Emotional intelligence involves the ability to understand and manage emotions. Experts agree that this type of intelligence plays an important role in success, and some have suggested that emotional intelligence might even be more important than IQ. In any case, research has suggested that possessing emotional intelligence skills is linked to everything from decision-making to academic achievement.

Motivation is another important emotional intelligence skill. Emotionally intelligent people are motivated by things beyond external rewards like fame, money, recognition, and acclaim. Instead, they have a passion to fulfil their own inner needs and goals. They seek internal rewards, experience flow from being totally in tune with activity and pursue peak experiences. Those who are competent in this area tend to be action-oriented. They set goals, have a high need for achievement, and are always looking for ways to do better. They also tend to be very committed and are good at taking initiative.

What is Motivation?

Motivation is one of the three areas of personal skills that are integral to the concept of emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman, the author of several seminal books on Emotional Intelligence, identified four elements that make up motivation:

• Personal drive to achieve, the desire to improve or to meet certain standards
• Commitment to personal or organisational goals
• The initiative, which he defined as readiness to act on opportunities
• Optimism, the ability to keep going and pursue goals in the face of setbacks. This is also known as resilience.

To improve self-motivation, it is therefore helpful to understand more about these individual elements.

How can you improve your motivation?

• Re-examine: It’s easy to forget what you really love about your career. Advisable, to take some time to remember why you wanted this job. Try the Five Whys technique to find the root of the problem if you are unhappy in your role and if you are struggling. Strengthen your root often helps you look at your situation in a new way and make sure that your goal statements are fresh and energizing.
• Know where you stand: Determine how motivated you are to lead. Our EQGL Assessment can help you see clearly how motivated you are in your leadership role. If you need to increase your motivation to lead, it directs you to resources that can help.

           More information’s about the assessment can be found at HRDF Website 

This training program, Essential Qualities of Great Leaders, EQGL is developed to help team leaders to analyse employee’s strengths, motivators and learning styles to drive performance at work.

• Be hopeful and find something good: Motivated leaders are usually optimistic, no matter what problems they face. Adopting this mindset might take practice but it’s well worth the effort. Every time you face a challenge, or even a failure, try to find at least one good thing about the situation. It might be something small, like a new contact, or something with long-term effects, like an important lesson learned. But there’s almost always something positive if you look for it.

Types of Motivators

In thinking about self-motivation, it is helpful to understand what motivates you to do things. There are two main types of motivators:

• Intrinsic: To perform an action or task based on the expected or perceived satisfaction of performing the action or task. Intrinsic motivators include having fun, being interested and personal challenges.
• Extrinsic: To perform an action or task in order to attain some sort of external reward, including money, power and good marks or grades.

Different people are motivated by different things and at different times in their lives. The same task may have more intrinsic motivators at certain times and more extrinsic motivators at others, and most tasks have a combination of the two types of motivation.

As an HR consulting organization, we at Alchemy Resources pay huge importance and have implemented these practices in our own workplace. We have conducted training programmes for employees as well as managers. At ARSB, we have designed our training intervention strategies using the given methods and have executed our training programme using Learning Management System (LMS) through both synchronous and asynchronous. Contact us at enquiries@alchemyconsultancy.asia to find out how we may work together to conduct a training programme to improve performances and achieve your company’s goals.