Emotional intelligence is a skill that every leader needs to have in order for them to be successful. It is something that I was struggling with before this class and one of my biggest goals was to improve it. I am actually very good at controlling other people’s emotion by asking questions about their problems and trying to be comprehending. However, when I have a bad day, I tend not to accept what other people say and I tend to be rude with them. I get easily frustrated on these days and it is not necessarily fun to be around me. One of my goals was to avoid this frustration and I decided that I would always listen to my teammates. As an athlete, I always try to get better at everything, so I decided to sort of evaluate myself after every group meeting I had with the team and also ask for feedbacks weekly. The feedbacks I got were mostly positive and I am very happy that at the end of the term one of my teammates’ final evaluation was: “Daniel is a really great guy who always suggested new and interesting ideas.”
I think I managed to achieve my goals partly because I accepted all the feedbacks I got from my teammates positive, or negative. I am very critical to myself, but I do not like when other people say negative things about me because I have the feeling that they judge me. However, during these ten weeks I got a few negative feedbacks that I thought were actually very true about me and I decided that I would change. During week 4 one of my teammates became uncertain about the topic of our project and she tried to change it right before our first presentation. I volunteered for the presentation and I had been working on my speech for a few days, so I got frustrated that she wanted to change the whole topic at the very last minute. Instead of being rude to her, I explained to her why I thought that we were on the right track and why our topic was strong enough. She finally agreed with me and we stuck to the topic that turned out to be pretty good. I definitely grew during this class; I did not get frustrated very often and by the end of the term I did not get one negative feedback about my emotional intelligence, which I consider to be a great first step to become a successful leader. However, I know that this was only the first step and I have to keep getting better at this. I will do that by reminding myself how good it feels to get positive feedbacks from others and that this is the only way to be successful on a team.