How to Use Emotional Intelligence to Your Advantage

What is emotional intelligence? A great place to begin is to think about it in terms of "Who I am" and "What I do." Start by checking out these five components of emotional intelligence:

First, Self-Awareness is about recognizing and understanding our emotions and also perceiving and understanding how others see us. Know this- self-awareness can come from self-knowledge. But it's really best informed by feedback that we get from people we trust.

Social awareness comes back to empathy and the social skill set that comes with treating others with kindness, respect and being able to listen and support people. It's also how we build relationships, how we communicate and our effectiveness in positively influencing others. It's your ability to "read the room" and understand and want to get to know the person or people you seek to connect with.

Self-Management has so much to do with managing and regulating our own emotions and converting the emotions that we're facing into positive energy, smart decisions and meaningful thought before we take action.

Our motivation is the drive, passion and purpose that goes into how we set goals, know what we want for ourselves and how we want to support others. I'd add also that a huge part of emotional intelligence is our ability to self-motivate and focus each day to complete the tasks that we have at-hand. It's also our energy management and drive to do great things. That's intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is how we support others and motivate them to do great things.

I encourage you to think about what emotional intelligence has done to help you in your career. And how you can use it now and going forward. Start with who you are, what you do and what you want to do to make a difference.