So, the good news seem to be: Yes, we can indeed learn and train our emotional intelligence. Following our coache’s strategies as well as Goleman’s four key competencies provides learning opportunities on what to attend to. In the past decades, numerous researchers and practitioners have published their tested strategies on how to learn to deal with emotions.
Marc Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and author of the book “Permission to Feel”. He developed the RULER framework, an acronym for the five skills by which he defines and practices emotional intelligence: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating. He teaches this evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning mostly in schools, but also in adult communities.
In her book “Emotional Agility”, psychologist Susan David shares her decade-long research on emotions, and how people navigate their inner world successfully even when faced with setbacks and adversity. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett coined the term “emotional granularity”, the ability to differentiate and label emotions with precision and specificity, which allows us to understand and communicate our emotions with more clarity. Author and researcher Brené Brown popularized showing up vulnerably to create connection and understanding, demonstrating the importance of authenticity, vulnerability and showing emotions for leaders and parents (and everyone in between) alike.
It becomes evident that the research – and specifically psychology-based self-help literature – on emotions is booming. And with it, the number of strategies on how to best develop one’s own emotional intelligence are growing.
Finally, following Carol Dweck’s empowering idea of the Growth Mindset, which claims that people who embody this mindset view every trait as learnable rather than innate talent, we can consider emotional intelligence a learnable skill, too.
We at bettercoach are often asked if there is a shortcut to learning emotional intelligence. We truly believe that people who enter learning about emotional intelligence and their own inner world are not interested in “solving this quickly”. It seems that for some people, dealing with emotions is easier, as their intuition and feelings might have guided them all life long in their actions and decisions, and it might come more naturally to them to communicate their feelings to others.
However, what’s interesting is that even the most seasoned practitioners of emotional intelligence will find it challenging to consistently demonstrate emotional intelligence in any given situation. Emotional intelligence demands effort. Not only does each and every moment demand a unique cognitive and emotional reaction, but respect for the emotional burden that people carry every day, and for the uniqueness of each moment. Everyone brings a different mood and ability to cope in any situation, and so understanding and responding with true emotional intelligence will always be a challenge, a lifelong way of learning, no matter when you started to practice in your life.
Considering all the areas of impact emotions have on our life mentioned above, and recalling Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee in saying “a leader’s premier task—we would even say his primal task—is emotional leadership”, gives us the confidence to say that the long way of learning is worth the effort.
Coaching provides a safe space, often 1:1 between coachee and coach, for the coachee to set their own goals and to reflect on their personal and professional development. In the ideal case, coaching is not a short term intervention, but a sustainable anchor for self-reflection and learning. We view the development of emotional intelligence as an essential part of leadership development; and many of the discussed topics in coaching eventually come down to finding the right strategies to deal with something emotionally. A regular and long-term coaching will thus support and equip leaders in becoming emotionally intelligent by navigating their individual real-life challenges. Consider coaching the “Learning by doing” catalyzer to learn emotional intelligence.
The coaching practice itself very much is dependent on the tools of emotional intelligence. To coaches and psychologists, emotions are a valuable source of information to get to the core of what truly bothers or excites a person. In the beginning of a coaching, a coach will likely start with the question “How are you feeling right now?”, and will probably come back to questions like “How did this make you feel?”, or “How would you like to feel instead?”. Many coachees hence get inspired by the type of questions that their coach would ask them and transfer them into their life, and naturally begin to develop their emotional intelligence by it.
In what specific ways coaching can help to develop emotional intelligence depends on the coachee (and their topics, goals, problems, and willingness to try new approaches), but also on the coach: their ways to engage the coachee, their questioning, and their suggestions on how to approach the topic.
