Emotional Intelligence: For the Leader in Us All

104 AJCC AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CRITICAL CARE, March 2016, Volume 25, No. 2 www.ajcconline.org A ll of us in critical care know that our chosen profession can be quite stressful. As the editors in chief of the American Journal of Critical Care, we therefore felt it was important to offer readers some helpful coping mechanisms for those inevitable stressful situations that crop up. We have all had days filled with emotional highs and lows, whether owing to our patients, our colleagues, our supervisors, or all 3. It’s not unusual to feel as though you are losing emotional control in some of these situations, and we subsequently feel we could have done better or reacted differently. The idea of taking a more structured approach to being aware of and modifying our emotions and reactions to them is known as emotional intelligence (EI). Originally described by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in the early 1990s,1 EI was further elaborated by Daniel Goleman in his book Working With Emotional Intelligence in 1998.2 In this editorial we hope to share with all members of the multidisciplinary team exactly what EI entails, and how a greater understanding of the concept can help us function at our highest potential. One of the most important and encouraging things to note here is that one’s skills in EI can improve through training, conscious effort, discipline, motivation, and repetition. Models of Emotional Intelligence Multiple models of emotional intelligence have been suggested, and all have some degree of validity.3-7 The one by Goleman, known as the “mixed” model, has 5 major components: self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. Self-awareness is simply the process of being aware of our emotional response to a situation. It seems counterintuitive at first, but the simple act of stating, for example, “this situation is making me upset, and I can feel my heart beating quickly,” can be enough to start down the road toward self-improvement. Self-regulation is the process by which we consciously turn an instinctive emotional response into some sort of lesser response or no response at all. Social skill is just what the words imply: conscious focused energy and efforts on managing relationships. Empathy is making a deliberate effort to take other people’s emotions into account. Finally, motivation is the ability to propel ourselves toward a specific goal. For the purposes of this editorial, we feel that the first 4 components (self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, and empathy) are the most important and relevant for practicing critical care clinicians.