Emotional Competence: The Fountain of personal, professional and private Success

By Dagmar Rudel-Steinbauer and Gerlinde Dörfel

'What is the use to reach the moon if we cannot overcome the chasm that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important expedition and without it, all others are useless.' (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer and pilot (1900–1944)
To recognize emotions and to keep a respectful manner with them is a skill of every single human, which should not be underestimated. Emotional competence plays an important - maybe even the most significant – role on the way to personal development, like Antoine de Saint-Exupery already put it to the point.
Phsychotherapists talk about humans to be threatened by alienation from themselves due to a lack of self-perception and an overload of external stimuli. The inner world, the world of emotions and needs, runs the risk of being neglected. Futurologists think that values like empathy and emotions will be more requested than ever henceforward. Psychologists realize that the availability of emotional competence is the key which unlocks the door on the way to all other social competences.
In this book you will learn about the importance of emotional competence for your personal, professional and private success. It is the ideal manual for everybody who is ready to start out for one's own fountain of success. You get answers to following questions:
– What is emotional competence exactly?
– How can emotional competence can promote personal, professional and private success?
– Which possibilities and methods exist to promote and develop emotional competence for oneself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: epubli
• Release date: Jul 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9783745002287

Book preview

1. Instead of an Introduction

You don´t want to read a long introduction but want to know what this book is all about? You will learn how emotional competence can help you succeed in your personal, business and private life.

You will find the answers to the following questions:

What exactly is emotional competence?

How can emotional competence benefit your personal, business and private life?

What possibilities and methods are there to encourage and develop your own emotional competence?

2 Thoughts that led me to write this Book

What is the use to reach the moon if we cannot overcome the chasm that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important expedition and without it, all others are useless.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer and pilot (1900–1944)

A strong trend for new key qualifications (such as the capability for teamwork, cooperation and motivation) has been noticeable in the last few years, which are associated with social or emotional competence.

According to many studies and reports, it is increasingly important to bring a certain portion of these qualities such as emotional competence into our professional as well as private lives.

The psychotherapists say that people are threatened with self-alienation through their lack of self-perception and the overload of external stimuli; and so our innermost, emotions and needs will be neglected.

Futurologists are predicting that values such as empathy and emotions will be in great demand.

Psychologists know that the key to all social competence is in the presence of emotional competence.

At the same time, the educational ideals of our western culture stress the importance of intelligence, logic and rational thinking. Grades, Pisa tests, exams and minimum duration of studies are the focus of the educational discussions.

Where are, in fact, the sensitization and encouragement of emotional competence in our culture, which should be supported in all areas? It has little room in our school system, as well as serious support for emotional competence in areas of adult education - mostly in professional life -, which is of very little value at this time. It is present only in a few curriculum or master courses just as it is not present in leadership training programs.

A further consideration, which led me to this subject and motivated me to write this book, was my many years in adult education, human resources development, consultation and coaching.

I realized - repeatedly - that the participants had the right tools for good communication or recognized the solutions to their conflicts. However, they lacked deeper competences such as the needed amount of empathy or sensitivity to solve the misunderstanding or conflicts in the team, to see the other person´s point of view or at least to try to understand him or her.

Social education has also strongly influenced and inspired me. The subject of how to strengthen our sensibility towards others has often been brought up in seminars that I have held as a trainer. Yet, it is my observation that especially the area of social education needs an awareness of one´s own feelings and emotions. For the percentage of burn-outs in these jobs are growing (but not only here) as the people involved are so devoted that they often forget to look after themselves. The awareness of one´s own psychological well-being is often forgotten.

Likewise, I had the impression that conflicts took place because of the lack of ability for maintaining social interaction, as well as not knowing one´s breaking point and the inability to regulate and motivate oneself.

These four areas are what emotional competence is all about:

To have vigilance for myself and my emotions

To have vigilance towards others

To have vigilance for relationships and common interaction

Ability to regulate one´s own emotions and motivation to act accordingly

The ability to recognize emotions and to deal with them accordingly is not to be underestimated. In this way, emotional competence plays a very important role, if not the most important role – as expressed by Saint Exupéry in the introduction.

There are many very good books about emotional competence. But I found that they lacked ideas how to increase one´s own emotional competence. In this book, I also want to give guidelines and suggestions that can support the promotion of emotional competences. I developed these guidelines from my personal experiences in coaching, training and adult education courses. Clearly, they can only be suggestions. How intensively you will follow them is your own decision. Furthermore, the application is dependent on your own experience and what focus you want to place on developing your own fountain of success.

I would be happy to hear from you if you have questions, suggestions or thoughts which you want to share with me:

E-mail address: [e-mail]

3 The Cooperation of Emotion,

Mind and Body

Emotion is the living mother of the entire spirit.

Friedrich Theodor von Vischer, German philosopher (1807–1887)

To understand emotional competence and thus to understand how emotions affects our lives, we need to think about how we function as human beings. Actually, it is quite simple:

We think, feel and act automatically, without having to think too much about how the process takes place. We have control of a wonderful network of emotions, understanding and body in which thoughts are linked with emotions, emotions link themselves to behavior and our behavior links itself to bodily activity or functions.

The human emotional center is not in the stomach, as many had believed, but in the brain, exactly in the emotional center of the brain, called the gyrus cinguli, amygdala and insula1. This emotional center is directly connected to the pre-frontal brain (center of intelligence/rational thinking).

Brain research has already given us the insight that our emotional center is activated when we make an analytical- rational or cognitive decision.

The emotional center and the cerebral cortex memorize occurrences independently but also function in parallel.

This can be seen in a simple example: should the eye register information e.g. sees a snake, this information will be processed first of all by the eye and then will be forwarded in a switching reaction through the thalamus to the emotional center as well as to the visual cortex. Both will compare this information with an earlier experience and then cause a reaction. These reactions are different from person to person. Therefore, these reactions could be one of the following:

Rational reaction: run away.

Emotional reaction: the feeling of fear arises.

As we see in this simple example, the interaction of the rational and emotional can actually be used in every different situation. Thus, human activity cannot be reduced to simple logic-analytical competences. In fact, the emotions react faster than the logic, more precisely: emotional processes operate faster, thinking processes operate more