Thanks to new inventions and discoveries, the speed of civilization development grows unstoppably. As a result, skills required for a successful career in the year 2020 are likely to be completely different than those were in 2015. Employers will require mind flexibility and emotional intelligence, and the importance of a critical thinking ability will become much higher. Why shouldn’t you start mastering these skills in advance?
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence, or EI, it is the ability of a person to understand and to control his or her own emotions. Why to do that? In order not to let emotions control you. Being an emotional person saying all you feel is good, but you still have to keep up to some limits.
Additionally, a high emotional intelligence lets you understand not only your emotions, but those of other people. So, you feel it easier to communicate with them and to find compromises. There are minimum conflicts in such situations. If you have a high EQ, it is much simpler to you to proceed in your career.
Emotional intelligence can be conditionally divided into 5 components:
- self-understanding (being conscious about your emotions, self-respect, self-fulfillment);
- communicative potential (understanding of relationships with people, empathy);
- adaptive skills (abilities to overcome difficulties);
- self-control (stress resistance);
- optimism (you actually are to be an optimist).
How to Develop Emotional Intelligence
Step 1. Know and estimate your own emotions. Ask yourself about your feelings from time to time. Start from the simplest feelings: joy, fear, anger, sadness. Then, expand the list: envy, despair, love, interest.
Step 2. Determine the source of emotions. What factor makes you feel joy or sadness? An old friend’s arrival? Favorite TV-series closing? Also, make sure you find the right correlation between the emotion itself and the factor that causes it.
Step 3. Estimate the intensity of emotions that you feel. Choose a scale that you feel to be the most comfortable. For instance, from 1 to 10, or from 1 to 5. This will help you estimate all the specific features of your personal perception about certain situations. And moreover, you’ll be able to change your attitude to them, finding the optimal level. If to perceive a loss of online game match as 10, you won’t last long, will you?
Step 4. Try to understand things going on with you and emotions you feel when working on something. And try to determine if that responds your expectations. Are you satisfied when going to the office? This will help you understand your needs.
Step 5. Estimate emotions of other people using the same algorithm. Analyze gestures, mimics, put questions attentively. This is how you can find touching points helping you to provide contacts with others. For instance, a person does the same gesture several times in a row: touches his or her chin. It is probably, that a person feels bored. Then, try to change your speaking tempo or ask your collocutor about something in order to let them take part in a conversation.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is a scientific one. Using it, a person makes only thought out and independent decisions. In order to think critically, one has to be conscious about all actions he or she makes, and to be busy with self-improvement on purpose. This skill is a guarantee of success in a modern world, as the information itself is less important than the ability of a person to process and analyze it.
How to Learn Critical Thinking
Step 1. Understand the problem you have met. Form a precise task you are to solve, basing on that info. For example, if your problem is lack of money, then your task is to find a part-time job.
Step 2. Try to overcome those difficulties using available resources. Ask your friends if they know about any vacancies, write a social media post and ask them to help you find the job there, or look for a job on specialized websites.
Step 3. Find your new viewpoint onto the situation, use all your knowledges and skills. Send a CV to a potential employer, know about details by a phone call, visit an interview.
