Five Compelling Reasons to Develop Your Emotional Intelligence

What’s your idea of an adventure? Climbing Mt. Everest? Canoeing the Amazon? Riding a camel across the Sahara? Scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef?

I’ll have to admit, the biggest adventure I’ve undertaken recently was simply kayaking about 8 miles down the River Raisin near Dundee, Michigan. A small adventure, to be sure, but fun!

I’d like to propose another kind of adventure, though, and provide five compelling reasons for you to join me on it.

This adventure is safe although it could take you on a few uncomfortable twists or turns. The positive and possibly extraordinary end result will make it all worthwhile!

In fact, this adventure could lead to expanded leadership capacity, a better understanding of yourself (ok, that could be a certain degree of risk or discomfort) and increased influence with people.

It’s the internal and very personal adventure of growing your emotional intelligence. Here’s why each of us should commit to it:

1.  You’re determined to keep making progress on emotional issues that crop up from time-to-time: anxiety, anger, depression, for examples.

2.  You’re aware that you need to ‘burnout proof’ your ministry.

3.  You’re working on becoming a world-class master of using ”relational capital” to influence, inspire and engage people to move toward a common goal. 

4.  You’re searching for the relational tools that can prevent some conflicts from ever occurring and turn others into opportunities for constructive growth.

5.  You know your church can achieve great things but you have to learn how to move others from resisting change to embracing change.

Each of those worthy goals above requires optimum emotional intelligence.  They all involve better understanding of your own emotions, managing your own emotions, tuning into the emotions of others and then communicating effectively with others.

That’s emotional intelligence.

I need it, you need it, we all need it.

How do we develop it?

I’ll write more about that over the next few weeks!

---

If you enjoyed this article, please “like” or share on your favorite social media using the icons below.

—-