncover deeply personal details. If you implement these steps with your team, it is crucial to give others the option to keep their results private. Step 1 of the exercise is to imagine your ideal self. The purpose of this is to improve your own self-awareness about what is missing in your life, and to increase your awareness of how your mood affects other people. Let's you and I try it together. Imagine that it is the year 2023. You have achieved success in your field, and you're thinking it might be time to move onto another opportunity. Before you make a decision, you open up a journal to start writing down your thoughts. You want to focus on fulfilling your most important values and dreams, and ways to incorporate these values into your work life or personal life. Before you make a decision, you write down the answers to the following questions in your journal. It's 2023. What are you doing? Where do you live? Who is there? What does it feel like? Once you complete that, move on to step 2. Step 2 is to come to terms with your real self. This is a tough but important exercise in developing self-awareness, and a test about how well you have developed interpersonal relationships. Here you need to reach out to your team and other colleagues to find out how they experience your leadership style. Don't shy away from receiving critical feedback. And when you do, it is helpful to keep an open attitude, so that you can learn from the comments. By gathering feedback from a number of colleagues, you can keep yourself motivated on self-improvement. Step 3 is to create an action plan to bridge the gap between the real and ideal. This step involves embracing new opportunities to overcome ingrained behaviors. To achieve this step, you can collect weekly written anonymous feedback about how your mood affects other people. Another option is to reflect one hour daily in a behavioral journal. Or you can attend the cost and group dynamics and listen to a trusted colleague as a behavioral coach, or get to know your subordinates outside of work. All of these options provide you with the opportunity to form your new habits while holding yourself accountable. Step 4 is to practice the plan. In this step, you seek out deliberate opportunities for practice. For example, during your commute, think back to a recent interaction that was especially difficult. Remember back to your ideal self, as you described it in step 1, and how that person might deal with this interaction differently. You can rehearse how to respond differently with this ideal self in mind. Finally, step 5 is to create a community of supporters. This is what Goleman and colleagues call change enforcers, who can motivate you through the sometimes tedious practice of changing mental habits. This group of trusted advisers can support you and increase your motivation to try new things. If you'd like to use the five steps with your team as a way of coaching them, remember that these conversations should be confidential, and that the purpose of coaching, whether in a group or one-on-one setting, is to help your teammates improve and get through each step. Be mindful that it's easy to apply pressure on teammates if you're in a position of authority. Some debrief questions you can ask in one-on-one or group sessions to help teammates make sense of the five steps include, how did the exercise go? Was there anything that resonated with you as you completed the exercise? Was there anything that surprised you as you completed the exercise? What strategies will you use to develop new habits in the next one week, one month or one year? While this video focused on how individuals can improve their own emotional intelligence, the next video talks about how you can use mindfulness strategies to help your team to collectively enhance emotional intelligence. See you there.
