Happiness EI Roadmap

How to achieve Happiness through Emotional Intelligence? To avoid burnout and improve productivity, mindful planning, correct decision-making, and reaction to events are needed to enjoy work with a purpose!

Why Happiness leads to Quality?

Happiness is a skill to achieve a state of mind — It’s a key aspect of mindfulness for Quality of Life

Using emotional intelligence, we can measure stress and burnout by measuring such traits as stress tolerance, self-actualization, happiness, and optimism.

- Brent Darnell

Emotional Self-Awareness:

The ability to recognize and understand one’s feelings and emotions, differentiate between them, and know what caused them and why.

Emotional self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence and is critical to career success, health, learning, relationship satisfaction and individual performance. These emotional self-awareness exercises will improve your skill in understanding and working with emotions and facilitate your effectiveness at work and in your personal life. Emotional self-awareness you will improve your ability to:

Identify the emotional and intellectual factors that contribute to your decisions
Label your feelings
Discriminate the intensity and range of feelings you experience
Recognize the existence of multiple feelings in a given situation
Identify what triggers feelings
Appreciate the “contagious” nature of feelings
Recognize that emotions can change over time
Shift your emotional energy

Emotional Self-awareness is the first step to Happiness

Emotional Intelligence Roadmap by Brent Darnell

Brent Darnell is the pioneer in bringing emotional intelligence to the construction industry. He began teaching it in 1999 before the AEC industry knew they needed it. In 2012 he was awarded Engineering News Record’s top 25 newsmaker’s award for his record-breaking program that transforms Alpha males into service-focused leaders.

Brent is second-generation in the industry. He grew up walking projects like the Plaza Tower in New Orleans with his Dad. He graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1981 and spent 15 years as a project manager on jobs such as the Brooke Army Medical Center and housing for athletes in the Olympic Village in Atlanta.

The impact of Brent's unique programs spans the globe to 20 countries from the US to Argentina, Sweden, Russia, and China.

He is an adjunct professor at such notable universities as Auburn, Penn State, Northwestern, and Virginia Tech in an effort to insure that young people come into the industry with much needed people skills.

A life-long process

Developing emotional self-awareness is a life-long process. Some people develop it naturally as they mature. But you have the opportunity to develop it on purpose!

Is it really possible to develop emotional self-awareness and improve emotional intelligence?

Yes, the good news is that emotional intelligence can be learned. Your emotional skills develop through experience over your entire lifetime. While this self-study will give you tools to increase your emotional intelligence, the real classroom is your everyday life!
Emotional learning is quite different than cognitive (intellectual) learning. It takes place in a different part of your brain. Cognitive learning primarily accesses the memory centers while emotional learning is literally hard-wired into your nervous system. Developing new emotional skills actually retrains your neural pathways (the system in your body and brain which carries messages around). The more you practice your new emotional self-awareness skills, the stronger those emotional habits become. An old emotional habit (e.g. holding a grudge) atrophies from lack of use when replaced by another emotional habit (e.g. forgiveness). Emotional learning is more like learning to play a musical instrument or learning a language. It takes more time, repetition, application, reflection, follow-up, and coaching.

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Benefits of Self-awareness

Like many people, you probably make decisions without giving a great deal of conscious thought to many of them. For example, did you reflect on your rationale for purchasing your last car? You probably spent time evaluating cost, mileage, comfort, financing, color, and other factors. But, did you actually spend time analyzing why those factors were important? Was it that blue reminded you of your favorite bicycle? Or, that you chose the same car company as your parents? So much feeling goes into every decision you make – and most of the time you aren’t even aware of it. Those feelings provide critical information. That information helps you make decisions. So, by getting better at using emotional information along with other rationale, you will be able to make better choices in your life. People who have developed their emotional self-awareness are more likely to:

make career and job choices, which match their talents and give them satisfaction
create and sustain healthy relationships
be highly regarded as team players
exhibit formal and informal leadership qualities
take appropriate risks and understand the consequences of their actions
maintain their composure and demonstrate resilience
elicit trust from others
enjoy a general sense of well-being
identify their level of stress tolerance and manage their lives to avoid debilitating stress
accurately assess their strengths and weaknesses and know what they need to develop
trust their intuition and use it to be creative
make thoughtful choices and take responsibility for their actions
know their values and live in alignment with them
recognize and respect differences in others
manage their time and resources consistent with their priorities
demonstrate integrity
balance their work and home lives
maintain flexibility in the face of challenges and change

There are several skills involved in being emotionally aware, such as recognizing and identifying feelings, understanding the reasons underlying your emotions, and understanding how emotions can be influenced. These skills allow you to be more in tune with your emotional life and use the skills to be effective in every aspect of your daily life. But, how you use these skills is, to a certain extent, a reflection of your beliefs about the value of emotion.

So what does emotional self-awareness look like anyway?

Recognizing feelings
Identifying and labeling feelings
Identifying the intensity and range of feelings
Recognizing that you can hold multiple feelings at the same time
Identifying what triggers feelings
Appreciating that emotions are contagious
Recognizing that emotions can change over time
Demonstrating how to shift emotions

Read more by purchasing Brent Darnell's book on People-Profit

Burnout Healing Process

Happiness in the workplace starts with Emotional Intelligence!

Gamification and having fun with Serious Work!

Being Serious at Work means being mindful on the task and having emotional intelligence to recognize how to behave and show reaction to situations and event! Many confuse being serious at work with being upset, angry, having a serious face on. This will in turn result in an unfriendly work environment where people are not feeling psychological safety to come to their line management and colleagues for help and support.

Happiness & Wellbeing

Business Agility requires a modern and agile management philosophy that recognizes the importance of employee happiness and well-being. By creating a supportive and empowering work environment, promoting work-life balance, and encouraging open communication and feedback, the WQM mindset provides the harmony needed to improve productivity and employee satisfaction.

The MGT3.0 approach in a QPMO helps to implement the People Domain best practices that place a strong emphasis on continuous improvement, encouraging employees to identify and resolve problems and make improvements to their work processes.

Another key aspect of QualityPMO is the focus on work-life balance. This means providing flexible work arrangements and promoting a healthy work-life balance for employees. This can include offering telecommuting options, flexible schedules, and time off for personal and family needs.

Happiness & Productivity

Companies are constantly looking for ways to boost productivity and raise employee happiness in today's fast-paced and fiercely competitive business environment.

If the approach is not balanced and the employees are pushed to boost productivity with disregard to their quality of life, burnout occurs and eventually the organization will lose its best talents. For employee retention, the investment made to prepare a person to perform effectively within a team, it's crucial for HR departments to encourage other activities for team building.

The goal of WQM in a QPMO is to establish an environment at work where people feel valued and inspired to give their best efforts.

Studies have shown that employees who are pleased with their work are more productive and engaged at work. Employees are more likely to be motivated and invested in their work when they feel content and happy, which results in higher-quality work and effectiveness. Happy workers are more likely to stay with an organization for a longer amount of time, increasing effectiveness as a long-standing team which means decreased costs and fewer disruptions caused by turnover. An organization's business mission and values are more likely to be promoted by happy and satisfied employees, who also serve as positive brand ambassadors, for internal and external stakeholders.

Mindful leaders promote happiness at work by creating a supportive and empowering work environment. This includes giving their team members the freedom to choose their own way of work and empowering them to make decisions that impact their work as a self-organized team.

WQM promotes regular feedback and open communication between team members. This helps to foster a sense of collaboration and mutual respect, which can go a long way toward promoting happiness and job satisfaction.

Employee Burnout

Employee burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress and overwork. It can be characterized by feelings of cynicism, detachment, and a sense of reduced accomplishment, and can lead to decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, and higher turnover rates.

Burnout is often the result of chronic workplace stress, which can be caused by a variety of factors including heavy workloads, long hours, lack of autonomy, unclear job expectations, and a lack of social support or recognition for one's efforts. It can also be exacerbated by personal factors such as financial stress, relationship problems, and health issues.

Some common signs of burnout include chronic fatigue, insomnia, irritability, forgetfulness, and physical symptoms such as headaches and stomach problems. If left unchecked, burnout can lead to more serious physical and mental health problems, including depression and anxiety disorders.

To prevent and address employee burnout, employers can take steps such as promoting work-life balance, offering flexible work arrangements, providing support and recognition for employee achievements, and addressing workplace stressors such as heavy workloads and unclear job expectations. Additionally, employees can take steps to manage their own stress and avoid burnout by setting boundaries, practicing self-care, and seeking help when needed.

Yes, healing from burnout is a process that takes time, effort, and support. The process of healing from burnout can involve several steps, including:

Recognizing and acknowledging burnout: The first step in healing from burnout is recognizing that it exists and acknowledging that you are experiencing it.
Reducing stressors: It is important to identify the sources of stress and take steps to reduce them. This can involve setting boundaries, delegating tasks, or prioritizing self-care.
Seeking support: It can be helpful to seek support from friends, family members, or a mental health professional. This can provide a safe space to discuss your feelings and develop coping strategies.
Practicing self-care: Self-care is an important part of healing from burnout. This can involve activities such as exercise, mindfulness, or engaging in hobbies.
Reevaluating priorities: Healing from burnout can involve reassessing priorities and making changes to ensure that they align with your values and goals.

It is important to remember that healing from burnout is not a linear process and can involve setbacks. However, with the right support and self-care strategies, it is possible to recover and prevent burnout in the future.

Professional Managers are Happy People

Emotional Intelligence for Happiness in “Wellness Quality Management” is a state of mind for the individual and the organization to have integrity and core values to promote “Quality Culture”!

Dr. Emari, PMP

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