Travis Bradberry Quotes

Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.

Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, this is not easy.

The biggest obstacle to increasing your self-awareness is the tendency to avoid the discomfort that comes from seeing yourself as you really are.

Remember, feedback is meant to address the problem, not the person.

Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it’s the same at age 15 as it is at age 50.

all emotions are derivations of five core feelings: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and shame.

Your brain has a difficult time distinguishing between what you see with your eyes and what you visualize in your mind.

You do control the thoughts that follow an emotion, and you have a great deal of say in how you react to an emotion—as long as you are aware of it.

The tricky thing about your brain is that, once a negative mood takes over, you lose sight of what’s good in your life, and suddenly you hate your job, you’re frustrated with family and friends, you’re dissatisfied with your accomplishments, and your optimism about the future goes out the window. Deep down, you know that things aren’t as bad as they seem, but your brain just won’t hear it.

In the beginning, doing other than yelling when you are angry will be extremely difficult. But each time you succeed, the new pathway is strengthened. Eventually the urge to yell is so small that it's easy to ignore

The link between EQ and earnings is so direct that every point increase in EQ adds $1,300 to an annual salary.

Good decisions require far more than factual knowledge. They are made using self-knowledge and emotional mastery when they’re needed most.

EQ is so critical to success that it accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs. It’s the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.

Trust is a peculiar resource; it is built rather than depleted by use.

Self-awareness is the process of getting to know yourself from the inside out and the outside in.

The biggest challenge to developing self-awareness is objectivity. It’s hard to develop perspective on your emotions and tendencies when every day feels like a new mountain to climb.

The secret to winning this culture game is to treat others how they want to be treated, not how you would want to be treated.

Closing your eyes and thinking of emotionally arousing events is simply training for the real thing—spotting the physical signs of your emotions on the fly.

people with the highest levels of intelligence (IQ) outperform those with average IQs just 20% of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70% of the time.

Even when you can’t do or say anything to change a difficult situation, you always have a say in your perspective of what’s happening, which ultimately influences your feelings about it.

Self-management is more than resisting explosive or problematic behavior. The biggest challenge that people face is managing their tendencies over time and applying their skills in a variety of situations.

Emotions serve an important purpose—they clue you into things that you’ll never understand if you don’t take the time to ask yourself why.

People high in self-awareness are remarkably clear in their understanding of what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them, and which people and situations push their buttons.

Greeting someone by name is one of the most basic and influential social awareness strategies you can adopt. It’s a personal and meaningful way to engage someone. If you have a tendency to withdraw in social situations, greeting someone by name is a simple way to stick your neck out; using someone’s name breaks down barriers and comes across as warm and inviting. Even if you are a social butterfly, greeting people by name is a strategy to live by.

Rather than avoiding a feeling, your goal should be to move toward the emotion, into it, and eventually through it.

Stay aware of your good moods and the foolish decisions these moods can lead to, and you’ll be able to enjoy feeling good without any regrets.

This sounds basic, almost too basic to mention, but listening is a strategy and a skill that is losing ground in society. Most people think they are good listeners, but if adults played “the Telephone Game” today, how accurate would the final message be? Listening requires focus, and focus isn’t easy because we’re stretched in several directions. Listening

Emotional Intelligence Appraisal® test. Taking the test now provides a baseline

feedback is meant to address the problem, not the person.

Remember, planning the future and reflecting on the past are valuable exercises, but doing this throughout your day interferes with what is in front of you—your present.

Suspending judgment of emotions allows them to run their course and vanish.

Butch’s thoughts didn’t make his feelings of fear and terror disappear, but they did keep his emotions from hijacking his behavior.

ignoring your feelings does not make them go away; it just helps them to surface again when you least expect them.

The more we understand the beauty and the blemishes, the better we are able to achieve our full potential.

Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them.

Relationship management is your ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully.

The surprising thing about this strategy is that just paying attention to your emotions and asking yourself good questions like these are enough to help you improve.

Physical appearance is more straightforward—what you wear sends a pretty clear, established message about how you feel. For example, wearing old sweatpants and ratty T-shirts and having disheveled hair every day tells the world you’ve given up, while overdressing for every occasion and never missing your weekly haircut lets people know you are trying too hard.

Your personality is a result of your preferences, such as your inclination to introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can’t be used to predict emotional intelligence.

A single cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of growth ensures the pathway of thought responsible for the behavior grows strong, making it easier to kick this new resource into action in the future.

Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them. This often means perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling even if you do not feel the same way.

Hard times of any kind—financial, familial, or job-related—create more intense and often prolonged negative emotions that ultimately result in stress. In addition to the physical costs of stress, such as weight gain and heart disease, stress also taxes our mental resources.

Part of self-awareness is knowing what you’re going through even if you can’t totally change it. Admit to yourself that your bad mood is hanging a cloud over everything you see, and remind yourself that your moods are not permanent. Your emotions change all the time, and low moods will pass if you allow them to.

As the first component of social competence, social awareness is a foundational skill. Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them. This often means perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling even if you do not feel the same way.

The excitement and energy you enjoy during a good mood paint a rosy picture of all you encounter. This leaves you far more likely to make impulsive decisions that ignore the potential consequences of your actions. Stay aware of your good moods and the foolish decisions these moods can lead to, and you’ll be able to enjoy feeling good without any regrets.

What a Lack of Relationship Management Looks Like Dave M., sales manager Relationship management score = 66 What people who work with him say: “If Dave doesn’t see eye-to-eye with someone, he makes it apparent that it’s not worth developing the relationship. I wish that he would still dedicate the time and resources necessary to make a win for the territory.

When you don’t stop to think about your feelings—including how they are influencing your behavior now, and will continue to do so in the future—you set yourself up to be a frequent victim of emotional hijackings. Whether you’re aware of it or not, your emotions will control you, and you’ll move through your day reacting to your feelings with little choice in what you say and do.

Every time one of those 50,000 thoughts takes place, chemicals are produced in your brain that can trigger reactions felt throughout your body. There is a strong relationship between what you think and how you feel, both physically and emotionally. Because you are always thinking (much like breathing), you tend to forget that you are doing it. You likely don’t even realize how much your thoughts dictate how you feel every hour of every single day.

When you’re stuck in a down mood, it’s not a good time to make important decisions. You’ll have to remain aware of the mood and understand it if you hope to keep it from leading you to make mistakes that will only pull you down further. Not only is it OK to reflect upon recent events that may have brought on the mood, but this is also a good idea—as long as you don’t dwell on them for too long—because often that’s all it takes to get the mood to pass.

Everything you see—including yourself—must travel through your own lens. The problem is, your lens is tainted by your experiences, your beliefs, and, without question, your moods. Your lens prevents you from ever obtaining a truly objective look at yourself, on your own. Often, there is a big difference between how you see yourself and how others see you. This chasm between the way you view yourself and the way others view you is a rich source of lessons that will build your self-awareness.

Plasticity” is the term neurologists use to describe the brain’s ability to change. Your brain grows new connections much as your biceps might swell if you started curling heavy weights several times a week. The change is gradual, and the weight becomes easier and easier to lift the longer you stick to your routine. Your brain can’t swell like your biceps since it’s confined by your skull, so instead the brain cells develop new connections to speed the efficiency of thought without increasing its size. As

Much of doing and saying the right things in social situations comes from understanding the rules of the culture game. Our world is a melting pot of vastly different cultures. These cultures interact, live, and conduct business with each other according to very specific rules. There is no way around it, and it is a requirement to learn how to become emotionally intelligent across cultures. The secret to winning this culture game is to treat others how they want to be treated, not how you would want to be treated. The trick is identifying the different rules for each culture. To make matters even more complicated, the rules you should be watching for and mastering include the rules not only of ethnic culture but also of family and business culture. How do you go about mastering multiple sets of rules at once? The first step is to listen and watch even more and for a longer period of time than you would with people from your own culture. Collect multiple observations and think before you jump to conclusions. Consider yourself new in town, and before you open your mouth and insert your foot, observe other people’s interactions. Look for similarities and differences between how you would play the game versus how others are playing it. Next,

10 Watch EQ at the Movies Hollywood. It’s the entertainment capital of the world known for glitz, glamour, and celebrity. Believe it or not, Hollywood is also a hotbed of EQ, ripe for building your social awareness skills. After all, art imitates life, right? Movies are an abundant source of EQ skills in action, demonstrating behaviors to emulate or completely avoid. Great actors are masters at evoking real emotion in themselves; as their characters are scripted to do outrageous and obvious things, it’s easy to observe the cues and emotions on-screen. To build social awareness skills, you need to practice being aware of what’s happening with other people; it doesn’t matter if you practice using a box office hero or a real person. When you watch a movie to observe social cues, you’re practicing social awareness. Plus, since you are not living the situation, you’re not emotionally involved, and the distractions are limited. You can use your mental energy to observe the characters instead of dealing with your own life. This month, make it a point to watch two movies specifically to observe the character interactions, relationships, and conflicts. Look for body language clues to figure out how each character is feeling and observe how the characters handle the conflicts. As more information about the characters unfold, rewind and watch past moments to spot clues you may have missed the first time. Believe it or not, watching movies from the land of make-believe is one of the most useful and entertaining ways to practice your social awareness skills for the real world.

Maintaining relationships may not be on your job description and may not have even been discussed, but for you to be successful, being open and curious is absolutely, unequivocally part of your job.

Being an open book on your end isn’t the whole story with managing a relationship—you also need to be interested in the other person’s story as well.

Ample self-awareness is necessary for effective self-management because you can only choose how to respond to an emotion actively when you’re aware of it.

Turn off the computer at least two hours before bedtime. The light of a computer screen right in front of your face late at night is similar enough to sunlight that it tricks your brain, making it difficult to fall asleep and disruptive to the quality of your sleep.

Whatever the story is behind your name, it’s an essential part of your identity. It feels so good when people use your name and remember it.

An unknown author said, “Trust is a peculiar resource; it is built rather than depleted by use.” Trust is something that takes time to build, can be lost in seconds, and may be our most important and most difficult objective in managing our relationships.

Instead of making a change and expecting others to just accept it, take time to explain the why behind the decision, including alternatives, and why the final choice made the most sense. If you can ask for ideas and input ahead of time, it’s even better. Finally, acknowledge how the decision will affect everyone.

Transparency and openness also make people feel like they are trusted, respected, and connected to their organization—instead of being told what to do and kept in the dark.

Tough conversations are inevitable; forget running from them because they’re sure to catch up to you.

In the end, when you enter a tough conversation, prepare yourself to take the high road, not be defensive, and remain open by practicing the strategies above. Instead of losing ground with someone in a conversation like this, it can actually become a moment that solidifies your relationship going forward.

CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace.

Only 36 percent of the people we tested are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen. This means that two thirds of us are typically controlled by our emotions and are not yet skilled at spotting them and using them to our benefit.

Since our brains are wired to make us emotional creatures, your first reaction to an event is always going to be an emotional one. You have no control over this part of the process. You do control the thoughts that follow an emotion, and you have a great deal of say in how you react to an emotion—as long as you are aware of it.

Personal competence is made up of your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior and motives in order to improve the quality of your relationships.

Self-awareness is so important for job performance that 83 percent of people high in self-awareness are top performers, and just 2 percent of bottom performers are high in self-awareness.

Listening and observing are the most important elements of social awareness. To listen well and observe what’s going on around us, we have to stop doing many things we like to do. We have to stop talking, stop the monologue that may be running through our minds, stop anticipating the point the other person is about to make, and stop thinking ahead to what we are going to say next.

People who manage relationships well are able to see the benefit of connecting with many different people, even those they are not fond of.

Conflicts at work tend to fester when people passively avoid problems, because people lack the skills needed to initiate a direct, yet constructive conversation

Anytime you choose to breathe right and flood your brain with oxygen, you’ll notice the effects immediately. Many people describe the sensation as one of entering a calmer, more relaxed state where they have a clear head.

Where are your emotions clouding your judgment, and where is your reason ignoring important cues from your emotions? Your emotions will create trouble if you let them lead you around without any reason, but your rational thoughts can be just as problematic if you try to operate like a robot that is without feeling.

stop the flow of frustration and anger long enough to cool down your overheated limbic system and give your rational brain some valuable time to catch up.

understand why you do the things you do, the better equipped you’ll be to keep your emotions from running the show.

For example, if people think you are passive in meetings when you simply need time to think before speaking, their perceptions begin to shape what opportunities are offered to you. Soon your boss is passing you over for chairing a committee because you are perceived as passive instead of thoughtful.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, “Give a man a pole, and he’ll catch a fish a week. Tell him what bait to use, and he’ll catch a fish a day. Show him how and where to fish, and he’ll have fish to eat for a lifetime.” The flipside to that proverb is that the man or woman without a pole, without bait, and without knowledge of the how and the where runs a serious risk of famine. Similarly, emotionally ignorant people with little understanding of how and where emotions affect their lives will have an exceedingly difficult time reeling in success. On the other hand, those who use the right tools and strategies for harnessing their emotions put themselves in a position to prosper. That same truth applies to individuals, organizations, and even entire countries.

Your body speaks volumes when you push it too hard. Take the time to recognize these signals and recharge your emotional battery before your stress causes permanent damage to your system.

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Real results come from putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals.

Much of self-management comes down to motivation, and you can use the expectations that other people have of you as a powerful force to get you up off the proverbial couch.

She’s so focused and driven to personally succeed that perhaps she takes on too much herself

What Social Awareness Looks Like Alfonso J., pharmaceutical sales manager Social awareness score = 96 What people who work with him say: “Alfonso has a rare talent to be able to read the emotions of others very well. He adjusts to different situations and manages to build relationships with almost anyone. Good examples are dinners, meetings, and ride-alongs with reps.

What a Lack of Social Awareness Looks Like Craig C., attorney Social awareness score = 55 What people who work with him say: “Craig needs to allow others to feel good about their ideas, even when he has a better plan. He also needs to be more patient, and allow them to have equally effective plans that are just different from his plan. I would like him to seek to understand what people are feeling and thinking and notice what evidence there is regarding situations before speaking his opinion or offering solutions.

What Self-Management Looks Like Lane L., healthcare administrator Self-management score = 93 What people who work with her say: “Lane is the epitome of patience and understanding during heated, emotionally-charged meetings.

What a Lack of Self-Management Looks Like Jason L., information technology consultant Self-management score = 59 What people who work with him say: “In stressful situations, or when something goes wrong, Jason sometimes responds too quickly, sharply, or disjointedly.

It takes practice to really watch people as you interact with them and get a good sense of what they are thinking and feeling.

Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, this is not easy.” We can thank Greek philosopher Aristotle for those words and enduring insight into managing our emotions and relationships. If you can master this one, consider your EQ journey a success. Anger is an emotion that exists for a reason—anger is not an emotion to stifle or ignore. If you manage it properly and use it purposefully, you can get results that enhance your relationships. Really. Think

Only 36 percent of the people we tested are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen. ADAPTED FROM AND REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION FROM JULIA WEST Triggers

What Self-Awareness Looks Like Dave T., regional service manager Self-awareness score = 95* What people who work with him say: “Dave has clear long-term goals, and he doesn’t make sacrifices for short-term gains.

What a Lack of Self-Awareness Looks Like Tina J., marketing manager Self-awareness score = 69 What people who work with her say: “On occasion, Tina’s stress and sense of urgency are projected/pushed on to other people.

Ask yourself, what are the values that I wish to live my life by?

Taking a moment here and there to check yourself will allow you to understand your mood before it sets the tone for the rest of your day.

The biggest challenge to developing self-awareness is objectivity.

Others’ views can be a real eye-opener by showing you how other people experience you.

Your lungs are built to provide precisely the amount of air your body needs for all of your organs to function effectively.