How Emotionally Savvy Are You About Yourself and Your Clients?

While we have been trying on new marketing skills to address consumer-encouraged changes toward a soft-sell approach, there has been a quiet shift from logic alone to logic-plus-emotions in our use of interpersonal skills. Emblematic of that shift is "social effectiveness."

Over the last ten years interpersonal skills have been slowly and publicly recognized by business as a necessary quality for effective organizational members. This awareness, however, had not fully permeated the area of marketing. But with the decline of the hard sell, social effectiveness is now likewise being acknowledged as not only useful but also essential to the new marketing mind-set.

So what is social effectiveness? It isn't just knowing the right thing to say and do in interactions to achieve your goal. It's something much deeper. It's being emotionally savvy about both yourself and others so you can keep an interaction on an even keel and going in the right direction.

Specifically, being socially effective is having a conscious peception and clear recognition of your own and others' emotions. It is being able to identify and discriminate those emotions so you can label them properly for use. Being socially effective means not letting your emotions, or those of others, rule you. On the contrary, you manage both your emotions and theirs and, thus, are in control.

The real meaning of individual emotions can be confusing because emotions depend upon an awareness of your physiological arousal as well as how it is being influenced by your immediate circumstances. For example, if your heart is racing, you ask yourself if it is the result of fear, too much coffee, physical activity, or physical atraction. To answer the question you will look to your situation to give you a clue so you can assign an appropriate emotional meaning to that arousal.

Learning to feel what others are feeling is necessary but not sufficient. You also have to be able to understand how emotion acts to influence thinking. For example, when you're in a good mood, you are more likely to be creative. But when you're in a bad mood, you are more likely to be analyical. Knowing this relationship can help you generate the right emotions in yourself and others in order to facilitate on-target problem solving.

Unfortunately being emotionally savvy is not something we are usually taught. Furthermore, few of us were born with it. It is an ability you have to develop in order to understand emotions, their complexity, causes, and how they change over time. For example, while moods may be static, emotions are not. They are temporary and can change quickly. As a result, if you can know what can cause emotional change and how the change is likely to progress, you can learn to manage and regulate your emotions to deal more positively, co-operatively, and productively with your clients and others.

Consequently, you can learn to engage in or disengage from emotions at appropriate times. By developing the skill to regulate feelings, you can even dampen a good mood and improve a bad mood in order to accomplish your marketing goal. Awareness of emotions can provide you with valuable information for both understanding and acting.

One way to begin to create emotional awareness is to think about past bosses, teachers, or leaders. You detail what they did to make you feel like a champ or a chump. You focus on the actions each person took that resulted in your feeling significant or insignificant.

While reason is important, emotions provide additional information that is incredibly valuable in marketing or any interaction.

Dr. Signe A. Dayhoff, Ph.D., teaches professionals who are marketing reluctant how to create profitable visibility and credibility confidently with integrity ... without selling. She enhances promotion effectiveness through a relationship-based method called the "VODKAA Process."

Dr. Signe is a social psychologist and soft-sell marketing coach who has specialized for the last 25 years in boosting interpersonal skills, client trust, liking, rapport, and relationships. She replaces communication anxiety with confidence and competence and emphasizes the need for professionals to be a valued and accessible educational resource for prospects and clients alike.

Author of five books and over 150 published articles, she has worked internationally with CEOs, attorneys, physicians and other health-care providers, CPAs, FBI agents, TV producers, writers, seminar presenters, computer programmers, and small businesses, for example.

Article Source

How Emotionally Savvy Are You About Yourself and Your Clients?