Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘filling your emotional tank’?
If you’ve played competitive team sports or worked in schools or teaching, it’s a phrase you may have encountered before. Its premise is simple: everyone has an emotional tank – and just like the gas tank in your car, you need to make sure that it stays balanced and not just topped up with energy.
Suppose emotionally you are in an environment where you feel disrespected, ignored, or unrecognized. In that case, it can drain your energy, and you may feel tired, irritable, and disengaged from what’s happening around you.
When you feel appreciated, acknowledged, and included, your emotional tank feels full, giving you energy, positivity, and action.
Our emotions can profoundly affect how our energy operates.
Simply put, our emotional tanks fuel our performance. You will perform better if you have a full tank, but if your tank is empty, you won’t perform as well.
In this week’s blog, we’re talking about emotional intelligence and its role in our day-to-day lives, focusing on a balanced approach in the workplace. Understanding your emotional capacity and the capacities of those around you can help supercharge your impact at work and throughout your career.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence, or EI or EQ, is a behavioral model first developed by psychologists Howard Gardner, Peter Salovey, and ‘John Jack’ Mayer in the 1970s, becoming more widely known in the mid-90s with Daniel Goleman’s book on the model. According to these leading researchers, emotional intelligence is “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” By positively understanding and managing one’s emotional state, one gains awareness of how thoughts and feelings can impact one’s behavior and how this affects others.
Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, identifies five key components to understanding EI:
- Emotional self-awareness: recognizing how you feel and the impact your emotional state has on those around you
- Self-regulation: the ability to act impartially from your emotions
- Motivation: harnessing your emotions as drivers to achieve your goals
- Empathy: observing the emotions of others
- Social skills: how you handle your relationships and get the best from them
In the workplace context, emotional intelligence can be used to develop strong interpersonal relationships with co-workers, employers, and clients. By embodying this principle, teams can build trust, manage expectations, and deal with difficult situations more effectively, positively enhancing team dynamics and performance.
“First know yourself, then know others.”
~ Gichin Funakoshi
Emotions drive us as humans. Our everyday actions and decisions are fueled by how we feel. Our mood influences our thoughts and cognitive thinking. Even the way we communicate, including our body language, is determined by our emotional state. So, to increase our effectiveness and impact in our careers, we must first gain awareness of our own emotional behavior. And because emotional sentience is inherent and often subconscious, many of us need support and guidance in developing this self-awareness.
How can we create abundance using emotional intelligence?
As a certified Project Management Professional with decades of leading financial transformation IT projects, and now additionally, as a BG5 Career and Business Professional, emotional intelligence is relevant in today’s business world.
As the founder of Shining Compass and an Evaluator (Reflector) BG5 Design Human Design Type, I recognize the powerful effect that understanding your emotional intelligence can have on your life. In the realm of career and the workplace, understanding your Career Design through the BG5 system gives you a clear picture of how you are designed to live, with a deliberate focus on your career direction, business interactions, interpersonal skills, and leadership.
As a Coach practitioner, I know that the principle values of the BG5 system closely mirror the key components of emotional intelligence, assisting in identifying your core expression (motivation), as well as identifying emotional traits (self-awareness) and offering practical tools that you can use in every day business decisions (self-regulation).
In the last few years, we all have been challenged by the pandemic. The recessionary trends have placed enormous strain on all of us, creating additional challenges and uncertainty in the workplace. Many of you may have experienced exhaustion and burnout – and almost all of us may feel that our emotional load is at an all-time high.
This is why so many millions of people are quitting their jobs, in what’s been coined the ‘Great Resignation.’ According to the Bankrate Job Seekers Survey conducted in 2022 and 2023, in a study of over 2,000 working Americans, over 56% of employees said they plan to leave their jobs in the next 12 months. Many experts believe this has to do with our emotional state – how people feel in their roles. That’s because feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, or disengaged can lead to emotional volatility, affecting our decision-making and interaction with others. In some rapidly growing economies like India, Michael Page Talent Trends study published in Business Today reveals that 75% of the surveyed employees are still job seekers.
In the BG5 System, we can see how you are designed to utilize your emotional intelligence through analyzing your Career Design. This can help us understand our emotional state and how we interact with others around us. Approximately 47% of the population has an inconsistent way of dealing with emotions. When they are around the other 53% of the population who are more emotionally expressive, these individuals can amplify the emotions of others, making them feel worse (or better). Quite often, those with an inconsistent way of dealing with emotions avoid conflict by not sharing how they feel or playing nice.
When interacting in the workplace, understanding your BG5 Career Design can significantly help you know how you interact in your work environment. Some of the examples below help to demonstrate the differences in action and reaction based on the way of dealing with emotions is consistent or inconsistent.
Here are a few examples using the BG5 Personality assessment tool for assessing a few situations based on Emotional Intelligence (Solar Plexus) state:
- Tom Person has a consistent way of expressing his emotions but is in what we call a not-self or unhealthy state, where he offloads his frustration onto everyone around him. The healthy state for Tom would be to observe how he is feeling, allowing the moment of frustration to pass before responding more calmly to his team, thus avoiding any upset.
Tom Person has a defined Emotional Intelligence Function but is in what we call a ‘not-self’ state, where he offloads his frustration onto everyone around him. Tom’s healthy state would be observing how he is feeling, allowing the moment of frustration to pass, and taking time to release this high emotional state before responding to the situation. This will enable Tom to think calmly with his team, thus avoiding any upset.
- Sarah works in a team and gets along with everyone except for Jack, who is loud and shares vulgar jokes, which makes Sarah uncomfortable. But Sarah doesn’t say anything and instead fake-laughs at his jokes, pretending she doesn’t mind.
In this example, Sarah has an inconsistent way of expressing her emotions and, in her not-self state, minimizes how she feels to avoid conflict and to please others. Sarah’s healthy state would be telling Jack the truth about how she really feels without reacting, even if his feelings get hurt.
- Ameera leads a team in an HR department at a large company. Ameera is well-respected for her decision-making and strategy when dealing with complex and often delicate staffing issues.
Ameera has a defined Emotional Intelligence and is in her natural state. She does not react to emotion but observes it, which gives her the clarity to make difficult decisions without losing the respect of her peers.
- Bav works in a garage as a mechanic. He is one of a team of 10, and although he is not a manager, his colleagues look up to him. They nominate him to represent them at local Union meetings because they trust him.
Bav has an undefined Emotional Intelligence, but in his natural state, he can act impartially on behalf of his peers. He understands their concerns due to his empathy. He is not afraid to speak up to represent his co-workers when necessary.
We can learn a lot from these examples. Going back to our emotional tank by identifying our unique code and observing how we feel from moment to moment allows us awareness and space to honor our feelings, the ones that make us feel happy and energetic, as well as the ones that make us feel uncomfortable. By simply connecting to how we feel in the present moment, we are given an opportunity, through self-observation and self-regulation, to recognize that emotions are just waves that ebb and flow. Our emotional state is constantly changing – and we are at our most authentic when we honor and identify these emotions rather than stifle them. From this position of emotional authority, we can make decisions that help us cultivate and boost our creativity and purpose in life and the workplace.
Once we have identified these emotional traits for ourselves, we can use them in our day-to-day relationships in the workplace to help us understand one another’s emotional needs and motivations. When we give ourselves and those around us the space needed to observe, feel, and replenish our emotional tanks, we find balance, productivity, and abundance. And if you are an employer or manage a team, understanding and embodying these principles can help your organization flourish, both in the business sense and on a personal, individual level.
If you want to learn more about your personal or business team’s BG5 charts with their emotional intelligence design to maximize teamwork, then a BG5® Career Design Overview may be what you need. It is the perfect way to learn more about your innate talents and interests in the field of work and discern where to invest your time, effort, and energy to lead a more fulfilling life.
Loveleen Paintal is Certified BG5 Career and Business Professional . She is an Evaluator (Reflector) type with a public role profile of 6/2 , being a Natural Leader. Evaluators are here to sample and provide objective assessment of people, communities and businesses.
Loveleen is also IHDS Certified Human Design Guide and Life and Business Coach, located in Canada. She has a compassionate personality with a natural problem solver . She offers Living your Design workshops, BG5 Career and business consulting . She has 36 years of business experience as Consultant , IT Project Management, organizational leadership in Financial transformation and Operations. Her last few years have been working on acquiring Human design and BG5 knowledge, Loveleen offers a unique platform for meaningful, heart-centered life coaching, business coaching and consultancy.
Her Business career and acumen goes back to the 1990’s running an international manufacturing and trading family business for 18 years and since 2002 she had Corporate career in North America as IT/ Project Management Consultant . Loveleen offers unique insights through experiential learning and BG5 business analysis knowledge for coaching and training Executives, Business Coaches, Entrepreneurs , Project Management teams and IT Executives in various industries.
Loveleen practices meditation, along with other esoteric practices including Reiki, and Sudarshan Kriya (rhythmic breathing) which helps any executive to build resilience. It was these studies that serendipitously guided her towards the Human Design System and then into BG5 Business & Career Consulting.
Click on the link below to connect with Loveleen and book your first free Discovery Call or reach out to her by email.
https://www.shiningcompass.com/bg5-career-coaching
Email : loveleen@shiningcompass.com
Warm and kind wishes,
Loveleen
Business Coaching and Human Design Guide. Shining Compass is a conscious coaching organization with global presence, designed to help small businesses, solo entrepreneurs and those in career transition find and project their career authenticity through business coaching, using established methodology.
