5 Signs of High Emotional Intelligence:

5 Signs of High Emotional Intelligence:

Emotional intelligence predicts people's ability to regulate themselves, manage other people, and achieve success. Research shows a link between emotional intelligence and career success. Not everyone is born with it, but unlike IQ, emotional intelligence can be acquired and improved with practice. So, how can we tell if someone's got it or not? Here are five signs of people with high emotional intelligence. These are qualities that are easy to assess in every day situations.

Sign No. 1 : They handle criticism without denial, blame, excuses or anxiety.

One of the hallmarks of high emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Self-awareness is a deep understanding of what makes us tick, what angers us, makes us happy, bores and interests us. It's also means that we can appraise ourselves, faults and all, with great honesty and clarity. So when people with high emotional intelligence make a mistake and get criticized for it, it doesn't send them into an emotional tailspin. It's simply a fact to be noted, analyzed and corrected.

Not everyone with high emotional intelligence reacts to criticism in the same exact way. Some people deal with it more empathically and instantly wonder “Why did this person just criticize me?" And they seek to understand “what does this criticism mean for our working relationship moving forward?" Others handle criticism more like a process engineer looking to root-cause a product defect, systematically dissecting every step leading up to the thing they just got criticized for. Their first thought is “I need to figure out exactly what went wrong."

Regardless of the exact nature of their reaction, people with high emotional intelligence do not deny it, blame others, make excuses or melt into a pool of anxiety.

If you've ever heard people say, “That rule doesn't apply to me" or “My performance was just fine" (when it clearly wasn't), you've witnessed denial. These are folks who are so defensive and walled-off or their egos are so fragile, that they're simply not ready for feedback. They are, in effect, saying, “There's no problem. My performance was absolutely fine. If you don't like the results, that's a problem with your judgment, not my performance."

Others exhibit blame. Blame is the unspoken acknowledgment that constructive feedback is warranted (i.e., the outcomes were subpar) coupled with an unwillingness to admit any personal fault. You'll hear things like “OK, results weren't perfect, but if you want to know where the problem is, go talk to Accounting about why they didn't get the right data to my team before the deadline."

Excuses are another reaction common to folks with lower emotional intelligence. An excuse is an admission of subpar results plus an admission of fault that is coupled with a host of extenuating factors that no normal human could possibly have overcome. Unlike blame, it won't be another person or department that gets thrown under the bus but rather your servers, procedures, phone systems and the like.

Then there's anxiety. Here, the actual subpar performance and culpability have been fully acknowledged, but the person lacks the readiness to move forward and improve future performance. People in anxiety say things like, “There's no way we'll finish in time" or “We've tried to fix this before and it just didn't work."