Transformative Emotional Intelligence: Achieving Leadership and Performance Excellence

Improve your time management skills by becoming aware of how you spend your time each day. Career professionals work, have family responsibilities, and pursue challenging professional goals. Time management is really self- management, so manage yourself in ways that allow you to get ahead rather than fall behind. Reflect on the idea that time does not exist unless you mark it or count it. Time moves in a constant and high speed flow, and it is difficult to keep pace with its speed. The speed of thought travels faster than the speed of time. By using effective and constructive thinking and thoughts, you can stay ahead of time and always be on time if you set specific daily goals to manage yourself on time. Self-Management is an important and essential EI learning dimension and is a valid predictor of achievement. To know thyself is one thing and to manage self effectively regarding time is another thing. Flow with time and stay ahead of it by setting daily personal goals to successfully complete your commitments and your personal goals. Make time a friend and ally. Leave for others to fight time, waste time, and worry about not having enough of it to do the things that are required. COMMITMENT ETHIC: The ability to complete tasks, projects, assignments, and personal responsibilities in a dependable and successful manner, even in difficult circumstances. Commitment Ethic is reflected by an inner-directed, self-motivated, and persistent effort to complete projects regardless of other distractions and difficulties. Commitment Ethic involves a personal standard for meeting the goals, expectations, and requirements of life and career. Commitment Ethic is a key emotional skill essential for success and satisfaction and is the inseparable companion of high achievement and personal excellence. The EI skill of Commitment Ethic reflects your ability to complete tasks, projects, assignments, and personal responsibilities in a dependable and successful manner, even in difficult circumstances. When an employer says: “All I want is a person with a good ‘Work Ethic,’ they want someone who is dependable, committed and responsible. Commitment Ethic is the learned and applied skill to complete assignments, projects, and responsibilities. High achieving and effective professionals are described as responsible and dependable. An essential EI skill for professional 118

success, career/life effectiveness, and personal well-being, Commitment Ethic is reflected by self directed, motivated, and persistent efforts to complete what we have accepted responsibility for doing. Professionals reaching high levels of achievement and career success have a personal standard of excellence that motivates them to complete challenging tasks even when difficult. Personal, professional, and career excellence are visible and observable reflections of Commitment Ethic skills. Personal responsibility and dependability are valued behaviors in all areas of life and employment. By purposely committing to a goal that is beyond our usual level of achievement, we create positive emotions and experience a sense of accomplishment that moves us upward to excellence and life satisfaction. As illustrated in Exhibit 7.2, integrating the personal skills of Drive Strength, Time Management, and Commitment Ethic with constructive and reflective thinking about our feelings and behaviors pushes us toward personal excellence by building quality from within. Exhibit 7.2. Building quality from within to achieve personal goals and success. 119

Personal Goal Achievement A personally meaningful goal is much different from a commitment or an activity on your daily “To Do” list. We have identified some important guidelines for learning and applying a goal setting process that you can use daily. Action goal setting is the essential process in developing intelligent self direction and self management skills. Your drive strength or achievement motivation will increase when you set goals for yourself that motivate you and that are important and valuable in your personal belief system. Motivation is key to achieving goals, and setting and achieving personally meaningful goals daily is the key to motivation. Successful goal achievement builds self esteem and self confidence. Set goals that relate to your basic needs, beliefs and values. If you set goals that are in harmony with your most basic needs, beliefs, and values, you will experience positive emotions when you achieve them. Clear meaningful goals are like thoughts in so far as you can only focus on one at a time. Most high achievers set daily goals, and they write them down. If you do not write them down you have nothing to see that spurs reflective thinking. If you are goal directed and a high achiever by nature, your cognitive and emotional minds will create many interesting goals. The constraints of time and energy require prioritizing your goals. Goal achievement is closely related to Commitment Ethic. Few people achieve goals that are not personally meaningful and highly valued. If you recall past goals that you have failed to achieve, you may have considered yourself a failure for not achieving the goal. You may find that the goal was a thought or an intention rather than a specific behavior that you could see how to achieve. Goal directed behavior requires energy and that is the job of the emotional mind. When your emotional mind whispers; “This is important and we must achieve this goal,” you will feel a sense of urgency and you will just work to do it. Applying the ELS and our goal setting criteria will improve your achievement and increase your motivation. Many goals and new year resolutions are derived from the clutter of the cognitive mind. The emotional mind may not agree with them. When you identify a goal and have written it down, apply the ELS and add the goal evaluation criteria to your reflective thinking process. A quote from Yoda in Star Wars is a good first thought when setting a daily goal: “Do or Do Not, There 120

is no Try.” Reflect on the goal that you would like to achieve. Write it down as a positive goal statement. Post your initial goal statement so that you can see it and then apply the Emotional Learning System (ELS) using the goal criteria questions to improve and refine your initial goal statement. For example: Goal Statement: “I will apply the ELS daily to learn EI skills to improve my job performance.” Step I: Explore - Ask: Do you really want to achieve this goal? Is the goal in harmony with your basic needs, beliefs, and values? Will you do it? Action statement: I do want to achieve the goal of improving my job performance. Step II: Identify - Ask: Is the goal specific? What skill will work best? Action statement: I will use the ELS daily to learn and apply the EI skill of Assertion. Step III: Understand - Ask: Is the goal attainable? Is the goal relevant? Action statement: I will apply the ELS daily and ask my manager about why I was not promoted. Step IV: Learn and Develop - Ask: Do you have the resources and ability to achieve the goal? Is the goal measurable? Action statement: I will know when I have achieved this goal. Step V: Apply - Ask: Is the goal time bound? By when do you plan to achieve the goal? Action statement: I will learn and practice the EI skill of Assertion for job performance during the next month. After applying the ELS with questions and related action behaviors, begin daily practice in applying the learning process and using the skill of Assertion. you will develop the positive habit of action goal setting which is essential to high achievement and work excellence. Seek feedback from your supervisor, coach, or friend to help you with improving your performance. Goal clarity is extremely important in achieving important goals, and you must be able to visualize the goal and see it clearly. With your eyes closed, visualize the goal in your emotional mind. If you have difficulty creating a picture and only see words like ‘To be more assertive with my manager’ in your mind’s eye the goal is still too vague. Try to rework to make the goal more specific so that you can see the picture of the skill at work. 121

For example, visualize (picture) the example of meeting with your manager by seeing the two of you sitting in an office and hear yourself saying: “I would like to discuss my low rating in communication skills in my annual performance review.” “My job performance is important to me, and I would like to know what you need to see me do differently in how I communicate with you and my coworkers.” Your emotional mind will make hundreds of decisions for you each day automatically with no conscious awareness. When you need to achieve something important, follow the action goal setting process until you can constructively think about the situation and set a clear goal. Include precise amounts, dates, and times in your goal statements so you can measure your degree of success. Exhibit 7.3 is a reminder to apply the ELS each time you set an important personal or career goal. The energy of the emotional mind is both bright and illuminating and the ELS reflective thinking process will greatly enhance your goal achievement behavior. Create your own memory aid for the five steps of the ELS. 1. Explore 2. Identify 3. Understand 4. Learn 5. Apply EIULA Emotional Intelligence U Learn and Apply - Daily Exhibit 7.3. Emotional Learning System model mnemonic. Your emotional mind is the automatic switch that signals the time to stop and reflect. Many of the most important and valuable thoughts, ideas, and solutions in history have occurred when the thinker was relaxed and pondering some important idea or goal. Here are some examples. • Newton relaxed under an apple tree. • Archimedes in a warm bath. • Huxley in his ‘Thinking Chair‘ • Henry Ford on the cot that was always in his office. The ELS is a structured way of pondering and relaxing by taking the time to go through the five steps of the ELS. If you use the ELS daily you will develop EI skills. If you do not, learning emotional intelligence will be much more difficult. 122