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The Physiology of Emotional Intelligence: Negativity and Stress
Name
OBLD 641 Resonant Leadership: Leading Change
School
Professor
Date
Signs of Discomfort, Unease, and Negativity in My Personal and Professional Life
A typical college student’s life has several challenges, especially during attachment. They face different signs of discomfort, restlessness and ease, and negativity. These negative stressors arise from both personal and professional aspects of their life. Personal stressors include challenges managing academic workload, financial pressures, feelings of doubt and inadequacy, and maintaining relationships with friends and family. As a student, I always do my best to start and manage my academic work in a timely, well-organized manner, which is typical for most other students, I assume. One of the issues I face includes managing group work, personal projects, and extracurricular activities such as spending time with family and maintaining my physical health and wellness.
My Personal Stressors
I am a very performance-oriented student, and any academic failure is an issue I take very seriously. Thus, whenever I cannot manage my academic workload, I feel stressed, affecting other parts of my life, such as my relationship with friends and family. While I’m taking classes, I often fail to spend enough time with friends and family while maintaining decent performance and enjoying myself.
These stressors make it difficult, as I am forced to sacrifice a lot of my time to try and balance everything. My relationship with some family members and friends has deteriorated of late, which has negatively impacted my psychological health. The main reason is because I feel lonely whenever I see friends and family members spend time together without me (Chaturvedi et al., 2021).
Other stressors that I face in my personal life include concerns about finances due to my socio-economic background and the future aspirations I have. While my wife and I are financially stable at the moment, I am currently paying a significant amount of my tuition fees from our savings account as to avoid tapping into my G.I. Bill benefit. This is so I can pass along the full benefit to my daughter once I retire from the military. Throughout my childhood, my family always had to work extremely hard to survive, and I remember being stressed about financial stability from a very young age. I do not want my daughter to have to worry about such things as a child, so the financial burden of continuing my academic career has weighed on me as of late. This stress, combined with the feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, has always weighed down on me and impacted my academic performance to some extent.
My Professional Stressors
I also phase unease and stress from my professional life. One of the main professional stressors I faced entails the application of theoretical knowledge in my field to real-world solutions. Other challenges include managing interpersonal relationships with colleagues and balancing the ever-growing demand and regularly changing dynamics of our geo-political environment.
Brain Reaction
As put forward by Yang et al. (2020), the brain’s reaction to negativity positively plays a vital role in an individual’s emotions, cognitive functions, and overall well-being, which I experience. These negative stressors affected my mood, and attitude while completing course work and during my performance at the workplace. According to Simic et al. (2021), when an individual experiences negativity, such as anxiety, stress, or fear, the amygdala, which is the brain’s area mainly responsible for processing emotions, is activated. This action triggers the release of hormones such as cortisol, which negatively impacts an individual’s ability to manage their emotions, make the right decisions, and also cognitive abilities.
The major challenge I face in both my personal life and professional life entails being an effective leader in all aspects of my life. I have managed to lead several group projects throughout my graduate program thus far, all while maintaining my position as a Senior Enlisted Leader of a geographically separated field training detachment. These stressors, combined with my role as a leader, have exacerbated the negativity in my mind, prompting the need to develop effective personal strategies to transform these concerns into positive outcomes (Law & Clow, 2020).
Strategies to deal with Stress.
Identification of the Stressors
The first step to dealing effectively with life stressors, especially in the leadership context, entails identifying them, as shown above. The next step entails the wake-up call I experienced when I noticed these stressors were impacting my life. To become an effective leader in my personal and professional life, I had to learn certain skills, and identify an effective coping mechanism, to avoid previous negative experiences. One of the skills I learned entails emotional intelligence, which is vital to becoming a successful leader and professional in any field.
Skills Required:
Emotional Intelligence
According to Boyatzis (2006), emotional intelligence is related to the differentiated neural circuit and endocrine systems. He added that it entails a set of alternate behavioral manifestations and is also related to outcomes in occupation and personal life that add value to the understanding of human behavior and personality. While doing competency research, especially for leaders in the financial sector, one of the factors identified entails emotional intelligence.
Brain Response
The mirror neuron system fosters imitation and mimicry, which further explains the importance of maintaining healthy relationships with followers as a leader. The mirror neuron system enables individuals to discern the context of an observed action, the action, and what another individual intended (Boyatzis & McKee, 2011). It helps individual sense the intention of another individual’s expressions or actions and links the motor and sensory representation of them.
Impact of Emotional Intelligence
I learned that to improve my role as a leader in my personal and professional life, I had to be self-motivated, self-regulated, and demonstrate the ability to manage people’s emotions and my emotions effectively. In most of my group discussion scenarios, especially as a leader, I would argue with group members, and react negatively, which affected our performance. Thus, emotional intelligence is among the skills I sought to learn to deal with stressors in my personal and professional life.
Mindfulness
Another technique I have learned to effectively manage my stressors and ensure that I am useful in any role in my life entails mindfulness. This strategy entails paying attention to one’s mind, body, heart and spirit. I also noticed that it was easier to adopt this technique because one of the defensive routines that I have always used entails avoidance. Whenever I experienced any challenges while in school or at work, I would self-isolate, analyze the situation, and find my own solution. Thus, I decided to turn this into mindfulness, where, instead of self-isolation and overthinking, I practice mindfulness to manage my stressors and maintain positive relationships with anyone I interact with (Urrila, 2022).
Impacts of Mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness is one of the most effective strategies I have adopted to cope with stressful situations in my life. Being mindful has enabled me to cope with negative emotions and also deal with pressure in my personal and professional life. I can now manage my academic workload and relationship with friends and family better (Urrila, 2022). I can also lead others to attain the desired goals without undergoing as many challenges as I used before adopting these strategies.
References
Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2011). Neuroscience and leadership: The promise of insights. Ivey Business Journal, 75(1), 1-3.
Boyatzis, R. E. (2006). Using tipping points of emotional intelligence and cognitive competencies to predict financial performance of leaders. Psicothema, 124-131.
Chaturvedi, K., Vishwakarma, D. K., & Singh, N. (2021). COVID-19 and its impact on education, social life and mental health of students: A survey. Children and youth services review, 121, 105866.
Law, R., & Clow, A. (2020). Stress, the cortisol awakening response and cognitive function. International review of neurobiology, 150, 187-217.
Šimić, G., Tkalčić, M., Vukić, V., Mulc, D., Španić, E., Šagud, M., … & R. Hof, P. (2021). Understanding emotions: Origins and roles of the amygdala. Biomolecules, 11(6), 823.
Urrila, L. I. (2022). From personal wellbeing to relationships: A systematic review on the impact of mindfulness interventions and practices on leaders. Human Resource Management Review, 32(3), 100837.
Yang, J., Mao, Y., Niu, Y., Wei, D., Wang, X., & Qiu, J. (2020). Individual differences in neuroticism personality trait in emotion regulation. Journal of Affective Disorders, 265, 468-474.
