My emotional intelligence strengths are control of my own emotions, managing myself, and relationship management. While I recognized these as strengths of mine while writing the LDP, I have still given them attention throughout the term, as they were major components of successful completion of the group project.

I see the ability to control your emotions as a direct result of patience. Delaying judgment until you have time to rationally think about the problem or person allows you to make a decision in a cool, calm, calculated manner. Whenever I found myself getting angry during a group meeting, I chose one of two routes. Either I brought it up immediately (such as side conversations during group projects) or let it go once or twice to see if the problem would rectify itself (and it often did). I employed these two routes at least weekly, particularly keeping the group on track during meetings.

Controlling your emotions is an integral part of working successfully in a group. If you are constantly losing your temper, your group will begin to see you as the problem, even if you are bringing up valid points. The only way to be heard in a group is by a standard of mutual respect, which means you must show respect and understanding to your peers if you wish for them to treat you the same. By controlling my emotional inclinations and hearing all points of view before casting judgment, I am better able to see the ‘big picture’, including the weak spots in my own line of thinking.

I am excellent at managing myself, always have been. As a small business owner, there is nobody else to manage me; if I don’t take responsibility for something getting accomplished, it just won’t get done. Once I came to terms with that, I found self-management to be easy and fun. I get to enjoy my own successes, but also must take sole responsibility for my failures.

This term I took personal responsibility for the majority of writing, and all editing. I know it to be one of my strengths, and nobody else in my group felt that way, so it was pretty obvious that would be one of my main roles. This took a huge amount of self control for me, as I generally like to write under time pressure. I recognized that this habit of mine would never work for business writing, and was unfair to my fellow group members, so I made a conscious effort to have these obligations completed at least a couple days in advance.

Managing relationships was made much easier by the fact that my team was composed of bright, competent, hardworking individuals. We were all friends by the end of the project, but those friendships never got in the way of our work, something I heard was a problem in other groups.

Our group had a very open dialogue with one another, which I personally fostered every chance I could. When two teammates and I discussed the lack of effort and commitment of the other two during a roughly two week period, we decided that I would start bringing it up whenever it happened during group meetings, and that they would back me up. This worked wonders; those two almost immediately increasased their input and became harder working, less distracted, and just overall better teammates. When the four of us discussed Link overdoing certain aspects of the project and not having faith in us to complete our tasks, I reached out to him during midterm peer reviews, and again almost immediately noted a change in him. In both cases, I simply had to reach out and let them know why what they were doing wasn’t working for me or the group, and they responded in the best way possible.

My emotional intelligence weakness is social awareness, particularly empathizing with people. I find that easy to do when we have shared experiences, but difficult when I have no point of reference to relate to them. The fraternity issue in our group was deeper and broader than I could ever have imagined. I was woefully ignorant of the time commitment it took and ewhat a major role it played in pledges lives. I found it almost impossible to relate to how they could prioritize a dinner over important schoolwork.

The solution was to simply ask questions. Through my dialogue with them, I learned that they genuinely considered their fellow pledges ‘brothers’, and thus to skip a dinner was the equivalent of skipping a family dinner, something I would never ask or expect a fellow group member to do. Their fraternity was their home, their social circle, their friends, and their family. I began to empathize with them, see how if I had pledged my freshman year I would certainly have had the same attitude. After this I found it easy to work around their schedules, or if that wasn’t possible, to simply meet without them and have faith that they would do their part. I was rarely disappointed.

I engage in self reflection daily. It isn’t written or spoken, it is something I do during down time, when I’m walking to class or drinking my coffee in the morning. It was a necessary component for our group project. I had to ask myself before and after every class and group meeting ‘am I upholding my end of the bargain? Am I contributing what is expected of me to this group?’. I usually answered myself that yes, I was, but it always makes me think of other things I could be doing to make the situation better.

I asked for feedback from my group about once a week. Whenever we would ‘divide and conquer’ a stack of work, I would always ask if mine was acceptable and in line with what they expected. Except in a few cases, the answer was always an enthusiastic ‘yes’, which felt good to me and made me want to ask for an receive feedback more often.

My group’s feedback was really helpful to me, particularly the required midterm one. It allowed me to really see my weaknesses through other eyes, and gave me hope because they were fairly minor and I had a month to correct them. One thing that came up on this evaluation that I’m proud I addressed was tardiness. Three of the four members said I had addressed it properly in my final peer evaluation and graded me 98+, and the fourth gave me an 85 and wrote one sentence about not being on time, not exactly great feedback. I was the only member to never miss a meeting and if I was late I always stayed past when people started to leave.