One of the things I love about my job is that I occasionally get to deliver a talk or workshop about a professional development topic, which also ends up being a personal development topic, as both go inevitably hand in hand.

This week, for the second year in a row, I got the chance to contribute to my company´s internship program (an intern role would be similar to a “becario” in Spain) with an interactive session on one of my favourite topics: emotional intelligence.

Summarising very briefly, emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability to:

• Recognise, understand and manage our own emotions, and
• Recognise, understand and influence the emotions of others.

It may sound a bit odd to you, us talking about emotions in a professional setting… Well, as it turns out, your “emotional quotient” (or EQ) often matters more than your intelligence quotient, especially at work.

Why? Because at the end of the day, above all else, we are human beings, we are people. And even though we get the impression that work is about tasks, processes, systems, programs and the like (or whatever is relevant depending on your job), deep down, it’s always about people, directly or indirectly - colleagues, bosses, clients, suppliers, users, patients or whatever they may be. We are always dealing with people, starting with ourselves.

The good news is that emotional intelligence can be trained, and it produces double benefits, personally and professionally. In either domain, the more you get to understand yourself and those around you better, the more you’ll be able to progress in life. It’s that simple.

In the 7th episode of Reprogram your life we looked at how emotions generally work, what the main emotions are (the so-called universal emotions), and the specific message that each of them conveys. Today I´d like to share with you a very useful technique to manage those moments when the emotion shows up: the acronym is STOP.

• S for Stop – Literally! Stop what you’re doing for a second.
• T for Take a breath (or take a step back) - Take a moment to breathe consciously. In and out.
• O for Observe – What are you feeling right here and now? What’s that emotion (name it), and what is it telling you? What’s the message?
• P for Proceed – Once you’ve received the message, what do you want to do with it? How do you want to respond to this situation?

This technique helps us to create a bit of space between the emotion, which is spontaneous and we can´t control, and the actions that follow the emotion, which we do have the ability to control, but only if we snap out of auto-pilot in order to choose more consciously. Managing our emotions appropriately will allow us to respond to situations instead of reacting to them, and consequently get better results, both for us and for those around us.

This quote from Viktor Frankl explains it beautifully:

Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor Frankl