1: 1: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations. On Friday, I share something about myself or what we are working on at PCI.
So what happens when we work on a team with a supervisor who scores low on emotional intelligence (EQ)?
The research tells us we will feel inspired about 25 percent of the time.
What about if our supervisor scores high on EQ?
We will feel inspired 75 percent of the time.
Wow.
“People who are good at recognizing and expressing emotions have a huge effect on those around them,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
2: This week, we’ve been exploring the power of empathy in different aspects of our lives. The learning: Empathy benefits ourselves as well as the people around us.
The good news? We have the power to become more empathetic. More emotionally intelligent.
Marc Brackett, the Founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, has developed a tool to help us improve our emotional granularity.
He calls it the “mood meter,” David writes.
“It is based on the idea that emotions have two core dimensions, energy and pleasantness.”
Marc has created a 2×2 chart with four quadrants.
“The top right quadrant,” David writes, “contains emotions that are high in pleasantness and high-energy: happiness, joy, exhilaration.”
“The bottom right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness but low-energy: contentment, serenity, ease.
“The top left,” he notes, “contains emotions that are low in pleasantness but high-energy: anger, frustration, fear.”
And the bottom left? It consists of emotions that are low-energy and low in pleasantness, like sadness and apathy.
3: “The mood meter is a map of human emotions,” David writes. “At any given moment we can pause, figure out where our mood is on the map, and attempt to assign it a label.”
Doing so, Marc reports, gives us “permission to feel.” We don’t have to “bottle up” our motions. Instead, we can choose “to acknowledge and investigate them.”
Marc’s research shows that when people are asked in a public setting where they are on the mood meter, nearly everyone says they are experiencing positive emotions.
However, when we ask them in private with confidential surveys, only 30 percent to 40 percent place themselves on the positive emotion side of the mood meter.
“That result is haunting,” David believes, “because it suggests that many of the people you meet, who seem fine on the surface, are actually suffering within.”
When we use the mood meter, however, we can learn how to differentiate between anxiety (worrying about future uncertainty) and pressure (worrying about your performance at some task).
Marc has developed a curriculum which is taught in schools called RULER: “How to Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate our emotions.”
He’s also created a program for business leaders called Oji Foundations.
More next week!
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Action: Check out the Oji Foundations program.
Reflection: How do others improve their emotional awareness and regulation?
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