Mike Clark's Business Bites: Self-awareness key to great culture

Emotional intelligence is being aware you are experiencing an emotional change of state and realising why that could be happening. Photo / Unsplash

Do you have emotional intelligence? Do you control your emotions or do they control you? How aware are you of your emotions?

I was watching an interview with All Blacks mental strength coach Gilbert Enoka on motivation, and one statement jumped out so strongly I paused the video to write it down. I love quotes. They can capture an entire concept in a few short pithy words.

The path I find myself on today I can trace back to an old promotional magazine I found as a kid at the back of our block of flats, discarded in a pile destined for the rubbish dump. Somebody had thrown out a whole lot of magazines and on top of the pile I saw this flyer advertising promotional cups and pictures.

We were at the dawn of the era of motivation. The current fashion was to put beautiful pictures on your wall with inspirational quotes underneath and to have your desk littered with similarly inspiring cups, pen holders and photograph frames all with motivational quotes to keep you going strong.

The print in the promotional magazine was tiny, but I read it cover to cover multiple times. For me it was the dawning of realisation you could change your life by changing your mindset.

Initially, I could not understand why everyone did not immediately get excited about the power of changing mindset. It took me many years to fully grasp that before you can change your mindset, you need to actually be aware of where your mind is set.

Being aware of what you are feeling and how that affects your thinking and your actions is not something people come wired with at birth. It was only in the early 1990s that emotional intelligence even became a thing. Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer coined the term emotional intelligence in 1990, describing it as "a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and action".

This led Daniel Goleman to write his famous book, Emotional Intelligence (EI). The foundation of the whole concept of emotional intelligence is self-awareness - the ability to understand one's own emotions. To be aware you are experiencing an emotional change of state and to realise why that could be happening.

I have used the pyramid of EI in my training for years. I choose to spend a lot of time on the foundation of self-awareness and have even developed activities to help people notice and see their emotional changes. I think this is why Gilbert's quote so deeply resonated. He answered a question with the statement, "self-awareness is the master skill".

It is foundational and impacts everything from business culture to the quality of your life. Being a skill means it can be learnt. Is this a skill you need to master? Is it one your team needs to learn?

• Mike Clark is director and lead trainer and facilitator at Think Right business training company.