An Exercise in Emotional Intelligence and Humility

What this compilation of words tell you? If you explore it further it should tell you a little bit about a person.

Recently I decided to conduct an exercise in both emotional Intelligence and humility. I am always trying to improve through self exploration and pushing myself outside my comfort zone. I do this for a couple of reasons; one I seek to improve my leadership Qualities and two I want to know how my friends describe me.

In an effort to conduct my research I made it difficult for friends and colleagues to describe me by only using 3 words. The responses came back quickly and surprisingly enough none of them were risque what I expected from a bunch of Army, Rugby, College, High School and Business friends. As, you can see from the word cloud that results in my opinion were great! The larger words come up more often in the responses so they received a larger representation. So here are my thoughts on the Word Cloud.

I have always considered myself a leader being the first born and taking on leadership roles in  Business, Sports, and the Military, so I really enjoyed that LEADER is my Largest and most pronounced word. The next few are Driven, Loyal, Motivated, Confident, and Aggressive. To me these are all positive, even aggressive.

Loyalty is what I hear the most from my wife, who continually says to me, you are the most loyal person I know, but it has been to a detriment to me before. I have worked with people I was loyal to and a few times that loyalty has come back to bite me. So Loyalty can be a great quality, but like many things it is how you use or distribute it and to where that loyalty ends is up to you.

Motivated and Driven are the same to me and are easy right, because you can easily say that person is motivated or Driven. It’s funny in the military they brainwash you to be motivated downright motivated every morning at 4AM to do PT, but in reality not how it works. It becomes the fire inside each person to be driven or motivated by something like a goal or for me my family. Another thing that drives me is a Poem my father wrote while in Vietnam. I keep it close to me because before my family it was the driving force that to me to where i am today.

The main few are self explanatory, but I feel the one word that need some justification is aggressive. I feel aggressive is another word for driven, and protective or loyal. This to me is a default attitude one that I have worked on for years to tone down in certain situations and in others to release like the silverback ape my friends tend to relate me to. This could be default aggressive after our goal or plan.

After all this I would suggest this exercise to all my friends and to dig deep into what their closest friends think of them when asked. That way it is honest and, hopefully you get the feedback to be a better you. What other things can you do to take a deeper look at yourself. DO you have all the tool in your tool belt to succeed. What skills might your friends co-worker or loved ones say you need to work. Use this exercise as a tool to better yourself daily.

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