Episode 063 - What is Emotional Intelligence?

What is Emotional Intelligence? That’s the subject of this week’s episode, and it’s a subject that Bernie is very passionate about. So, what is it, and how does it relate to our business of Real Estate? It’s the ability to perceive, reason, understand, and manage emotions of others in our day to day lives. For agents, being emotionally intelligent can mean the difference between working with clients on a purely transactional basis or understanding what they’re looking for on an emotional level and coming up with those outside the box solutions that working in everyone’s interests.   We are in a people focused industry, and the types of transactions we deal with as real estate agents can be very emotionally charged. When speaking with our clients about what our clients are looking for in a forever home, we can get any kind of response ranging from cold logic to emotional milestones. Being emotionally intelligent means more than identifying with a person’s feelings in the moment, it’s about understanding what’s behind the way a client responds to our questions. There are times to empathize with stories of our own, or solutions to the problems brought up, and then there are times when listening is the best course. Being able to build the trust with your clients that you are working in their best interests and working to find solutions to the problems they may or may not have vocalized can be important to your success as an agent.   “Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand what's happening with your feelings at a given moment in time and not acting in them but leveraging that to really understand what's happening within whoever you're interacting with.” -  Bernie   “When we get into our business right there, that’s where a lot of people come up short. They're not listening to the full conversation because they're too busy trying to regurgitate their next response, rather than taking a pause to give themselves some time to truly respond.” – Steve   “That's how you connect with other humans is to re