Psychology of Entrepreneurship | Leaders and Emotional Intelligence (Part 1)

The idea that EQ or Emotional Intelligence is even more important than IQ has been discussed in the business world. Studies have shown that entrepreneurs with higher EQs were more successful.

But what is EQ, and how do you develop it?

First, there are many ways to understand EQ. Yet what’s important is looking at the definition of emotional intelligence:

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage emotions as a whole. This means both yours and others. These managed emotions are used to carry out a decision you’ve made.

1. Understanding your Emotions

We grew up being taught to control certain emotions. For example, boys are told not to cry. A child falls, scrapes a knee, and is told not to worry. Society decides whether an emotion is acceptable or not. This leads to people suppressing their emotional awareness.

Understanding your own emotions means having to ask: What do I feel? Where do these emotions come from and why?

Based on my professional experience, around 80% of my male clients could only describe and remember using less than 10 emotions from a list of 140. How can we understand what emotions we experience if we do not know what they are?

Furthermore, it is important to conduct an “emotional time-study” during the week. Write down the day, time, emotion, and how and where it manifests in the body (sore throat, butterflies in the stomach, etc.). The more often you do this, the better. This allows you to track your emotions, which helps manage them.

I always recommend using record-keeping tools like a diary. Keeping a diary helps you develop retrospective and analysis skills. It also helps pick out important info to develop your attention span in our era of information overload. Finally, it can become an important ritual that makes it easier for you to fall asleep.

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius kept a diary. The 12 books he wrote show how his brain developed from the time he started writing in his diary. He started as a slave, and now we remember him as an incredible, stoic philosopher.

2. Managing your Emotions

Managing emotions is determined by signs such as how strong our anger is, whether we can “switch” the emotion if necessary, how long we can feel resentment, whether we can feel happiness, and much more.

You need to train your awareness skills to develop this component of Emotional Intelligence. This is done through mindfulness meditation and simple techniques that will allow you to track and manage your emotional state (as well as the thoughts that cause them). As a bonus, you will develop your memory and attention span. The brain will then begin to work much more efficiently.

It is also necessary to train yourself to adopt new ways of thinking, to find irrelevant settings in your mind, and then to think of new cognitive-behavioral algorithms.

Think of the synaptic connections in the brain like a bowling ball track: once the ball has fallen into it, it is very difficult to get it out. Similarly, once you fall into a certain pattern of thinking it’s hard to get out of it. For example, if an employee fails to complete a task and you automatically become furious, this implies you tend to become furious easily. Breaking this pattern sometimes means giving yourself the command simply “not to think about it;” in other words, get rid of the mental trigger.

One client of mine used a technique to prevent himself from procrastinating. He understood that when he was lazy, he wasted time and money. He decided to reinforce this realization by throwing away $100 every time he caught himself in this state. This method comes from a neurolinguistic programming approach. After doing this exercise three times any businessman will be afraid to even think about procrastinating.

It is important to incorporate these new ways of thinking into your behavior.

Another interesting thing is that suffering or experiencing happiness are just like other habits. They can be developed accordingly.

The book “Buddha, Brain, and Neurophysiology of Happiness” describes in detail how this happens. For example, the process of developing the habit of being happy is interesting. You can start by noticing things that make you happy and bring pleasure, even small things. It could be delicious coffee, the sunny sky, or a task you completed on time. Soon enough the brain itself will begin to look for things to make you happy.

The opposite is also true: if we constantly complain, get irritated, and scold ourselves then this is exactly what our brain will get used to doing.

3. Expression Control

There is a difference between how emotions are controlled within us and how we express them—this is called expression control.

Expression control is about how well you express your emotions. You will look strange if you laugh at a funeral or remain silent at a football match.

To develop expression control, it is necessary to work on the inside and outside. On the inside, you have to develop analytical skills and form the so-called “observing ego”. The “observing ego” is the ability to separate from oneself and observe what is happening as if from the outside. On the outside, you can use breathing techniques and even oratory skills to control your emotions.

If what I’ve written here interests you, write your questions and comments down below. I will analyze them in the continuation of this article, where we will learn how to understand the emotions of other people and how this skill differs from empathy. We will also discuss whether it is possible to control the emotions of others, whether this is manipulation, and why decision-making is an important factor in emotional intelligence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anna Kravtcova is a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology and is internationally certified with EuroPsy or European Certificate in Psychology (2021). She is a member of several respectful international business psychology societies including the International Society for Emotional Intelligence (2017), and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) – a division of the American Psychological Association or APA (2011).

Anna is a speaker at conferences all around the world (USA, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Russia, etc.), and did a TED talk on Emotional Intelligence. She has extensive managerial experience across various positions including as HR director (500 employees), COO (6 tech startups), CEO (17 hotels and restaurants), and managing partner of an international consulting company (36 consultants, 150+ clients around the world).

If you’ve watched “Billions” on Netflix, she is “Wendy” in real life.