How do you use Emotional Intelligence to perform?
How you feel determines what you do. This is the case for everyday behaviors, but also for the moment you need to perform. A top performance is nothing less than executing the right actions at the right time. The baseline is to investigate which emotions lead to this desired behavior for you, since this is different for every individual. Everyone has their own emotional fingerprint. If you are aware of this, you can consciously leverage your emotions to optimally make use of your skills and talent, and prevent your emotions from hijacking your most important moments.
The Perfect Performance
If all aspects are aligned, your performance will peak.
Personality
Your personality indirectly influences your performance
Performance-demands
This is the level you need to reach in order to deliver the perfect performance.
Emotions
How you feel determines whether you can use all of your skills.
Physical skills
Mental skills
Technical en tactical skills
The perfect performance?
Before you consider emotions, you first need to know all the aspects required to deliver this performance. Emotions are important – crucial even, we would say – yet, they are not all-encompassing.
On the left you can see a schematic overview. If you hover your mouse over the icons, their content will reveal. The theme’s of the perfect performance are similar for everyone; the content of these theme’s differ widely.
What skills do you need to perform well?
Physical
In the world of sports it is quite self-explanatory that you need an adequate physical health to perform. But this also includes your sleeping and eating habits, and your energy requirements. This is relevant for everyone.
Technical / Tactical
These are all the skills directly related to your performance. They are discipline-specific skills such as your first touch on the pitch or your negotiation skills as an entrepreneur.
Mental
What is your communication-style? Are you open to feedback? How do you deal with adversity? Do you set goals and targets? When do you quit? All skills not directly related to your performance are part of this.
Personality
What you value in life influences how you develop. Personality is more difficult to change than the three other skill-dimensions mentioned here.
Emotions as a skill
The essence of performing is: using all the skills you have at exactly the right moment. With the emotiplus-method you’ll learn a performance-skill. First you’ll learn about which emotions can lead you to that unshackled performance. When you know this, there are different methods and techniques you can use to consciously summon these feelings. And perhaps more importantly, you’ll learn about your most harmful emotions during performances, which helps you develop the emotional resilience and stability that enables you to stay in control.
Emotion profile
All the important emotions and their intensity determine your own emotion-profile. The light stroke is your ‘zone’. When you are in your zone, you maximize the probability that you reach your perfect performance.
Emotion-profile
The X-axis represents emotions and the Y-axis represents intensity.
Emotion-profile with current state
The orange line is the feeling in one moment in time.
Practical use of Emotion Profile
*We use different emotion-regulation techniques to realize these steps.
Lecture
How does the mental coaching of a professional athlete work? How do they use their emotions to perform? In our 1.5 hour interview-style lecture you’ll find out.