Emotional Intelligence Series: Deep Dive into Understanding 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 last week’s summary of Perceiving and Expressing Emotions.

This model suggests that 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 second key area of this model – UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS.

What is Understanding Emotions all about?

Remember, EI is all about sensing and reading the emotions within you and of those around you, and then using this information in a positive way to drive better, human-centric ideas, relationships and outcomes.

Just being able to read the mood of those around though is not enough. A critical part of EI is about diving into these emotions and feelings, and really exploring why they are being felt and what caused these feelings.

In measuring someone’s EI, this is what we call Understanding Emotions – the ability to understand the meaning behind emotional information and the way emotions combine and change in the context of relationships.

This is the superpower in EI – and it’s easy to see why.

Imagine this. You’re in a meeting with a colleague and you sense that they are feeling anxious. In a safe environment, you might even talk to them about this, and encourage them to be open about it. That’s great, but it’s only the first step.

If you can go beyond this ‘read’ of the situation and try to understand what caused these feelings in the first place, you’ll be much better placed to help avoid it in the future. You’ll not only have the information, but you’ll also have the context and important information behind the feelings that allows you to take control of the situation and to build trusting and positive relationships with those around you.

Why does it matter?

If you’re bank account went up by $100,000, you’d think that was great. But surely you’d want to know why it went up and what you can do to make it happen again, right? That’s Understanding Emotions.

Ultimately, this is about empathy…

Schutte et al (2001) found that, over a series of studies, there were significant links between high EI and more successful interpersonal relations.Those participants who exhibited higher levels of EI also showed a greater propensity for empathic perspective taking, cooperation with others, developing affectionate and more satisfying relationships as well as greater social skills in general.

Critically, as with all areas of Emotional Intelligence, it’s important to think about this element from two perspectives:

Self-awareness: the ability to explore and understand the drivers behind your own emotions, and to learn how to manage these positively, lead to stronger outcomes for you and for those around you.

Social connection: you’ll build stronger inter-personal relationships with those around you with an open understanding of emotions and the drivers of these emotions.

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 EI, the stronger relationships we’ll have with others around us.

When it comes to Understanding Emotions, as with many areas of EI, it comes down to having open conversations, being vulnerable, asking for and seeking more information, and practicing these skills.

Here are a few quick tips.

Don’t assume. Although it turns out we are terrible and listening to others (and it’s getting worse), giving people space and time to talk through their feelings and to share openly will help you get to the heart of the matter. Practice active and attentive listening.

Be open and vulnerable to your own feelings. Take time to consider how your feeling in different situations, and then to dig into what might be causing these feelings

Listen to your body. Your bodies physiological response in different situations can give you clues as to how you are feeling – and tuning into this, rather than trying to put it to the side, can be critical for really understanding what is going on.

Build rituals with your team. The more open your conversations with others are, the more likely people will be to share not only how they are feeling, but why they are feeling that way.

We shared this last week, but there are plenty of other ideas here and here to get you thinking.

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.