Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep05: Develop your EQ. It matters!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I want to talk about emotional intelligence and specifically how developing your EQ skills is essential to success today and tomorrow. So EQ is something that I'm extremely passionate about.

Starting point is 00:00:48 And if you have been following my LinkedIn and Facebook for some time now, I'm sure you would have seen my videos and articles and other snippets of thoughts that I've been sharing on these platforms in terms of emotional intelligence. This continues to be a very popular skill to have in the professional world and I bet you not that it is the number one skill that you need to master to do well professionally either in your career if not in business. So you might even wonder why is EQ important? like what is this all about is this a trend is this some sort of hippie thing or is it something that we're just um doing it for hr right some sort of employee engagement thing it's not the thing is e EQ is something that's more instinctive to us and ultimately it really boils down to self-awareness.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Self-awareness, understanding who you are, how you respond to conflicts, how you communicate, how well you listen, how motivated are you and how positive you are. All these are related to EQ. We are generally motivated by something that we can tag to an emotion. So EQ ultimately is emotions management. You'll be surprised to know that while it sounds so simple in actuality, it's not that easy to execute or put into practice. Because you know what, most people are not self-aware self-awareness is something that you need to set an intent and really observe yourself the way you think the way you feel the way you do things and EQ also is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes that's why I made sure that the past

Starting point is 00:03:03 few episodes on the top 10 soft skills, I talked about communication, getting along with people, as well as creating win-win relationships, because all these pretty much rolls into what a person that has high EQ will be able to respond in a positive manner. So understanding where other people are coming from allows you to better connect with them and better create a genuine relationship in terms of your career, your business, running projects, stuff like that. Having high EQ is also the ability to empathize with people.

Starting point is 00:03:48 A lot of times, you know, we are quite fixated on ourselves. We are very focused on our own wants and needs, not so much on other people. What is important to recognize is that in this current world right now, we do work with other people. What is important to recognize is that in this current world right now, we do work with other people. So how we come across to others, they do matter as well. And hence, we're back to self-awareness where we need to know our strengths and weaknesses. Take a personality test if you haven't. My personal recommendation is Myers-Briggs. I love the Myers-Briggs personality test.

Starting point is 00:04:31 There are lots of links out there that you can try out. But ultimately, the main point is this. Get to know you. Who are you? How do you react to things? What do you like and what are your preferences, your defaults? Get to know you. Get to also know what triggers you.

Starting point is 00:04:54 What makes you really pissed off? What frustrates you? Annoys you? Drains you? And on the flip side, what makes you very excited? What makes you happy? What makes you happy? What makes you inspired? What makes you say, ready, you know what, I'm ready to go, I'm just gonna make it happen. So all these, all in all, are part of being emotionally intelligent. Being self-aware, knowing what makes you feel how you feel, gives you so much more control over your day,

Starting point is 00:05:32 over circumstances, and over different, different events that might trigger you if you don't have that self-awareness or you are not that emotionally intelligent. So I can share some examples with you because this is obviously a very, very passionate topic of mine. So I'll share one from my professional career when I was in the corporate world. I'll also share one in the current coaching space in which I am a leadership coach for the next generation. So the other day, I was having a conversation on a potential collaboration with a lady. We started off the conversation quite awkwardly because she was late.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Not a single apology was shared. She was late. Her equipment couldn't work. And she started, I wouldn't say nagging. She was babbling on about, oh great, this doesn't work. Oh my god, this is useless. Blah, blah, blah. The funny thing is that this is actually the first time I was having a video meeting with her. I've never ever met her before, except exchanging one or two messages on LinkedIn. But that was how she came across. Whether she realized it or not, that was her attitude. Whether it's right or wrong, it's not for me to judge. more importantly the self-awareness of how are you coming across to other people then fast forward she asked me a little bit more about what i do and i said i mainly work with my clients to be more emotionally intelligent and how to manage themselves so that

Starting point is 00:07:19 they can lead the way in their career or in business. So what's interesting is that she immediately said to me, oh, this whole EQ thing, no one's interested because it's not something that's easy to sell. People won't sign up on trainings. Hence, what you're doing is useless. Okay, mind you, again, this is the first time I've ever spoken to her. I don't even know her.

Starting point is 00:07:43 So it just shows you, some people don't have self-awareness. And the faster you catch yourself lacking in, you know, in this part, you know, it's a skill that you need to pick up, the faster you can reap rewards. Because it's not an age thing. Obviously, you know, the older you get and the longer you behave like how I guess this lady has behaved, it's not going to work out. I mean, I'm sorry to break the truth to you, but that is reality. And if you're in a corporate world or in business, who are the people that you really, really enjoy talking to and working with?

Starting point is 00:08:26 These are the people who have very high EQ. They want to understand where you're coming from, they listen, they collaborate in a very positive manner, you know, they are generally upbeat, they're easy to talk to, and they don't, you know, respond in anger at every single little thing that pisses them off. So really food for thought. And then sharing an example from the corporate world, I have also seen many managers and directors, I guess especially at the more senior levels, also lacking EQ or limited at that.

Starting point is 00:09:06 But the danger is this, because they are a bit more senior, they don't necessarily recognize that this is something important. So they will self-justify and tell themselves, oh, I'm the boss, I know what I'm doing. No, you don't always know what you're doing unless you are really self-aware. Just because your staff or your team members tolerate you doesn't mean that they respect you as a leader ultimately we want to create a positive and collaborative environment so that we can collectively work towards our goals but if someone is just tolerating you just because,

Starting point is 00:09:45 you know, you don't care, you don't understand how you come across, you sound extremely rude. And like I said, the worst thing is that you don't even recognize that that's how you come across. Okay, so I'll pause here. So the food for thought for today is how much self-awareness do you have? Are you really able to tell me what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What do people like about you? And what do they not like about you? And if your answer is I am perfect, then okay. But I think we all know that there's something more there's something deeper than that so i really challenge you to take to do this exercise take a personality test if you want to but ultimately only you can decide if that those personality traits work for you and more

Starting point is 00:10:41 importantly don't get into this very bad habit of justifying the development traits. For example, you tell yourself, I'm not stubborn. I'm just very determined. Okay, but how are you coming across to the other person, right? So I'll leave you with this. And yeah, let me know how that goes.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep05: Develop your EQ. It matters!

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.