At the end of this module you will be able to:

• Familiarize with the concept of Emotional Intelligence
…so to better equip learners with a robust theoretical background   

• Experiment and test your EI in real-life settings
Learners will be exposed to the very fundamentals of EI and the framework that help them in navigating social environments

• Being more self-aware and self-effective combining the EI framework with EntreComp
...to better manage and understand the true power of emotions for a positive state of mental well-being

• Combining emotional awareness with Social Intelligence
Where Social Intelligence stands for the ability to build and nurture positive and stimulating interpersonal relations

In IHF’s module, you had the opportunity to familiarise with the official EU framework for education and training on entrepreneurial skills and how it can be a strategic resource of reference for new comers in the labour market.

By “Resources” we mean the competences area that is most relevant for the acquisition of key personal, material and non-material resources that are instrumental in favouring people’s empowerment and professionalization.

The five competences listed under this training area enhance and strengthen your competitiveness in the labor market as strategic lever for your job-hunting.

Each of the listed competences represents for you a focus of interest as it provides for the most valuable skills to thrive in business and professional life.

2.1 Self-awareness and self-efficacy
2.2 Motivation and perseverance
2.3 Mobilising resources
2.4 Financial and economic literacy
2.5 Mobilising others

The Resources’ Competences and opportunities for employability

Emotional intelligence is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions.
Source:  P. Salovey, John D. Mayer, 1990, Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence is an integral part of  many studies on behavioral psychology applied to organizations, businesses and management, leadership and Human Resources. For many years the concept has been a trending topic for debate and discussion among academics and professionals.

The EntreComp framework does not refer to Emotional Intelligence directly, but at the same time, many of the EntreComp’s areas of interest share the same field of Emotional Intelligence.

The first empirical studies on the roles played by “emotions” in our everyday began in the 1920s (Averile & Nunley, 1922) with a study conducted to understand how humans comprehend and analyze emotions.

For the next 70 years, the research done  on Emotional Intelligence and “emotions” was  relatively insignificant . That was until 1990 when two authors, (John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey) published a ground-breaking article simply entitled  Emotional Intelligence, which was  destined to become one of the most influential articles in contemporary social science.

Emotional intelligence became a “pop” phenomenon in 1995 when the American psychologist and essayist Daniel Goleman, wrote the bestseller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ...

The international success of this self-help book has helped the concept of Emotional intelligence reach out beyond academic studies  and become extremely popular with  the general public.

Ever since, a countless number of authors, speakers, and researchers have followed in the footsteps of  Mayer, Salovey and Goleman.

Source: www.danielgoleman.info

As of today, the literature in the field of emotional intelligence – and emotional intelligence applied to business environments – in incredibly vast.

Throughout the years, the concept has been re-framed in many different ways. However, the essentials of emotional intelligence (i.e., the Emotional Intelligence Framework) have remained the same:

• Self-awareness → the ability to recognize one’s and others’ emotions
• Self-regulation → the ability to recognize how one’s and others' emotions impact the surrounding environment
• Motivation → the ability to recognize and leverage on the drivers of our actions
• Empathy → the ability to establish a meaningful relation with others by understanding their feeling/emotions
• Social Skills → the ability to interpret the relational dynamics surrounding one’s ecosystem

By looking side-by-side at both Frameworks, it is impossible not to notice the many different ways in which the two relates and overlap each others.

The most notable cross references are:  

Out of the five Resources’ competences, self-awareness and self-efficacy remain the competence with the highest level of consistency and coherence with the “original” Emotional Intelligence Framework as it  narrows down to all its five dimensions.

Self-awareness and self-efficacy (2.1) as an “intelligence” allow people to progress for the better, set for themselves higher standards of performance, be highly reliable and confident in their actions, move towards desired states, generate a positive impact on themselves and the ones around them.

Self-awareness and self-efficacy are two driving engines leading people’s resilience and goal-oriented mindsets.

Self-awareness has always been a buzzing topic of debate in psychology, neuroscience, theology, philosophy, and lately physics as well.

The concepts of awareness and “consciousness” lead intellectuals and scientists in scratching their heads for many years, even centuries and millennia since the very first traces of “self-awareness” can be found in Greek philosophers’ bibliographies.

Throughout time the concept gained different meanings, mostly due to the many scientists from different fields that focused on the phenomenon from the perspective of their discipline.

Out of the many possible interpretations, in the context of this module we prefer to rely on a social psychology theory proposed by two authors in 1972.

Self-awareness is a psychological process of auto-regulation that allows people to orientate their behaviours towards favourable and more desired thoughts and feelings.

Source: Duval, Shelley; Wicklund, Robert A. (1972). A Theory of Objective Self Awareness

The self-awareness process happens in all domains of life and it is an essential mechanism to help people in sustaining (and reinforcing) actions and attitudes that produce positive impacts.

By being more sensitive to your self-awareness’ mechanisms (i.e., being more honest and open with yourself), you train your mind to be:

• Responsive to the external environment
• Aware about your needs, aspirations and long-term vision
• Proficient in assessing your strengths and surrounding opportunities
• Comfortable with your weaknesses and insecurities
• Resilient towards external adversities and “knockdowns”
• Confident about your potentialities

Bare in mind that this does not relates only to professional life but it can greatly benefit your relationship with family members and peers.

Source: www.albertbandura.com

Self-efficacy is one’s reflection of internal beliefs, driving forces and motivation agents that lead him/her to “execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations”.

Source: Bandura, Albert (1982). “Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency”. American Psychologist. 37 (2): 122–147

The concept of self-efficacy was originally proposed by the Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura and it represents our capacity to orientate social, cognitive and behavioural competences so as to be as effective and efficient as possible to achieve a specific objective.

According to Bandura, the sense of self-efficacy compared to a specific performance derives from three beliefs:

• Belief on what to do to achieve something
• Belief on one’s own competences to perform what to do
• Belief on the planned task will produced the desired effect

On the other hand, the aforementioned system of belief generates from four sources of information:

• Direct experiences (i.e., one’s know-how a.k.a. capacity indicators)
• Indirect experiences (i.e., benchmarking with others’ performances and courses of actions in similar contexts)
• Peers’ influence
• Physiological and emotional states

Typically, self-efficacy beliefs stem from a three-stage process:

1. Education and training on the required skills/competences from direct and indirect experiences
2. Testing of the previous in a “safe environment” (i.e., family and peers)
3. Piloting of newly acquired skills/competences in a “hostile environment” (i.e., work and everyday life)

Building a sense of self-efficacy implies validation and approval from others. The process can result harming for one’ self-esteem if the person nurtures a bias against external judgement – preventing him/her from finding useful insights and indicators for self-improvement.

Bandura’ self-efficacy is the into-practice’s dimension of self-awareness. The two concepts are very interrelated as self-efficacy builds on self-awareness and vice versa through a continuous cycle of improvements and upscaling.

→ Self-awareness is a full checkup and results in a final diagnosis of the most critical areas of intervention

→ Self-efficacy is the rehabilitation process, and not of the easiest one as it moves through errors, adjustments, fine-tuning strategies and a long cycle of testing and validation.

Luckily, the EntreComp offers you a reliable self-assessment model composed of eight level of proficiency that you can use to monitor and evaluate your progresses with each of the 15 competences.

One of the most successful Goleman’s follow-up to its 1995 bestseller was a detailed study on the fifth dimension of the Emotional Intelligence Framework: the one related to social and relational skills.

After a series of other successful publication on Emotional Intelligence, in 2006 Daniel Goleman reached once again popularity with his new book Social Intelligence. The New Science of Human Relationships.

The book deep dives into the social and relational skills originally included into the fifth dimension of the Emotional Intelligence Framework and, as expected, it found great success among organisations, businesses and general public.

The concept of Social Intelligence is less mainstreamed compared to Emotional Intelligence, mainly due to the fact that it is mostly associated to other phenomena and labels.

Again, Goleman contributed to popularizing the term, but its true origins should be traced back in the beginning of the last century by the American psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike.

Social Intelligence was introduced as a specific dimension of a three-area model for intellectual development:

• Abstract Intelligence
• Mechanical Intelligence
• Social Intelligence

Social Intelligence changes in meaning based on the areas of interests/discipline in which the concept finds application. That is why we have Social Intelligence as:

• Social influences impacting (for the worst or for the better) human intelligence
• Group Intelligence
• Ability to comprehend how to build and nurture positive and stimulating interpersonal relationship

In the context of this training module, we will refer to the latter.

As per the Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence is commonly framed into a five-dimension model that takes into consideration:

1. Situational Awareness – the environment that you are sharing with other people and their willingness to interact and participate with you in “social” activities
2. Presence – insights and signals that indicates their emotional states (voice’s tones, posture, etc.)
3. Authenticity – what other people are perceiving from us
4. Clarity – our ability to share in a clear and detailed way ideas, information and opinions that can gain us their trust
5. Empathy –  an identification process to others’ emotional states and feelings

Empathy represents the most sophisticated dimension of the framework as it implies great knowledge and mastery of the framework itself.

Establishing an empathy-based relationship requires a twofold effort:

• Great self-awareness and self-efficacy
• Great authenticity and clarity of our intentions

Any mismatch or misinterpretation can generate a totally opposite effect, damaging not only the relations but also our reputation and identity.

There are three key ingredients that helps establish empathy based relations:

• Thoughtfulness – demonstrating genuine care for others’ mental and physical well-being
• Appreciation – valorizing and recognizing others’ opinions, while peacefully stating our disagreements (if any)
• Acceptance – supporting and sustaining people around you, practicing active listening, nurture dialogue and common understanding

Before Goleman’s EI Framework, Salovey and Mayer came up with their own reference framework for Emotional Intelligence, the so defined Ability Model, as It implies one’s own capacity to process the nature of his/her emotions

In a publication from 2004, the two authors defined Emotional Intelligence as:

…the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions, to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

Source: Mayer JD, Salovey P, Caruso DR (July 2004). “Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings, and Implications”. Psychological Inquiry. 15 (3): 197–215.

Emotional Intelligence is the social “compass” that gives people guidance in orientating their behaviours, actions and reactions to external and internal stimuli.

This “orienteering” ability, presents itself similarly to the self-regulating process that we saw in action talking about self-awareness and self-efficacy. The construct of the Ability Model lies on four different abilities that are:

• Perceiving Emotions
• Using Emotions
• Understanding Emotions
• Managing Emotions

The Perception dimension of the model implies the ability to detect and recognize the traits in which emotions manifests.

This layer of the model represents the very first building block of emotional awareness as it is instrumental for the functioning of all other emotion-based cognitive processes.

Higher states of perception awareness include also cultural factors that might intervene as further carriers of meanings and social artefacts with great implications for the development of the relations.

The “use” of emotions implies the ability to network emotions, decode their meaning and carry them to sustain at best other cognitive abilities – such as creativity, lateral and critical thinking.

In other words, using emotions means leveraging on their full potentials to generate meaningful ideas, thoughts and solutions.

On the other hand, while dealing with disrupting feelings (i.e., anger, jealousy, etc.), people should use emotions as a coping mechanism so as to “break the loop” and re-establish a peaceful state of mind.

While perception pertains to the capacity of people to “detect” emotions, the understanding dimension pertains to the ability to catch where they come from, read and decode the relation among them, comprehend their shades and the way they might evolve over time.

Understanding emotions requires a great sensitivity and responsiveness to the external environment as many times the most meaningful insights appear much less tangible than what we can imagine.

For instance, in non-verbal communication there is a lot more than what words can express…

Managing emotions represents the peak-state of the Ability Model.

People that manage to master their Emotional Intelligence can relate with the surrounding environment in a way that allows them to be extremely proficient, effective and efficient in what they do (i.e., professional development, sentimental relationship, etc.).

This is not about manipulation and there is nothing malicious in this process, “emotional aware” people recognize and valorize other people’s feelings while supporting them in their needs and development paths.