Leadership Mastery: A Marriage Between Emotional Intelligence And Mindfulness
Source | www.forbes.com | Jamelle Lindo
What is control?
Simply put, control is the ability to start, stop and change. Control over oneself means having the ability to start new behaviors, as well as stop or change old ones intentionally. This principle is foundational to self-mastery.
I believe leaders who don’t have control over themselves and cannot influence themselves aren’t capable of influencing and leading others — at least not effectively. From this perspective, self-mastery becomes the gateway through which leadership mastery becomes possible.
This idea brings forward the question of how leaders can achieve mastery. How can they become self-empowered in order to successfully empower and lead others? The reality is, there are many ways. For example, some research points to emotional intelligence as the answer. Building onto that, research has also found strong connections between emotional intelligence, mindfulness and highly effective leadership. What’s interesting here is that emotional intelligence and mindfulness, though they have different backgrounds, might actually be more similar than different.
What is emotional intelligence?
Daniel Goleman, world-renowned researcher and author in the field, referred to emotional intelligence as the “sin-qua-non of leadership.” More specifically, he described emotional intelligence as your ability to manage and use your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, purposefully.