Developing emotional intelligence (EQ)
Emotional intelligence (emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathise with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.
Most of the ideas on this page relate to our emotions in some way, but here we focus on a selection of emotions or feelings that can enhance or get in the way of our wellbeing:
- Optimism
- Feelings of inadequacy brought about by our imposter feelings and inner critic.
- Motivation
- The emotions of difficult conversations and relationships
Optimism
Focusing on the future
Optimistic people focus on the future and look for options and set themselves goals to work towards. This presentation is most effective if you find a quiet time to watch it and have a pen and paper handy!
Related resources and links:
- Mentoring – helping you to focus on your future goals
- Career planning and strategy
- Short article: The power of freewriting
- Blog: Free-writing exercises for stress and anxiety relief
Gathering unbiased data
We can train and develop our optimism. The first step is to start gathering data to support our inner optimist.
Related resources and links
- Exercise - optimism and emotional intelligence
- The happiness project – a book by Gretchen Rubin
Emotional intelligence - your inner critic
Understanding your inner critic
What is our inner critic, and where does it come from? Why do we have imposter feelings?
Recognise and ‘separate’ your inner critic
Getting to know your inner critic a little better is a great way to start to tame it
Taming your inner critic
Reduce the impact of your inner critic or impostor's voice by gathering some data and new beliefs.
Related resources and links
- A fun way to look at impostor syndrome
- Website and a free guide about impostor syndrome by academic Dr Hugh Kearns
- Taming your Gremlin: blog and podcasts full of advice on taming your inner critic
- Dr Brené Brown short video clips on:
- Feel the fear and do it anyway – the well-known book by Dr Susan Jeffers
The ingredients of your motivation
The ingredients of your motivation
What can we change about the things we do, or how we do them, to enhance our motivation?
Video transcript: the ingredients of motivation - part 1 (pdf)
Ingredients of motivation 2
Explore mastery, autonomy and other motivation models
Related resources and links
- A Nature article for researchers from Hugh Kearns and Maria Gardener - Waiting for the motivation fairy
- A book on Ikigai: finding your purpose
- Start with Why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action – book and TED talk by Simon Sinek
- Motivation theories:
Video transcript: the ingredients of motivation - part 2 (pdf)
The emotions of challenging conversations
The emotions of challenging conversations
Understanding what gets in the way of effective conversations, and why they can be stressful. Includes a short introduction to Transactional Analysis.
Related resources and links
- Eric Berne’s theory of Transactional Analysis
- Our video on planning difficult conversations (this can be found in the next section on Building Competence)
- An example of how Transactional Analysis can help to understand a difficult conversation: a short video by Transaktionsanalyse
Video transcript: the emotions of difficult conversations (pdf)
Previous and next
Go back to the previous section: the challenging nature of research
Go to the next section: Building competence