Emotional Intelligence Series: Deep Dive into Managing and Controlling Emotions

This month we’re deep diving into the important area of Emotional Intelligence – a super important part of TALY’s holistic personality profiling that measures your skills in perceiving, understanding and using emotions. This may be:

Your own emotions or the emotions of those around you;

Overtly shared in conversation or perceived through behaviour, sensing, body language and more;

In understanding others to build connections, or using emotions to create new ideas and outcomes.

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 and Harnessing Emotions.

At TALY we use a well-established and renowned Emotional Intelligence model that suggests there are four key dimensions to evaluating and understanding someone’s emotional intelligence. The Mayer and Salovey model of Emotional Intelligence is illustrated below.

Today, we’re going to deep dive into the forth (and last) key area of this model – MANAGING AND CONTROLLING

What is Managing and Controlling Emotions all about?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the core areas of emotional intelligence that help to understand how one draws out emotional information, understands the context of it and uses this information to make decisions.

The last part of the picture is a little different. It’s less about the specific emotional information, and more about controlling our own emotions and the emotional environment to help maintain positive outcomes.

This is called Managing and Controlling Emotions – the ability to be open to feelings, and to modulate them in oneself and others so as to promote personal understanding and growth.

This element of EI is super important in a number of ways which we’ll explore here.

The easiest way to understand Managing and Controlling Emotions is to think about it as creating the right emotional environment. There are lots of emotions inside us and inside others – managing and controlling is about the context within which these emotions sit, creating a positive space for them to be shared, and promoting positive outcomes as a result.

And in managing this emotional environment, it’s all about finding ways to amplify the positive and to manage and let go of the negative – so we can continue to feel great, to work positively together, and to drive positive outcomes at work.

This plays a role in two ways:

Looking inside. Remember, the first step of emotional intelligence is about being open and honest about how we are feeling. In managing and controlling emotions, it then becomes about working out techniques and strategies to help us feel emotionally positive, and to manage the negative appropriately.

Connecting with others. In this area, we’re talking about helping others to share and to help them focus on the positive, promoting the right work environment that supports this, building inclusive and positive connections, and generally building the right structures that lift others.

Why does it matter?

If you are on the EI journey (which we should all be!) then this element is critical. Creating a positive, open, inclusive and supportive environment where people are comfortable sharing their emotions and where they can be a little vulnerable is what it’s all about.

A negative environment, where people lash out and respond negatively, can quickly shut others down.

We’ve all been in many situations where our mood has been impacted by the actions and behaviours of others. In personal relationships, in our own minds, in a work context… these situations just lead to team members wanting to tune out and disengage.

So obviously not bringing out the best in us!

For more examples, check out this great summary. Some examples of negative emotional behaviour at work can include:

Frustration/irritation

Worry/nervousness

Anger/aggravation

Dislike

Disappointment/unhappiness

How can you develop in this area?

Remember, Emotional Intelligence is not a fixed trait. Rather, it is an area that we all want to continue working on, and to become more and more skilled at. The better we are in Emotional Intelligence, the stronger relationships we’ll have with others around us.

An important note… when exploring the area of Managing and Controlling emotions, we often talk about amplifying the positive and letting go of the negative. That does not mean ignoring or repressing the negative – these are important feelings.

What it does mean is about acknowledging these feelings, finding ways to share and resolve them, or to building a positive mindset around them, so you can do what you need to do, and can have constructive and positive relationships with others.

This can be hard, and can take time if it is a challenge for you.

When it comes to Managing and Controlling Emotions, as with many areas of EI, it comes down to a high level of self-awareness and self-control, and tuning into these feelings to accept what they are telling you and to respond accordingly.

Here are a few quick tips.

Some of this just comes back to old-school well-being and mindfulness. Check out a few tips here or businesses like EQMinds share a lot of great ideas and insight.

Be open to negative emotions. They aren’t wrong, and sometimes can lead to solving important problems for your team or your customers.

Learn what works for you. Build techniques that help you when you notice things start to go awry, and that will give you the space you need to get back to a positive place.

Practice building your emotional intelligence skills in other areas. This will create a strong base-line for you to be able to control your feelings more positively.

Recognise that your body will react to stress, even if you don’t want it to. The stress responses you feel can sometimes be a warning for you before you mentally acknowledge you’re not feeling comfortable, and tuning into these early can be helpful.

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.