9 Habits Of Highly Emotionally Intelligent People

 
When emotional intelligence first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success—IQ. Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

How much of an impact does emotional intelligence (EQ) have on your professional success? The short answer is: a lot! It’s a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a tremendous result. Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we’ve found that 90% of top performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim.

Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.
• Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior, and motives in order to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.
• Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Despite the significance of emotional intelligence, its intangible nature makes it very difficult to know which behaviors you should emulate. So I’ve analyzed the data from the million-plus people TalentSmart has tested in order to identify the habits that set high-EQ people apart.

Frugal Habits of 8 Extremely Wealthy People

Read the full text of Aisha Buhari's interview with BBC Hausa

Below is the full text from Aisha Buhari's controversial interview with BBC Hausa Service. 

BBC Hausa: It has been One and a half years since President Muhammadu Buhari came into power, a lot of people are expressing their unhappiness over the way few acquaintance of the President have hijacked power while neglecting people that work for his success. Like we have promised, here is how the interview with Aisha Buhari and Naziru Maka’ilu from Abuja goes. 

BBC Hausa: People have goodwill towards President Muhammadu Buhari, especially looking at the things he did before, but since coming into power things have not been working the way they should, what do you thing is the cause?

Aisha Buhari:  I am not a government official, but in my opinion as a woman, a mother, what I think is it is well known that the first 4 years are not going to be easy. Firstly, it was people that brought the government into power. More than half of those people are not appointed into the government. Some people that are not politicians, not professionals were brought into the government. They don’t even know what we said we want and what we don’t during the campaign.  They even come out and say to people we are not politicians, but they are occupying the offices meant for politicians. Some have parted with their wives, some lost their children lost, some women too have parted with their husbands because of politics, a lot happened during the time. The way things are going I too I am not happy. We are just starting, we have not finished. Some people that worked for the government have been appointed. But those heading government agencies you can find one fighting his state governor, they contested together during election one in APC while in PDP.
 

The story of Lekan Babalola, Nigeria’s 1st Grammy Award winner

 
When most Nigerians think of the Grammy Awards, we think of Femi Kuti‘s four nominations and King Sunny Ade‘s two. Sometimes we go as far as claiming the four won by Sade Adu and Seal respectively as ours.

But we do have a bonafide winner, a Nigerian who has won the Grammy Award not once, but twice. His name is Lekan Babalola, a jazz musician and percussionist.
His first Grammy came in 2006 for his work on the album In the heart of the moon by legendary Malian guitarist, Ali Farka Toure. And Babalola got his second Grammy Award in 2009 for being on Cassandra Wilson‘s album Loverly.
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria as a choirmaster’s son, he started his foray into music by playing cowbells and drums in the church. By the age of six, he formed a ragtag band with his peers. ‘All we were playing were tins and plastic – and I would be imitating my father. That was my first band and I paid my fellow musicians- my friends- with sweets that I bought with the money my mother gave me,’ he said in a documentary.
Even though music came to him easily and he quickly developed a knack for leading a band, he had a different dream- he wanted to be a pilot so at the age of 20, he got a scholarship to study automobile engineering at Chelsea College of Automobile and Aeronautical Engineering, London. But like his idol Fela Kuti had done some twenty years before, he soon found that his calling was not aviation but music.

How To Discover Your Individual Communication Style

 
We all have our own communication style, and most of us have strength in more than one area.
Knowing how your strengths—and challenges—stack up gives you insight and an awareness to guide you in having more successful conversations.
When those who work together understand their own and each others' strengths, they bring out the best in each other and take more risks, respecting individual differences and developing a stronger team where innovation and productivity flourish.
There is a deep connection between learning styles and communication styles; use this inventory to gain insight into the processing strengths that drive your own personal communication style:

1. Interpersonal

Your preferred learning style is interpersonal if you agree with the following:

• It is important for me to get my thoughts and feelings out in the open.
• Others seek me out for counsel or advice.
• I am intrigued by emotional dynamics in interpersonal relationships.

A coworker communicating with you might ask you, "What do you know about our customer in terms of what really matters to them?"
If you are interpersonally driven, then you are tuned into human relationships. You intuitively understand the feelings, motivations, and goals of others. Your understanding of the customer is rooted in the emotional connections you develop.

Listen, Speak & be Heard

 
Communication is both an art and a science. It often involves acts of speaking and listening, reading and writing, but it also goes beyond these and incorporates the transmission of non-verbal language, sign language, codes transmitted electronically (e.g., Morse code), and physically (touch; hormones; muscles, tendons, nerves), and messages communicated through music, and by other means.
Although you communicate simply by being in the world, developing good verbal and body language skills involves learning and consciously using your skills to improve.
The act of communicating verbally serves to convey how we feel and how we think to others. It is also the basis of how we relate with others, using language as its medium. Increasing knowledge and awareness of some of the components involved in effective communication can serve to improve how we use those components personally.
To explain all the features required of good communicators, you need to delve into the nature of verbal communication in its various modes. Basic questions are: How can you put yourself on a path that would make you into a better communicator? How can you develop skills to overcome some fears or limitations?

Effective communication may be said to involve the transfer of values, beliefs and thoughts from one person to another.

• To transfer a spoken message, it is obvious that speakers and listeners are involved, with timing used for speedy transmission. Speakers use verbal and body language to convey messages, looking towards listeners. Listeners respond by glancing towards speakers, with words and movements and attention to timing and turn-taking.
• What can you do to become a more effective speaker? Look around and observe some good exchanges between people and check out their body language. It's good to start with body language, because it is powerful, and often the beginning of good exchanges.
• It may be useful to know more about what your attitudes are regarding communicating and your communication skills. To find out more about this Click here

UPDATED: 21 Missing Chibok Girls Released - Presidency

Twenty-one of the more than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped from a school in Chibok by Boko Haram fighters in 2014 have been released. This is according to Shehu Garba.

The release followed negotiations between Nigeria's government and Boko Haram brokered by Red Cross and Swiss government.

It is confirmed that 21 of the missing Chibok Girls have been released and are in the custody of the Department of State Services, DSS.
"It is confirmed that 21 of the missing Chibok girls have been released and are in the custody of the department of state services," presidential spokesman Garba Shehu said in a statement.

"The release of the girls ... is an outcome of negotiations between the administration and the Boko Haram brokered by the International Red Cross and the Swiss government," Shehu said.