Business Book Summaries

The Big Idea
Emotionally intelligent people communicate better and more successfully than their emotionally unaware counterparts. The good news is that emotional intelligence, or EI, can be learned. This book explains how.

Authors Eaton & Johnson reveal how to manage yourself better and how to improve your listening skills so that you respond more constructively to others. Find out how to develop empathy, manage conflicts and create win/win situations. Improve your EI and you will significantly improve your professional and personal life.

Why You Need This Book
This book will assist you in understanding emotional intelligence and then harnessing its vast power to significantly improve the way you speak to and relate to others. This will undoubtedly raise your powers of persuasion and self-belief.

What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence refers to our ability to inform our decisions with an understanding of our own and others’ emotions in order to act productively. It means the ability to manage our own emotions (intrapersonal intelligence) and the ability to interact well with others (interpersonal intelligence).

Emotions act as warning signals when there is trouble ahead, motivate us to overcome adversity, and enable us to make good decisions.

The key skills that go with emotional intelligence include:

Self-awareness. With this, you understand your own emotions and recognize them as they occur. Your emotional responses guide you in different situations.

Self-confidence. Based in a realistic awareness of their limitations, confident people know when to trust in their own decisions and when to defer to others. Making the most of their strengths, confident people continually engage in new challenges that expand personal potential.

Self-regulation. This ability enables you to stay focused on your goals and delay gratification until they are accomplished. Destructive emotional responses are put aside in favor of ones more likely to achieve the goal.

Motivation. This ability enables you to inspire others by focusing on their needs, preferences, values, goals, and personal strengths.

Empathy. With empathy, you attune to the needs, values, wishes and perspectives of others. You sense others’ feelings and thoughts by actively placing yourself in their position.

Social acumen. Reading situations quickly and well, both verbally and non-verbally, enables you to adapt to the intentions of those with whom you have a relationship. Your sensitivity to group dynamics enables you to identify who in the group is most influential and to align with the cultural style of others.

Persuasiveness. Emotionally intelligent people are adept at reading the intentions and wishes of others and creating mutually satisfactory outcomes. They develop the habit of win/win thinking and look for ways in which personal goals can be aligned with those of others.

Conflict management. With this ability you anticipate conflict before it occurs and divert attention to more productive courses of action. If conflict develops, you resolve it by focusing the attention of the parties involved on actions that are in their best interests.

Self-Management
Presenters fail to inspire us, even though they are familiar with their subject, if they don’t engage our interest. Much of a presenter’s appeal is bound up with non-verbal communication rather than content.

Non-verbal communication – body language and voice quality – is a vital component of credibility in face-to-face interaction. An ounce of commitment is worth more to them than a ton of vague wishes.

Setbacks, of course, can and do rear their ugly heads. Emotionally intelligent communicators, however, retain credibility by bouncing back quickly. Their self-belief shows in their commitment over the long term.

SOME POINTS TO REMEMBER:

• Treat your failures and successes as learning opportunities.
• Listen to your gut reactions when making important decisions.
• Practice developing states of poise, control and humor until they become automatic.
• Stay in touch with your most important personal goals and values.
• Improve your credibility by using voice, gesture and movement to emphasize the points you make.

Reading Others Well
Not only are they following on foot but they are also reading clues, anticipating the target’s next move, and mapping out the eventual destination. This analogy tells something about human communication.

Expanding our social radar in this way, we become more attuned to the needs and dispositions of others. It helps if you have a fund of experiences to draw on. Just as travel broadens the mind, so does having experience in relationships, organizations, social, and cultural settings, and working practices.

Persuasive Communication
In order to deal with interruptions, tangential responses, misunderstandings and unforeseen objections, effective communicators are ready to develop a dialogue with their listeners. The skill of active listening is important here.

Empathize – mentally stepping into the other person’s shoes to gather information about their emotions, thoughts, and assumptions.

Reflect – mirroring back key phrases (particularly those linked to values) in what is said. Also matching some aspects of body language.

Summarize – summarizing frequently to check understanding and then asking a question or making a proposal that leads to positive action.

Emotionally intelligent interaction means keeping your cool while searching for the values, needs and purposes that lie behind communication.

Managing Conflict
If no solution can be found, after careful, creative, mutual effort – acknowledge the differences that exist and move on to matters on which you can agree.

The key to managing conflicts with emotional intelligence is to disengage from negative emotion and replace this with cool reason.

Disengage from fear and anger by taking constructive action and learning how to handle frustration.

Cool down conflicts by exploring the perspectives through which other people are framing the situation. You can also use creative frames, goal frames and big picture frames to generate new solutions.

Build dialogues with others through emotional honesty, openness and freedom from fear.

Watch out for your emotional bananas – areas in which you feel threatened – and learn to let them go.

Resolve differences by respecting other people’s emotional bananas and finding out what lies behind their position.

HOW MANY BANANAS DO YOU HAVE?
Consider the answers to these questions:

•    What triggers off anger in you? Why?
•    What triggers off fear in you? Why?
•    How do you most need others to treat you?

The idea for this comes from a common method used to catch monkeys in some remote areas in Asia.

To catch a monkey the hunter will attach a small wicker basket to the floor of the jungle. Then a banana or two is placed in the cage. The monkey sees this and grasps the banana. It is then easy prey for the hunter.

Human beings are no different – we hold on to our emotional bananas for grim death because we feel threatened without them.

Examples of emotional bananas include:

•    Craving for status
•    Demanding love or respect from others
•    The need for control
•    The cry for recognition
•    Avoidance of discomfort

The fewer bananas we carry around with us, the less likely we are to succumb to emotional hijacks. To reduce the power some of these bananas may have over us it is useful to substitute the word ‘prefer’ for ‘must’.

Widening Your Influence
Here are some important points to remember that will enable you to influence people in your network, create a good impression and enter conversations with them easily:

•    People will eventually see through phoniness and opportunism.
•    Successful people nearly always have a large network of contacts, allies and supporters.
•    Build up your contacts through your current network of friends and colleagues, taking opportunities that come your way, and setting up informal groups.
•    Be sure to exercise tact when timing your entrance into a new group.
•    Create emotional bank balances in your favor with as many people as you can. Use constructive politics to get acceptance for your ideas by calling on your allies and canvassing the support of seniors.
•    You can influence seniors through poise and confidence, being clear about your goals, and adapting your proposals to the needs of the organization.

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