What is Emotional Intelligence?
You often hear that Emotional Intelligence (EI) is important in leadership, but for many it’s not clear what it is. We define Emotional Intelligence (EI) as your ability to identify your emotions in yourself and others and to understand and manage your responses and actions. Daniel Goleman said: “Emotional Intelligence is what prevents anger from turning into rage and sadness into despair.”
So an example of ... Continue Reading »
The 7 Golden Rules of Email Writing
Did you know that email is a great productivity tool? You can be forgiven if you don’t. The average email onslaught on the inbox is enormous. At the same time, writing emails costs a lot of productive time. Nevertheless, if you use email in the right way, you will find you will get more done in less time. Abiding by the Seven Golden Rules of ... Continue Reading »
4 Tricks to Beat Procrastination
Don’t we all do it? We seem to have this innate tendency to delay doing those things that we feel we really should be doing. Often they seem hard and are not really urgent for us now. There are so many other things that are pressing. It’s often just too easy to ignore this project or task and just do the stuff that’s in the ... Continue Reading »
Beating Procrastination: Setting Deadlines
After my last Time Management post '4 Tricks to Beat Procrastination', John, one of our readers commented that setting artificial deadlines is a time management strategy that helps him tackle it and I fully agree.
How many things do you have on your to-do list that have no or wishy-washy deadlines? And how are you getting on with those?
As humans we have the tendency to give ... Continue Reading »
Time Management: How do I prioritise my 100+ To-dos?
The river of tasks is flowing mercilessly and for many it’s growing every day. If you are like most of us, you can never do all the things that you need to do, let alone do all the things you want to do. The only way to manage the madness is to make choices.
You will need to prioritise. In fact, you always prioritise in some ... Continue Reading »
How to Use Emotional Intelligence to be More Effective
If you think Emotional Intelligence is something ‘airy fairy’, think again. Understanding and using emotions is highly practical. One example is that if you are in tune with your own and others’ feelings, you can work more effectively.
When you’re happy, you are better at generating ideas and solutions. This is the time to work on problem solving, on innovation and on planning and strategy. When ... Continue Reading »
Don’t Speak to a Person; Write an Email!
If you read about leadership or management, you will often see a disapproving comment about people who write an email while they’re sitting next to the recipient. In leadership courses you regularly hear the same criticism.
The wisdom is that you shouldn’t abuse email. You should not send a message when you can discuss it face to face or over the phone. I’d like ... Continue Reading »
