IQ or EQ?
The truth about emotional Intelligence
Many of you might have heard about Emotional Intelligence, but what is it, exactly?
Technically speaking, the emotional intelligence is the capability of being aware of the emotions and adjust your behaviour accordingly.
You can be aware of your own emotions (self awareness) and manage them in the best way you can (self management).
Recognising the emotions is an ability that humans develop at the early stage of their childhood. You learn what it means being happy, sad, excited, angry, scared, concerned and so forth.
The adults teach you that, that uncontrollable smile on your face and your heart being full of joy means you are happy. When you can’t control your movements and you simply feel the need to jump and run around is excitement. When you feel like there’s a fire that is exploding in your chest, that’s anger. When you have a knot in your troth and tears in your eyes that’s sadness.
Being able to manage those emotions, well that’s another story. For sure is one of the most complicated things to do and requires consistency, training, discipline, self awareness and self control. This becomes absolutely necessary when interacting with others.
Let’s go a bit deeper into this: you can be be sensitive enough to recognise the other’s feelings (other awareness) and manage the situation in the appropriate way (relationship management). Pay attention: this doesn’t mean control other’s people emotions. This means you control your behaviour and adjust it to the situation, to be more specific, you adjust your behaviour accordingly to the person’s feeling you have in front of you.
Imagine you have to communicate a bad news to a friend who just lost her job few days ago. You can’t wait: this is something she needs to know right here, right now. You know this won’t make her happy, but it’s extremely important you do now. Being able to recognise the emotions she is going trough, will make you decide to go for a soft and delicate touch. Maybe you would like to speak to her with a low tone of voice and reduce the speed of your speech. Maybe you decide to go for simple words to make the message clearer, and ask her questions at the end to double check she understood.
This is relationships management.
People can’t change, but they can change their behaviour.
EQ is as important as IQ. Imagine you are a a math genius, you can complete very complicated calculations in an eye blink, you discover new formulas that haven’t been discovered so far but you can’t manage your feelings and start crying without control after received a criticism.
In the field of the private jet, where the contact with the customers are deeper and last for longer, business jet operators have to rely a lot onto EI, and they test it from the beginning, during the hiring process. Even more that in the past, the companies adopt new test to try to elaborate the emotional intelligence of their candidates, because you don’t only want a good crew in your team, you also want somebody capable to efficiently interact with others, create a nice and smooth working environments, have a special care for your customers, has a working integrity. Somebody who is empathic, who can manage a conflict (or even avoid it to create), who has situational awareness and is trustworthy.
Thanks to the experience in recruitment, Private Jet Coach is able to unlock this knowledge and make you aware of what the corporate aviation is looking for, and consequently increasing your chances of success.