But how do you know your level of emotional intelligence?

First of all, you should understand that, unlike IQ, no one can summarize your EQ in a single number. Know someone with great self-confidence, but zero empathy, for example?

I think of emotional intelligence in terms of a profile of specific competencies that range across four different areas of personal ability:

• self-awareness
• self-management
• empathy and social awareness
• and relationship management.

Nested within each of those four areas are specific, learned competencies that set the best leaders and performers apart from average.

I listed some of these emotional intelligence competencies in a recent short article in the New York Times (which went platinum: most e-mailed article that day). But if you want to see the longer list, here you are, as given on the website of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations:

Self-Awareness concerns knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions. The Self-Awareness cluster contains three competencies:

• Emotional Awareness: Recognizing one's emotions and their effects.
• Accurate Self-Assessment: Knowing one's strengths and limits.
• Self-Confidence: A strong sense of one's self-worth and capabilities.

Self-Management refers to managing ones' internal states, impulses, and resources. The Self-Management cluster contains six competencies:

• Emotional Self-Control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
• Transparency: Maintaining integrity, acting congruently with one’s values.
• Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change.
• Achievement: Striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence.
• Initiative: Readiness to act on opportunities.
• Optimism: Persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks.

Social Awareness refers to how people handle relationships and awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns. The Social Awareness cluster contains three competencies:

• Empathy: Sensing others' feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns.
• Organizational Awareness: Reading a group's emotional currents and power relationships.
• Service Orientation: Anticipating, recognizing, and meeting customers' needs.

Relationship Management concerns the skill or adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others. The Relationship Management cluster contains six competencies:

• Developing Others: Sensing others' development needs and bolstering their abilities.
• Inspirational Leadership: Inspiring and guiding individuals and groups.
• Change Catalyst: Initiating or managing change.
• Influence: Wielding effective tactics for persuasion.
• Conflict Management: Negotiating and resolving disagreements.
• Teamwork & Collaboration: Working with others toward shared goals. Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.

By: Daniel Goleman
Author of The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education     

Seventy-five percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated, according to the Idaho-based Panhandle Health District. This number is alarming because the health of every system in your body relies on water. Drinking enough water can improve your mood, make your skin glow and keep you regular. Staying hydrated also plays a role in appetite suppression and weight management.

Glowing SkinAlthough you may not think of it as such, your skin is an organ; in fact, it’s the largest organ in -- or on -- your body. Just like any of your other organs, your skin needs an adequate water supply to stay healthy. When you don’t drink enough water, your skin becomes dehydrated. This manifests as dry, flaky skin that feels tight. Dry, dehydrated skin is more prone to the development of fine lines and wrinkles. The Panhandle Health District notes that drinking enough water also helps prevent sagging skin, especially after weight loss. Water fills the spaces between skin cells, plumping the skin while reducing drooping and the appearance of wrinkles.



Appetite ControlDrinking water before a meal can decrease your appetite and help prevent overeating. Researchers from the American Chemical Society found that dieters who drank 2 cups of water before each meal lost 5 more pounds over a period of 12 weeks than dieters who ate without hydrating first. In addition to diminishing your appetite, drinking enough water may also keep your metabolism working efficiently. According to the Panhandle Health District, mild dehydration can slow your metabolism by 3 percent.

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Keep Things MovingInsufficient fluid intake is one of the primary causes of constipation. When you don’t drink enough fluid, your body gets the water it needs by pulling it out of its internal sources, like your colon. This leads to a dry colon and dry, hard stools that are difficult to pass. When you drink enough water, your colon stays hydrated and lubricated, which keeps stools soft and easy to pass.

Drink and SmileResearchers at Tufts University studied the effects of mild dehydration on college athletes and found that a lack of water can affect your mood. Participants who engaged in aerobic activities for 60 to 75 minutes but didn’t properly hydrate reported feeling more depressed, tense, confused, angry and fatigued than athletes who drank enough. The researchers concluded that inadequate fluid balance -- not drinking enough water -- has a negative effect on your mood.

Stop trying to motivate your employees!
March 31, 2015 By Rosie Ward 
When I was a kid, my mom decided to expand our family’s collective palate and serve shrimp for dinner. For the four of us under age 10, this was tantamount to torture. We spent the first hour at the table crying and begging for something else, but finally, three of us choked down a few bites and spit the rest into our napkins. Despite my parents’ threats, my sister Jill sat for another hour, refusing to eat a single bite. She spent the rest of that day in her bedroom, and she never learned to like shrimp.

Kids hate being told what to do. But the truth is that people don’t outgrow that feeling. Sure, we will give in when threatened by a big enough stick or rewarded by a tasty enough carrot, but we will also begin to harbor resentment if never given autonomy to make our own decisions.

In the workplace we continue to put a lot of energy into “employee performance management” as if people behave like replicable and predictable robots that can be manipulated and controlled. Neuroscience can shed some light on why we are hard-wired to resist extrinsic motivation and prone to creative thinking and problem-solving when we are intrinsically motivated. Scientifically speaking, the more we try to “fix” a person or attempt to “get” him or her to change, the more powerful that person’s brain signals that something is wrong. The result is, for that person’s “animal instincts” to take over and readily overpower any rational thought. Not exactly conductive to peak performance.

So, if you can’t motivate your employees to change, what can you do? The goal is to create a healthy workplace that fosters creativity and innovation, where employees are empowered and self-motivated.

1. Begin by asking employees questions that allow them to initiate their own thoughts. This is a critical component to autonomy, employee engagement, and lasting organizational change. Take care to be authentic when you are asking questions, as the brain has a keen ability to detect the difference between authentic inquiry (i.e., I’m asking you a question for no other reason than I’m genuinely interested in you) and persuasion (i.e., I’m asking you a question to try to “get” you to somewhere I think you should be).2 Our Thriving Workplace Culture Survey is a great tool to help you understand your employees’ attitudes toward your organization.

2. Stop using incentives and punishments to “get” people to change. This kind of coercion is unsupported by literature and, in fact, has been shown to actually erode intrinsic motivation. Over the last 20 years, business and leadership researchers have definitively demonstrated that the key to organizational effectiveness is having committed employees who are empowered and intrinsically motivated. 3 People are motivated by work when they understand how it contributes to something beyond themselves; work that provides them with autonomy, growth, meaning, and purpose.

3. Focus on developing more effective thinking in employees, not on measuring outward behaviors alone. Most managers choose behavior measurement as a primary path to achieving greater accountability, focus, teamwork, innovation, and quality and then spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to find the right reward to tie to the right measure. The brain has an innate desire to solve its own problems and create novel connections. When people are able to work out their own solutions, the brain rewards them with pleasure.3 Let people solve their own problems and watch how their satisfaction motivates them to be more productive. Create an environment where employees are allowed to make their own decisions and then your employees will exceed expectations.

Many years after the shrimp incident, my mother confided to my sisters and me that trying to get us to eat something we hated was worse punishment for her than it was for us.

Don’t punish your entire organization by trying to force motivation on your employees. Instead, focus on creating the conditions that will free, fuel and inspire your employees to bring their best selves to work each day. Download a FREE chapter of How to Build a Thriving Culture at Work for a blueprint that will help you get started!