Emotional  Intelligence

Stephen Blakesley was our guest speaker this week. He spoke about emotional intelligence and how emotions can impact hiring the right people and retaining them in harmony with others in the workplace.

Emotional Intelligence (EI), often measured as an Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ), is a term that describes the ability, capacity, skill or (in the case of the trait EI model) a self-perceived ability, to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups.

Salovey and Mayer's conception of EI strives to define EI within the confines of the standard criteria for a new intelligence. Following their continuing research, their initial definition of EI was revised to: "The ability to perceive emotion, integrate emotion to facilitate thought, understand emotions and to regulate emotions to promote personal growth."

The ability based model views emotions as useful sources of information that help one to make sense of and navigate the social environment.[13] The model proposes that individuals vary in their ability to process information of an emotional nature and in their ability to relate emotional processing to a wider cognition. This ability is seen to manifest itself in certain adaptive behaviors. The model proposes that EI includes 4 types of abilities:

• Perceiving emotions — the ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts- including the ability to identify one’s own emotions. Perceiving emotions represents a basic aspect of emotional intelligence, as it makes all other processing of emotional information possible.
• Using emotions — the ability to harness emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem solving. The emotionally intelligent person can capitalize fully upon his or her changing moods in order to best fit the task at hand.
• Understanding emotions — the ability to comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. For example, understanding emotions encompasses the ability to be sensitive to slight variations between emotions, and the ability to recognize and describe how emotions evolve over time.
• Managing emotions — the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others. Therefore, the emotionally intelligent person can harness emotions, even negative ones, and manage them to achieve intended goals.

To learn more visit Stephen's website or Wikipedia

Guests, Visitors & Other Good News

Donne Wright, an associate of Steve Blakesley, vistied with us this week. Past club member Feroze Abdullah visited again and committed to rejoining the club. Welcome Home Feroze!

The march of the Rotary Foundation contributors continued. Karen Blakeman and Wayne Staton are the latest club members to be recognized for donating to the RI Foundation...they both got lei'd.

Coming Up At Rotary