Emotional Intelligence in IT: The Emotion You Don’t Recognize Can Hurt Your IT Customer Service

One of the most dangerous emotions in IT is the one you don’t realize you’re feeling.

You’re frustrated with an end-user, irritated with a coworker, or stressed about something completely unrelated to work. You may not recognize what you’re feeling, but it still affects your tone of voice, your choice of words, and the way you treat other people.

That’s why recognizing your own emotions is such an important part of emotional intelligence. It starts with awareness: What am I feeling, and what triggered it? Then comes intentionality: Given what I’m feeling, how do I choose words and actions that produce a positive outcome?

In my online training course, “Customer Service Secrets of Successful IT Pros,” I have an entire section on emotional intelligence. That section includes a lesson on recognizing your own emotions. Recognizing your emotions starts with being aware of how you’re feeling and your personal triggers. Then, once you’re aware, you intentionally choose words and actions that produce positive outcomes. 

Here are six powerful tools for recognizing your emotions:

Check your emotional gauges

Just as network management software monitors network conditions, you can monitor your emotional conditions by asking yourself questions such as “How am I feeling right now?” or you could be more specific and ask yourself, “What emotion am I feeling right now?” Consider keeping a notebook or using a note-taking app on your phone to record the activities happening in your life and the emotions you feel as a result. This can help as you later pause and reflect.

Go deeper

When you ask yourself how you’re feeling and your answer is vague, such as “Fine.” or “Okay.”, go deeper and ask yourself, “What specific emotions am I feeling right now?” Just like Windows Task Manager’s initial display shows overall performance, you can also dig deeper to see which applications and threads are running under the surface. Often, when we ask ourselves more probing questions, we discover that we’re experiencing multiple emotions, which can lead to multiple responses. We may not be aware of all of the emotions we’re feeling, so some of our behaviors may not make sense to us until we identify more specifically what we’re feeling.

Identify your personal activators

Take an inventory of your day-to-day life and look at what might be causing your emotions. How are your personal relationships (spouse/partner, children, friends, neighbors)? How are your finances? What about your health, or the health of important people in your life? How’s your professional life? Are you feeling satisfied and fulfilled in your work? How about your professional relationships with your boss, your co-workers, or employees?

Recognize emotions as soon as they materialize

Express them assertively, but not aggressively. The difference is this. When you express them assertively, you stick to the issues. When you express them aggressively, you might attack another person’s personality or character.

Look for patterns

Review those emotional check-ins periodically. Maybe you discover you’re more impatient late in the afternoon, more defensive around a particular coworker, or more easily frustrated when you’re under deadline pressure. Once you recognize the pattern, you can anticipate it instead of being surprised by it. 

Take ownership of your emotions

Other people and external events absolutely influence how we feel. Emotional intelligence isn’t about denying that. It’s about recognizing that we’re responsible for what we do with those emotions.  If you’ve ever said words such as, “You make me so angry!” or “You make me so happy!”, you have given another person tremendous power over your emotions. This isn’t to say there aren’t people in our lives we find annoying or comforting. Of course there are! It’s just that we are personally responsible for how we let those people affect us. We are also responsible for our behavior choices in response to the emotions we feel. Let’s say you have a particular end-user who struggles regularly with technology, and you dread getting a service ticket from them. They may be super annoying to you, but it’s your choice whether to handle them with courtesy and professionalism or to sigh and mutter insults under your breath. The first response is how someone who is emotionally intelligent would handle it. The second response shows immaturity and a lack of emotional intelligence. Frankly, the second response is inexcusable.

The most dangerous emotion

Remember, one of the most dangerous emotions in IT is the one you don’t realize you’re feeling. You can’t always control the end-user who frustrates you, the coworker who annoys you, or the problem that lands on your desk five minutes before you’re supposed to leave. But you can become more aware of what you’re feeling, recognize what’s triggering it, and intentionally choose how you’re going to respond.

That’s emotional intelligence: awareness followed by intentionality.

If you want to help your IT team develop skills like these, Compassionate Geek’s on-demand training teaches IT professionals how to communicate with empathy, defuse frustration, and create positive customer experiences. You’ll find the link below.

Next Level IT Customer Service Training

Enroll your team now in Compassionate Geek IT online customer service training so they can work together, get things done, and take care of customers.