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Emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, is important and essential to communicators as well as leadership. It can be defined as personality traits which are fed by nature and nurture. To some extent, it’s even more crucial than IQ in business and other fields. The key elements of emotional intelligence include the ability to accurately perceiving the emotion of yourself and others, using emotion to facilitate thought and understanding and managing emotion (Business Communication, Ethics and Practice, p2.8).

As for how emotional intelligence helps me handle difficult conversations, we should firstly define difficult conversations. They are categorized into three: the content of conversation, each person’s feeling and identity (Karen Christensen, 2011). From the text of “Difficult Conversations”, it says the most difficult conversation for us does potentially harm to our self image. In most time, the image we have about ourselves is totally different from how others see us, so we have to improve our EQ to balance both my and others’ emotion and feelings on the same thing. That means we should fully understand feelings and thoughts or contents not only from the aspects of ours but from others’. Also, a learning conversation is a good way to handle the difficult conversation, which means people from different stands learning how others see and feel things. There are also two tools for difficult conversation recommended by Douglas Stone: role reversal and observer’s insight which means we should perceive others from their stand rather than just from your own side (Karen Christensen, 2011).

Student ID:3358310

Name: Guo Huanyu