Tune up your EQ

The 7 Laws Series
I’ve given a lot of thought to the ideas and suggestions that you’ve made regarding the 7th Law of Emotional Intelligence.

Before I share my thoughts, I want to remind us that the purpose of the 7 Laws is to steer us safey through the perils of an Emotional Intelligence overload. If we focus on Read the rest of this entry »

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Every week, I write 3 original articles that help you improve your Emotional Intelligence. If you're new here, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Tanika Williams Seized The Initiative
Me and My EQ Series contributor Tanika Williams sparked an interesting conversation when she suggested I change to 7th Law from:

“I can learn and practice new and more effective behaviours”:

to: Read the rest of this entry »

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Perhaps this is your first visit to this blog. If it’s not your first visit, maybe you haven’t been here often.

To help you get what you’re looking for, I’ve written this round up of 10 blog posts that cover the fundamentals of Emotional Intelligence.

I’ve also tagged each of the posts with the tag Emotional Intelligence 101, to make it easier for you to sort through the list. Click the Emotional Intelligence 101 tag at the top of this post to pull down the full list. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Power Of Personal Initiative

Treat yourself to Ed Brenegar’s compelling account of his 5 professional and personal passions. Here’s Ed’s take on Personal Initiative.

Ed’s Insight About How We Tend To Be

One of the conclusions that I have reached, though without a full appreciation of its cause, is that people in general tend to move toward that which makes them comfortable. They tend to look to other people as responsible for both the problems that they have in life and for the solutions to those problems. As a result, people tend to be reactive, resistant to change and ill-prepared to deal with change

Ed’s View About How We Ought To Be

Human progress, potential, happiness and fulfillment only come when we take responsibility for our lives. When we stop blaming others, and accept responsibility, then we move into a mindset where personal initiative becomes how we approach every aspect of our lives. Personal initiative is the activity of leadership character. My passion in this regard is to help individuals and groups develop their capacity to take initiative in the context of their work and life.

Ed’s insights resonate with my 7 Laws of Emotional Intelligence. Our response to change is tied to our feelings, emotions and sense of self esteem. We rarely reason or intellectualise our way to successfully chieving personal change. If you adopt these Laws you’ll succeed in moving away from automatic responses to stimuli, for example, blaming others, and reach a point where you accept that you always have choices and you should select your actions wisely. This diagram makes the argument.

Here are my 7 Laws of Emotional Intelligence.

Law #1: I am responsible for my own feelings.
Law #2: I am responsible for my own behaviour
Law #3: I always have choices about how I respond to situations, events and people.
Law #4: No-one can make me upset, angry, happy etc.
Law #5: Identifying my choices empowers me to take fresh look at my behaviour.
Law # 6: Recognising my range of choices is an excellent way to start changing my behaviour for the better.
Law# 7: I can practice and learn new and more effective behaviours.

The 7 Laws challenge us to move towards living an empowered life. EQ provides a series of approaches that can help us to achieve this transformation. Thanks for sharing your ideas Ed. A strong theme of the importance of character runs through your 5 professional passions Ed. Thanks so much for your insights.

Download Galba Bright’s 7 Laws Of Emotional Intelligence

This article is part of the EQ 101 series.

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If you have already read my first post on this topic, you may have noticed that I didn’t give you a real world example of naturalistic intelligence. If you haven’t read the first post, I suggest that you read that post first and then come back to this one.

Here is an excellent naturalistic intelligence resource.

Leslie Owen Wilson explains:

“People possessing nature smarts are keenly aware of their surroundings and changes in their environment, even if these changes are at minute or subtle levels. Often this is due to their highly-developed levels of sensory perception.”

If you want to increase your Emotional Intelligence, it’s important that you understand the basics of multiple intelligence for two key reasons

1) your awareness of each of the different types of intelligence gives you a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.

2) when you improve your knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses, you improve your intrapersonal intelligence (your capacity for being smart about yourself).

Intrapersonal intelligence belongs in the foundation set of emotional intelligence competencies called self awareness.

Experts argue that anyone who wants to improve their Emotional Intelligence should start by improving their self awareness.

What’s Next?
How do you feel when you use your naturalistic intelligence?

Can you think of a famous person in history who demonstrated high levels of intrapersonal intelligence?

This article is part the EQ 101 series.

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