Carrie Montgomery
Emotional intelligence is a critical skill that business owners need to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and manage emotions, both your own and those of others. It’s an important tool that can help you better understand your customers and employees and make smarter decisions based on emotional cues.
Meet Carrie Montgomery, Brand Mentor, Creative Director and Style Architect, and founder of the Somatic Styling Method and the Radiant Branding Method, who teaches business owners how to use their emotional intelligence to fine-tune their their nerve and express their brand more skillfully. She helps her clients expand their capacity and vision and reach new opportunities.
Montgomery believes that emotional intelligence is vital to entrepreneurs and the success of their businesses as it helps you make business decisions with confidence. She uses a simple and memorable process to take action: Recognize, Adjust and Re-approach to teach her clients how to recognize others and navigate situations.
The benefits of emotional intelligence in business
Having emotional intelligence as a business owner has many benefits. First of all, it allows you to better understand the needs of your customers. With emotional intelligence, you can more accurately decipher customer behavior and tailor your offers accordingly. This leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction and more sales and revenue. Emotional intelligence makes it easier for you to motivate your employees by understanding their individual needs and responding to them appropriately. Being emotionally intelligent can lead to better decision making as you can consider the impact of emotions in any situation before taking action.
Developing your emotional intelligence
The good news is that anyone can develop emotional intelligence with practice and dedication. Start by becoming aware of your emotions. Try writing down how you feel during different situations or talking them through with a friend or therapist, and then reflect on how those feelings affect your actions or words. Once you have a good handle on yourself, start paying attention to the emotions of others around you. Listen carefully when they speak, observe their facial expressions, notice their body language and ask questions or listen non-judgmentally to understand what they are feeling. Then use this knowledge when interacting with them, communicating in a way that reflects their feelings toward them, while also offering solutions that address their needs in the moment.
Without emotional intelligence you are leaving money on the table
When making decisions in life, emotional intelligence is just as important a factor to consider as IQ. Simply put, people with strong emotional intelligence understand and manage emotions in themselves and those around them better than those with low emotional intelligence.
This ability to recognize, manage and even profit from the thoughts and feelings of others can be useful when it comes to business negotiations or any other endeavor involving people. Lack of emotional understanding can cost businesses tremendous amounts of money. Success is possible by adequately understanding the feelings and motivations of those with whom you are trying to interact.
The bottom line is that having emotional intelligence is essential for business owners who want to succeed in today’s competitive market. By being aware of your own and others’ emotions and using this information wisely when making decisions, you will better meet customer needs and foster collaboration among team members. With dedication and practice, anyone can develop their emotional intelligence skills over time, so take the first steps today toward incorporating emotional intelligence into your business.
