Leadership in Practice: Emotional Intelligence Starts With Noticing

Oct 13

The Source

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, built around a self-assessment across four skills: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management. Abby read it this month, following last month's exploration of CliftonStrengths.

Why This One

Last month, I wrote about CliftonStrengths and the value of understanding what we naturally bring to the way we lead. This month, I have been reading Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, and it has me thinking about something that comes one step earlier.

Before I decide what to do, how well do I notice what is happening inside me?

The book includes an emotional intelligence appraisal across four areas: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management. My scores were 72, 93, 83, and 79, respectively.

The difference between my Self-Awareness and Self-Management scores caught my attention. It did not exactly surprise me. Self-management is kind of how I operate my life.

I am generally even-keeled and optimistic. When something gets stressful, my instinct is to figure out what needs to happen next. That has served me particularly well professionally. As a Chief of Staff, I often need to move through the stress of a situation so I can help figure out what we are going to do about it.

I do something similar at home.

The house is a mess. We are running late. The girls are bickering. I am getting irritated.

My instinct is to rally everybody, change the environment, solve what needs solving, and keep us moving. I have always considered that one of my strengths.

Reading about emotional intelligence made me wonder if there might also be something I am skipping.

Why would that matter, if what I am doing already works?

Because self-management can only work with the information it has. If I do not notice what I am feeling, I am managing a version of the moment that leaves something out. Self-awareness is what helps me tell whether I am irritated about the mess, the clock, or something I carried in from earlier in the day, and the right response can be different for each.

It also shapes what my girls see. They are learning what to do with big feelings by watching what I do with mine.

The Big Idea

The authors describe emotional intelligence as our ability to recognize and understand emotions in ourselves and others and use that awareness to manage our behavior and relationships.

The important word for me is awareness.

I have spent a lot of time learning how to manage my response. I am less certain that I have spent as much time noticing the emotion that comes before it.

My appraisal made that distinction hard to miss. Self-Awareness was my lowest score at 72. Self-Management was my highest at 93.

Those scores are not a definitive description of who I am. But they gave me a useful question: Have I become so good at managing myself that I sometimes move past what I am feeling before I understand it?

I tend to categorize emotions as good or bad. Joy, gratitude, excitement, optimism? I am happy to spend time there. Anger, frustration, sadness, disappointment? My instinct is to acknowledge them quickly, solve whatever I can solve, and move on.

I am not convinced that the goal is to spend more time in negative emotions simply for the sake of experiencing them.

But I am beginning to wonder whether noticing an emotion and dwelling in an emotion are two very different things.

Bring It Home

This is where emotional intelligence started to feel particularly relevant to Mom Life.

So much of motherhood directs our attention outward.

Who needs to be where? What did we forget? Why is somebody upset? What needs to happen before we can leave? What is for dinner? What just changed?

That outward attention is often necessary. People really do need things from us, and things really do need to get done. But when our attention is almost always directed toward what is happening around us, it can become surprisingly easy to lose track of what is happening within us.

At Chief of Mom Life, we talk a lot about creating enough space to get out ahead of the work. That is part of why Systems matter. When fewer things require our constant attention, we have more capacity to think proactively about what matters.

I am starting to think there may be another use for some of that space.

Not just planning. Not just solving. Noticing.

When the house is chaotic and I am irritated, I know how to start solving the chaos. But what if I paused long enough to recognize the irritation first?

Not because it should determine what I do next or because every emotion deserves an extended investigation. Simply because it might contain information.

Maybe I am frustrated because I have asked for the same thing five times. Maybe I am anxious because we are late. Maybe I am carrying stress from work into an interaction that has nothing to do with it. Maybe I am tired or disappointed.

Those are different things. If I label all of them "bad feeling I would rather move past," I lose the distinction.

That distinction matters because each one points somewhere different. Frustration from asking five times may mean an expectation needs to change. Anxiety about being late may mean the morning needs a better System. Stress carried in from work may mean I need to keep it from landing on someone who had nothing to do with it. Tiredness may mean I need rest more than I need a solution.

If I treat them all as the same bad feeling, I risk solving the wrong problem, and the same moment shows up again next week.

That has made me think differently about three of my own values: Clarity, Connection, and Focus.

Clarity means stepping back to see what matters most so I can spend my time, energy, and attention on purpose. Maybe clarity also requires understanding what is happening within me.

Connection means giving my full presence to the people and relationships that matter most. Perhaps understanding what I am feeling gives me more choice about what I bring into those interactions.

Focus means staying with my priorities so my actions follow what matters rather than what feels urgent. I think I have sometimes treated uncomfortable emotions as distractions, something to move past so I can get back to what matters.

Maybe the opportunity is not to give those emotions more power. Maybe it is to gather the information before deciding they do not deserve any more of my attention.

Noticing might simply help me understand whether I am responding to what is actually happening in front of me or to something else I am carrying with me.

In Practice

One of the self-awareness strategies in Emotional Intelligence 2.0 that interested me was keeping a journal of emotions, paying attention to situations that trigger a strong emotional response and what happens next.

And, perhaps predictably for me, I like the idea of creating a System for it.

I am not setting out to analyze every emotion. I want to experiment with noticing more consistently.

What happened?

What did I feel?

What might have triggered it?

What did I do next?

Over time, are there patterns?

I do not know what I will discover, but I can imagine what it might be worth.

Maybe I will notice that the same moment triggers me every time, like the last ten minutes before we leave the house, which would tell me exactly where a System could help. Maybe I will catch the first signs of stress early enough to say "I need a minute" instead of snapping at someone. Maybe I will find that some things that irritate me really do deserve very little of my emotional energy, and I can let them go on purpose rather than by default.

But I would rather make that choice after noticing than make it automatically.

Try This

You do not need an emotional intelligence appraisal or an emotion journal to experiment with this idea. The next time you notice yourself moving quickly into solving mode, try putting one small step before the solution:

What am I feeling right now? And, if you have another moment: What might this feeling be telling me?

You do not have to fix the feeling, justify it, or let it determine what happens next. Just notice it.

I have spent a lot of my life getting good at moving through. What I want to practice now is noticing myself before I move on.

This post is part of an ongoing exploration of the idea that motherhood is leadership. To read the essay that started this work, see Motherhood Is Leadership.

Read the essay →