Building Emotional Intelligence – Using habits to help your tired brain
Your brain is tired.
In 2011, our brains needed to take in 5 times more information than they did in 1986. And today that’s even higher.
But the truth is, we can only actively pay attention to around 120 bits of information at any one time – that’s about the equivalent of 2 people talking to you.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking a lot about Emotional Intelligence.
If you need to catch up, check out our first overview on Emotional Intelligence and the model we use at TALY, and our summary of Perceiving and Expressing Emotions, Understanding Emotions, Harnessing Emotions and Managing and Controlling Emotions.
Or if that’s all too much, just get in touch. We love talking about this stuff!
We all know that Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a critical collection of skills for leaders in the modern workplace – and that these are skills that we need to pay attention to and to continue to develop.
Your EI is not fixed – it’s a skill you need to protect and maintain, and to work to develop further over time.
But in a busy workplace (and life), with a tired and busy brain, how can you give space to improving your EI?
Well, one way to get around it is to think about developing EI as forming new habits. And there is plenty of science and research around now to get you going.
What are habits?
Habits are routine behaviors that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. We’ve built these subconscious habits – along with a range of other auto-pilot skills in our brain – so that we can function in a over-stimulated environment, so we can quickly identify what matters and if things change, and we can pay attention to what matters the most.
Usually the thing that will keep us alive!
Research from Wendy Wood found that “about 43 percent of what people do every day is repeated in the same context, usually while they are thinking about something else”.
How can thinking about habits help in developing Emotional Intelligence?
When it comes to developing new skills, moderating behaviour or thinking differently, we need to start by paying attention. That means breaking out of the current way of thinking that our brain has conveniently locked in to make us operate efficiently, and actively paying attention to something new.
Overall, there are two types of habits…
Passive habits arise from exposure to things we eventually get used to. High-altitude climbers gradually adapt their bodies to the lower levels of oxygen available as they climb above 7,000 feet.
Active habits are those we develop by repeated intention and effort, crystalising as skills we perform with little or no thought. A gymnast practices walking, jumping, and flipping on a narrow beam until she can do all these maneuvers smoothly without falling.
Going back again to Wendy Wood’s research. In another study, she found that habits are habits. The brain doesn’t think differently about good or bad habits – it just loves habits overall. So in times of stress or challenge, or even when we’re just a little distracted, our habitual behaviour will kick in.
This means that if you’ve taken the time to build good habits in Emotional Intelligence, when things get tough, your response will naturally prefer to tap into these good habits you’ve built.
How can you get started?
That’s easy. The best time to start is always today! Overall, it takes about 66 days for a repeated behaviour to lock in as a habit.
Forming habits takes time – the sooner you start, the sooner your brain will built the new neural connections needed to lock in this behaviour.
The key steps in forming a new habit are:
Set a goal
Develop a plan
Make it fun and easy to repeat
Be flexible and ready for challenges
Get support from those around you (and reward yourself!)
Great people decisions start with TALY.
The TALY approach to personality profiling brings together a unique mix of Five Factor and Emotional Intelligence profiling to help organisations, hiring managers and teams to make better decisions about recruitment and teams.
Get in touch to find out more… we love talking about this stuff! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.