Up-level your emotional intelligence to win at work (feat. Alison Whitmire)

Mar 23, 2021

Do you know your EQ score and what to do to improve it?

Developing your EQ profile is the most important leadership skill to develop to survive past 2021 and beyond.

AI (artificial intelligence) is coming sooner than you think, and will wipe out industries and jobs. Many of the tasks performed by humans will be outsourced to artificial intelligence in the next decade. The one thing AI can’t replace is leadership.

AI is going to take the place of IQ, but it can’t replace EQ or emotional intelligence.

So what do we do about that?

The EQ Profile, a tool that determines empathy accuracy and compassion, bringing light to emotional blind spots, can tell you exactly where your EQ stands today and what you need to focus on to develop further. The profile provides a snapshot of your internal experience, in relationship with others, under stressful situations.

Alison Whitmire is an authority in Emotional Intelligence and the President of Learning in Action, the company that created the EQ Profile. Alison is a certified professional coach, and a master EQ practitioner with over 17 years of experience coaching CEOs, leaders and business owners. She trains other coaches on how to use the EQ Profile to reveal people’s emotional blind spots, and helps them create a level of self-awareness that results in breakthroughs with their working relationships.

What makes the EQ Profile unique is its ability to unveil aspects of your personality that you are not aware of, identifying possible triggers. The assessment places you in complex mock emotional situations that you may encounter in the workplace and assesses how you are feeling inside and, by extension, how you are likely to react.

Sure there are other EQ assessment tools out there, but those tools just ask us to self-assess ourselves. “Do you have a high level of EQ? Why, yes, I do!” The result is we answer these questions as an idealized version of ourselves, and may not have the self-awareness to be able to answer accurately, making it difficult to derive value from any insights.

So, why is this important?

As leaders, our EQ shows up in our companies in ways we cannot always predict. Our company challenges, culture and successes are all an expression of the leader, often in ways we leaders are not aware of.

We are neurologically hardwired to not see our own flaws. As children we are taught what is right and what is wrong, and what traits are desirable and undesirable. Our brains deliberately hide our shortcomings from us as a survival technique, so we literally cannot see them. The EQ Profile helps leaders shed light on their own blind spots, and ultimately to figure out where our behaviors may be causing difficulty for us or our teams.

Here’s what the EQ Profile will tell us:

  • Access to emotions: What emotions do you over-access? What emotions do you under-access? This will impact how you show up in relationship with others when in conflict.
  • Positive–negative orientation: Do you see life’s glass as half full or half empty? Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic? This influences our relationships with others.
  • Self-other orientation: When you are under stress, where do you look for responsibility? Do you look to yourself or others? The extent of this will determine what perspective or the lens with which you view relationship conflict.
  • Thinking, feeling and wanting: Do you tend to make decisions based on emotion, instinct or logic? Ideally, we want to evenly access all of these because they each provide a source of information.
  • Empathy accuracy: How accurately can you identify what someone else is thinking, feeling and wanting?
  • Empathy compassion: How much do you want to join in or have compassion for what others are feeling?
  • Relationship strategies: Do you tend to trust yourself or others more? This will indicate the way you engage with others, especially in times of stress.

When we apply the lessons we learn from our EQ Profiles, we start to lessen the effect of our pasts on our current behavior. We begin to loosen the grip of our patterns, become more effective leaders, and ultimately create more successful organizations.

Learn more about how the EQ Profile can transform your leadership and your organization at http://LearningInAction.com.

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