4 Must-Learn EQ Strategies For The AI Era

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The World Economic Forum estimates that 44% of workers’ core skills will change by 2027. Asked what specific skills will be the most important between now and then, organizations overwhelmingly named people skills. In fact, four of the top five skills organizations named are all a matter of emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness and motivation: A self-aware workforce is a motivated

2. Creativity: Creative thinkers can go “beyond the algorithm” to do work that’s truly original.

3. Leadership Skills and Social Influence: In times of uncertainty, it’s especially important to be able to engage, motivate, and influence your team.

4. Resilience: Resilience skills can help you navigate change, stay healthy, and find opportunity in tough circumstances.

We’ll call the above four skills the four core AI Era skills. And with those skills in mind, let’s map them out to each of the four core EQ skills:

What Is Emotional Intelligence (EQ)?

I like to break emotional intelligence down into two different definitions:

1. Mid Complexity: EQ is RUM, which stands for recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions toward desired outcomes for yourself and in your interactions with others.

2. Full four-box definition: In order to RUM your emotions, you need four core skills:

Self-Awareness: Your ability to recognize and understand your emotions and tendencies. Self-awareness requires you to know what makes you tick, what motivates you, your strengths and weaknesses, and your values and mission.

Self-Management: Your ability to work with your emotions in order to have the best possible outcome. For example, you recognize that you’re overwhelmed (self-awareness), so you take a deep breath and write down everything that feels overwhelming. That second piece is self-management.

Social Awareness: Your ability to recognize and understand the emotions of others. This is about picking up on what other people are really saying and why. It gets into body language, facial expressions, and reading the mood in the room. It also gets into empathy.

Relationship Management: Your ability to use the previous three skills to build and maintain strong relationships. This gets into conflict resolution, having effective critical conversations, giving feedback, and having good one-on-one meetings.

Mapping These Four Core AI Era Skills to the Four Core EQ Skills

Now, let’s run through the connection between EQ and each AI Era skill. Then, let’s run through a specific strategy you can practice to simultaneously improve your EQ and future-proof yourself for the AI Era.

Self-Awareness & Motivation → Self-Awareness → Pinpoint Your Values

Take a minute to think about the most motivated people you know. Now think about why that person is so motivated? Typically, people’s answers have something to do with a deep intrinsic motivator: Giving my family the opportunities I never had. Helping others. Or a personal favorite. the musician Bob Dylan, who believed from a young age that he was born to make music for the world and that he’d have to sacrifice a lot to do so. In other words, our values are the underbelly of our motivation. Without values, motivation can crumble quickly.

EQ Strategy: Consider how your values influence your decisions.

1. Write down your top 3-5 values. Whatever comes to mind. Family, religion, friends, nature, helping others.

2. Now, think about a big decision you recently made. Things like buying a house or a car, adopting two bonded border collie brothers, changing jobs, getting married, having kids.

3. How did (or didn’t) your values influence your decision? If they didn’t, is that because a value you didn’t write down informed your decision? If so, add that value to your notes. If not, you might have a bit of misalignment.

Creativity → Self-Management → Use an Emotion Wheel to Find Flow

Flow state, a state of total immersion in the task at hand, has been shown to:

• 5x your productivity

• release a boatload of feel-good hormones (norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, anadamide, and serotonin).

• put your creativity on hyperdrive. You take and process more information, faster. Your ability to recognize patterns shoots up.

EQ Strategy: Use an emotion wheel to find your flow.

Next time you’re struggling to get started, pull up the emotion wheel. Start in the middle and work your way out to find the most specific word that fits how you currently feel. Once you’ve chosen the word it becomes much easier to adjust your approach to match it. For example, if you’re overwhelmed or anxious, you can carve out a bite-size chunk. Or if you’re bored, you might try to find a way to complexify your task, like automating it, templatizing it, or doing it on a timer. By enhancing your focus, you’ll position yourself to enter a state of flow and boost your creativity.

Leadership and Social Influence → Social Awareness → Re-Evaluate the Stories You Tell Yourself about Others

Good leadership encompasses so much: you have to build trust, foster psychological safety, establish strong relationships, do career development, hone your coaching skills. The list goes on. But foundational to all of these things is a leader’s social awareness.

Without social awareness, you can’t build strong relationships, trust, or psychological safety. How can you make someone feel safe if you don’t understand how you make them feel?

EQ Strategy: Break down the stories you tell yourself about others.

1. Think about a memorable interaction you had with someone this week. What story did you tell yourself about that person?

2. How many behaviors can you connect to that story? Name specific examples.

3. How many behaviors can you think of that tell a different story? The opposite story? Name specific examples.

4. Assuming your story was inaccurate, why might you be telling yourself that story?

Resilience → Relationship Management → Make a Plan to Ask for Help

Take a second and think about the word resilience. What words come to mind? What behaviors do you envision? What scene do you picture?

If you’re like me, I think of words like grit, perseverance, pain tolerance, endurance, and sweat equity. And when it comes to behaviors or a scene, I pictured something like the movie Rocky, where an underdog is staying up late to punch giant hunks of cow meat in a warehouse. Or the business founder who sleeps just five hours every night, passing out on their desk in exhaustion. Or the endurance athlete who runs 100 miles in the mountains.

For all of these reasons, I wanted to go a different direction for our resilience strategy, and make it about leaning on help from others. It sounds so simple, but we almost never think of leaning on others for help as a resilience strategy.

EQ Strategy: Create a plan to ask for help.

1. Write out one skill or project you want to improve at.

2. Write down 1-3 people who are skilled at it or could offer a unique perspective.

3. Make a plan to ask them for help (slot out 15-30 minutes per ask).

Note that if you’re like me, asking for help might make you feel a bit anxious, like an imposition. Well I want to leave you with a comforting piece of research which shows that we tend to like people who ask us for favors more, not less. So by asking for help, you’ll not only build your resilience, but you’ll also do work to build your relationship.

Putting These Strategies to Practice

The beauty of EQ is how seamlessly it connects to a number of other critical skills. Practice the four strategies above and you’ll simultaneously improve your EQ and future-proof yourself for the AI Era.

P.S. Kevin Kruse and I just gave a talk on this exact topic at ATD. If you’d like, I’d be happy to share our slide deck. Just hit reply!