Emotional Intelligence & Everyday Leadership
Imagine the following situation. You and your wife are extremely exhausted due to lack of sleep, hungry since you didn’t have much time to grab something to eat, and anxious to catch your flight back to your hometown. You are not in the best physical or psychological state. You finally sit and fasten your seatbelt as the pilot says with a voice that doesn’t make you feel any better; “Welcome aboard”. What would you want to do then? Eat? Sleep? Both?
My wife and I were in such a situation when returning from a trip to Texas. But what happened next quickly changed our mood and even made our day. We experienced a heartwarming gesture. A mother sitting behind us said; “Excuse me, please accept this gift from my son.” She handed us a bag of candy as you can see in this original picture with a note inside that had the following message:
“Good afternoon! My name is Liam and I am 2 years old. This is my first time on an airplane! My parents are not sure what to expect. I’ll try to be on my best behavior, but here is a sweet treat and an apology in advance for any disturbances. Happy traveling!’
Despite traveling excessively, we had never experienced such an encounter. In fact, we have experienced situations of kids yelling, crying, and disturbing us while their parents didn’t do much to mitigate the situation. In this case however, it was as if our exhaustion and hunger suddenly melted away. We smiled, thanked her, and complimented her creativity and generosity.
My wife and I spoke about our encounter with Liam’s mother the entire week, and we reflected on the lessons we learned from her. I thought about the striking association between the mother and what I had learned from Daniel Goleman’s book on Emotional Intelligence. Even though I didn’t know the mother, I can confidently say that she has a heightened sense of sympathy and a high level of soft skills. She exemplified emotional intelligence in practice, not in theory. In an interview with Forbes, Goleman says that “leaders need an inner focus to be aware of their own feelings, values and intuitions, and to manage themselves well. A focus on others allows a leader to read people well, which is key to managing relationships, the art of leading itself. And an outer focus lets a leader understand the larger forces and systems that she must navigate and to determine the best strategy going forward.”
Some other lessons we learned from the mother were:
We have to think about potential risks of what we do. In this case, she projected in advance the possible scenarios of her child crying or screaming and disturbing other passengers.
Second, we have to consider the impact of those risks on people around us. She could have easily disregarded other people’s emotions but instead, she tried to place herself in other people’s shoes.
Third, we have to plan and strategize a way to minimize the negative impact if we can’t control it completely. The mother in this case was intelligent enough to turn such potential risk into an opportunity of doing something positive.
We have to apply leadership practices in our daily lives. From this situation alone, she leveraged self awareness, communication, creativity, sympathy, strategy and many more leadership qualities.
Even though my wife and I don’t have kids yet, we thought about traveling with our child in the future inshaAllah. We thought of incorporating the same idea but changing the content of the gift and the message. Here is what we came up with:
“Hi! My name is Aladdin and I am 3 years old. I will try my best to be less fussy than I usually am. It’s the first time my parents take me on a plane ride with them so I’ll try to cut them some slack. Please bare with us. Also, enjoy some treats on me. I hope this will be as smooth as my magic carpet ride. May the odds be in our favor.”
So if you are traveling with your children this summer, consider other passengers on board. If you are traveling alone, then consider parents and the challenges they go through while traveling with their children. In addition, Keep in mind that we also need to apply these skills of everyday leadership and emotional intelligence in other scenarios as well, not just while traveling. It starts by looking at the world through other people’s eyes.
Best regards,
Dr. Mohammed Almathil