Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 171 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're all doing great today, and at the time of recording this episode here in the US, it's Independence Day.
We usually call this the 4th of July.
So today is the 4th of July and so many people will be outside all day at the beach, at parks, having barbecues, things like that.
And many people will watch the fireworks at night and it will be a fun day for many people.
And you're probably wondering why I'm working on this holiday.
Why am I inside recording when I should be outside celebrating?
Well, in reality, I don't usually take days off for holidays in the U.S.
The one exception is Christmas.
I don't work on Christmas, but on the other holidays I usually work, unless that holiday is on a weekend.
So I'm working today, and for me, that's okay.
I'm happy to be here recording this episode, but hopefully I'll be able to go outside later and enjoy the outdoors a little bit.
And in today's episode, we're going to talk about the topic of emotional intelligence.
This is something that you might not be very familiar with.
But I think it's an interesting topic to talk about, because emotional intelligence is is something that helps us in our lives.
It helps us in our careers, in our relationships, in many areas of life.
So what is emotional intelligence?
Well, this is the ability to recognize, interpret and regulate your own emotions and understand those of other people.
So there are five key elements of emotional intelligence, according to the sources that I found online.
And I want to talk about those five elements today and how those elements help us become more emotionally intelligent and can help us in our everyday lives.
And I got all of this information from the website verywellmind.com.
So that's my source for this topic.
And before we start, I want to encourage you to sign up for my membership.
If you want my help understanding native speakers when they speak fast, if you want my training on, Or if you want my advanced podcast episodes, you can sign up and become a Listening Time family member and you'll get those advanced episodes.
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Conversations podcast, if you feel ready to, to practice with my conversations that I have with other people from around the country.
The link to sign up is down below.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let's talk about the five key elements of emotional intelligence.
The first one is self-awareness.
So what is self-awareness?
Well, this is the ability to recognize and understand your emotions, and as well as understanding how your actions, your emotions and your moods affect other people.
So really, it's the ability to really understand yourself, how you feel, how you act and the consequences of those things.
So I think that this is a very important quality that helps people in their everyday lives, whether it's just understanding yourself better or communicating and interacting better with other people and having better relationships overall.
So I tend to think of myself as a pretty self-aware individual.
I think that I'm actually a little too self-aware sometimes, in that I can be overly self-conscious and think too much about these things and about how other people are affected by me, and I can't kind of exaggerate this a little too much, let's say, and that's not good either right, but I think that we should all try to be self-aware, and when you are self-aware, other people feel better around you and I think you probably feel better with yourself.
So imagine if you didn't really understand why you feel what you feel.
And imagine if you didn't understand how your mood affects other people around you.
That would definitely affect your relationships with people.
Because someone who's self-aware can understand how other people perceive them, and this can help them act in a way that is more appropriate in different situations.
They can interact more appropriately with different people, and they can just be more conscious of how people view them and how they seem to other people.
They can also learn from their interactions with other people, and they can just have a better understanding of all this.
I know that I've talked to many people who are are not self-aware.
I've had interactions with people that don't have this quality and it's very obvious.
These people don't realize how their actions and their emotions are affecting the people around them, and the people around them are kind of put off by the way that these people are acting and by how they're expressing themselves and their emotions.
By the way, when we say that someone is put off by someone else, we're saying that that person feels negatively about that other person.
They might lose interest in talking to that person, for example.
So I've been around people that don't have any self-awareness and people are sometimes put off by by them so self-awareness is important what's the next key element the next one is self-regulation so this refers to being able to manage and regulate your emotions so are you expressing your emotions at the right time in the right situation and are you doing so well?
Are you expressing your emotions in a healthy way?
I'm sure you've had this experience before, where you express yourself in a way that afterwards makes you regret what you did.
And you say, whoops, I shouldn't have said that.
I shouldn't have exploded like that.
I should have picked a better time to say that.
I think we've all experienced that before.
So it's normal for that to happen sometimes, but it shouldn't be something that just happens all the time.
But unfortunately...
This happens all the time for some people.
They just can't control their emotions.
They can't express their emotions in a healthy way.
Or they can't wait for the right time in order to express what they want to express.
And they choose the wrong time to do so.
So because of that, they get into a lot of arguments or problems with other people.
And this isn't something that helps us in our relationships and it doesn't help us when we're working with other people.
Maybe you've had a co-worker or a boss that isn't able to self-regulate very well, and it's not very pleasant to work with this type of person, right?
So when you can self-regulate effectively, when you have this trait, usually...
This means that you can manage conflict well.
And it also means that you can diffuse tense situations.
When we say that you diffuse something, we're saying that you calm this situation down.
Okay.
So if there's a tense situation and you're very good at self-regulating, then you probably won't make the situation even more tense and add more conflict.
You can probably diffuse that tense situation.
You can probably make things a little bit less tense sometimes.
And you can control the situation like that.
So that's a great quality to have.
This is something that I really strive to exhibit in my own life.
Remember that when you strive to do something, it means that you try your hardest to accomplish that thing.
They get really heated and there's a lot of fighting.
By the way, when we say that something gets heated, this means that it gets very contentious and people are fighting and arguing and yelling and things like that.
So I don't like to be in situations where everything is tense and people aren't interacting well and they're fighting.
And when I'm in those situations...
I really want to help calm things down and I don't want to add my own emotions that will make the situation even more tense.
Right.
So self-regulation is also important.
And then the next key element is social skills.
This one is very important.
Social skills help you to succeed in life.
I think that this is something that is really important.
It helps you in your career.
It helps you in your personal life, your relationships, all of your interactions, etc.
So someone who has good social skills is someone who is able to listen very well to the person that is talking to them.
Someone who has good social skills is able to communicate effectively verbally and non-verbally.
So verbally refers to the words that you say, right?
And then nonverbal communication refers to all the other ways that you are communicating with besides just the words that you're using.
So, for example, your tone of voice, how you're saying the words, and your body language, how you position your body.
This really affects how other people feel around you when they're interacting with you.
So someone with good social skills is able to communicate well with their words and their nonverbal communication.
And someone with good social skills can be very persuasive.
They can present an argument or a point and have other people listen and actually be persuaded or convinced about what you're saying.
I thought this was interesting when I saw this point on this website that I mentioned because, if you think about it, your social skills can really help other people see things the way you see them, or at least see your point, your point of view, and you can be more effective at getting other people to understand your opinion or even agree with something that you say.
You can persuade them better.
Of course, we don't want to take this too far and manipulate people and do all that, of course.
But I think it's good to be able to be persuasive.
I think this helps us actually get our point across.
That refers to communicating your message well, right?
And it helps us in our careers.
It helps us be able to manage our work.
Relationships better.
If we can convince other people of what we're talking about and they can really see our point, that can really help us.
So social skills are obviously a very important thing for us.
If we want to be emotionally intelligent, the next key element is empathy.
So empathy refers to being able to understand other people's feelings, behaviors and motivations, being able to see things from their point of view.
Some people need to work on this key element here, because I'm sure you've interacted with people who just can't seem to empathize with you.
It seems like they can only think about their own perspective and their own feelings, their own desires.
And it seems like they don't really respect your opinion or your desires, or your feelings, your point of view, etc.
And that's not fun to interact with someone like that.
We all like to interact with people who are empathetic, with people who actually care about our point of view, our feelings.
We feel like they understand us.
They make the effort to try to put themselves in our shoes, as we say, to see things from our point of view, even if they don't agree with us.
And when you're having a difficult time for example, you're going through a rough time it's great when you can talk to someone who is empathetic, who can really understand you and make you feel cared about and understood.
So when you're an empathetic person, people like interacting with you.
It's that simple.
People feel comfortable around you.
People feel like you listen to them, right?
We all want to feel like other people are listening to us and that they care about us and understand us.
So this is an obvious one.
I think that we all need to strive to be empathetic individuals.
This will help us in every area of life.
And one other key element of emotional intelligence is motivation, actually.
And so I thought this was an interesting one.
I wasn't expecting to see this element when I was looking up information on emotional intelligence.
But it's pretty interesting.
So on the website that I mentioned earlier, It talks about intrinsic motivation and external motivation.
So someone who is emotionally intelligent has intrinsic motivation, not just external motivation.
So intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that comes from inside you.
It's not just the motivation to succeed because you're going to earn a lot of money or you're going to earn people's respect or people are going to like you.
Those are external motivations.
Intrinsic motivation is a desire to do something, a motivation to do something simply because you just have that motivation inside you.
And I think that's related to maybe understanding your own emotions, your own desires, things like that.
So maybe that's why this element is part of emotional intelligence.
Honestly, I don't really know, but I think it's, of course, still a good thing to try to have.
Try to have intrinsic motivation.
Try not to allow yourself to just be motivated by external things, right?
So someone who is intrinsically motivated is someone who is able to set effective goals, And it also says this that someone who's intrinsically motivated has a need for achievement.
Like it's part of their nature to just want to achieve things, accomplish things.
And that's cool.
I think that's a great trait when someone just has a desire to achieve something.
Not because they need to satisfy other people's demands for them or they want to just impress other people.
No, they just have a desire, a need, a thirst even for achievement.
Like it's just something they want to do.
They want to do things well, accomplish things, improve, etc.
And so if you're intrinsically motivated, you're always looking to improve, you want to get better.
You have that desire to improve yourself, and that's great.
And one other result of having this type of motivation is that you can take the initiative, meaning you don't need other people to tell you to start something or to do something.
You do it.
You start that on your own.
And if you've ever worked in a company with a boss, I'm sure that you know that your boss loves when you take the initiative and you don't wait for for your boss to tell you that you have to do something.
You just do it without needing to be told.
I think that that's a boss's dream when they have employees like that.
So of course, having this type of motivation can really help you in your career as well.
All right, well, this episode was a little more theoretical, a little deeper than normal.
I hope you were able to follow it.
In the next episodes, I'll talk about things that are a little bit less theoretical, let's say.
Actually, in the next episode I'm going to talk about motivation and how I'm able to increase my own motivation.
So you won't want to miss that episode.
And, of course, remember that if you feel ready to practice with my advanced podcast episodes, then you can sign up to become a Listening Time family member.
The link is down below.
And you can also sign up for my US Conversations podcast.
The link is also down below for that.
All right.
Thank you for listening to this episode, and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
