Emotional Intelligence & Entrepreneurship
Does Emotional Intelligence have a part to play in Entrepreneurship?
As human beings, we daily go through emotions in our lives. The ability to experience emotional feelings such as pain, anger, happiness, joy is healthy and living without them would spell disastrous to the human race. The absence of feelings would mean that a person could place their hand in a burning flame and get burnt to death due to lack of feeling pain. But when they experience the pain, they will immediately withdraw their hand from the flame. Anger, fear, pain, sadness are feelings that tell us that all is not well within or around us. We need to recognize these emotions and learn how to control them in order to avoid them hurting ourselves and the people around us.
So what is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence could be described as the ability of a person to handle life’s challenges in a sound and mature way especially those that involve relations with people around them.
How does entrepreneurship and emotional intelligence relate? Well, an entrepreneur interacts with people almost 80% of his life time as he or she goes about their business hence the need to embrace emotional intelligence.
Is a person born with emotional intelligence or can it be acquired in life? We are all born with emotions hence the ability to cry, laugh and express discomfort and displeasure in certain circumstances. As a human race, we need emotions in order to survive. They say you cannot control 80% of what happens to you in your daily interaction with people but you can control how you react to circumstances that come your way through these people. How well we manage our reactions towards disturbing interactions with people determines how high or low our emotional intelligence is. Emotional intelligence can therefore be learnt and developed in life. An entrepreneur therefore needs the ability to perceive and understand emotions going through him or through other people and manage them in a reasonable and well balanced manner in order to progress well in business.
Research has shown that every successful entrepreneur has high emotional intelligence. In a bid to succeed in business, an entrepreneur could raise his or her emotional intelligence from low to high by going through four key processes mentioned below;
The first key process every entrepreneur needs is self-identity. Know who you are; understand yourself, your likes and dislikes and how you react emotionally towards circumstances and the impact your reactions have towards others around you. What is your temperament? Are you able to interact well with people or do people find it difficult to approach you. Do you have people’s skills? What is your value system? Once you know yourself you are better able to respond to the emotional reactions of people around you well.
The second key is how you communicate and interact with people around you. How do you respond to different situations around you? Are you receptive to positive criticism and others opinion of you or your business? An entrepreneur needs to learn how to communicate with different people from different cultural and ethnic divide while at the same time showing genuine interest to situations surrounding them. They should be ready to learn and also impart their knowledge thus developing both listening and speaking skills with clarity.
An entrepreneur needs to be able to empathize with others especially those going through some difficult emotional experience and different mood swings. When emotionally alert, one will be able to understand the strengths, weaknesses and struggles of those around them and will be able to discern those who are genuine from those who are not.
Self-management is a key ingredient to developing high emotional intelligence. Learning to control one’s temperament, behaviours and habits by dropping retrogressive ones and enhancing positive attitudes is key to elevating successful interpersonal relationships in not only the business world but in family life too.
Entrepreneurs with high emotional intelligence create positive working environment around them which in turn leads to thriving and successful business growth.
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