Social and Emotional Intelligence Power Skills

Social skills are those skills that a person requires to handle and influence the
emotions of people effectively. A person needs to understand and manage themselves to
understand the emotions and feelings of others and influence them (Beydler, 2017) . On the
other hand, emotionally intelligent persons can self-manage their emotions and successfully
go through the challenges they face to achieve the best possible outcome without affecting
others that are not so close to them (Beydler, 2017) . These emotions always define a person
since they contain data about our feelings and their reasons. Therefore, social skills are
considered a crucial part of emotional intelligence.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to have self-knowledge of your characters and feelings
(Rasheed et al., 2019) . In difficult work situations, a nurse practitioner must build an aspect
of solid self-awareness to help you manage your emotions and use them appropriately to
motivate yourself and successfully solve the problem at hand. Self-awareness will enable you
to acknowledge and understand the feelings and emotions of the people around you at work,
including the patients and the staff, thus creating a conducive work environment.
Additionally, a practitioner of high self-awareness possesses a high spirit of teamwork,
communication skills, and leadership skills. These social skills are essential in providing
quality healthcare services and management of these facilities.
Self-management
This is the ability to consciously and effectively manage our thoughts, emotions, and
behaviors (Ikpesu, 2017) . In difficult workplace conditions, practitioners should put in place
self-management skills by demonstrating that they understand their responsibilities and fulfill
them. With solid self-management skills, a practitioner will consistently provide solutions to

3

every situation at the workplace. According to emotional intelligence theory, self-
management is also known as self-regulation, which helps us have conscious access to our
thoughts, desires, and feelings.
Interpersonal Communication
Interpersonal communication is the exchange of information between two or more
interdependent people, either verbally or non-verbally (Raeissi et al., 2019) . It is easier for an
emotionally intelligent nurse practitioner to communicate with fellow workers and patients in
difficult working conditions. The ability for a practitioner to understand other people’s
emotions and behaviors will enable me to appropriately communicate and build more robust
and valuable relationships with the staff and the patients. Additionally, conducive work
environments are based on good relationships and interpersonal communications with fellow
workers.
Executive Function
Executive function is essential when talking about social and emotional intelligence
skills as it entails sets of fundamental skills applicable in our day-to-day activities (Vaughan
& Edwards, 2020) . These skills include thinking flexibility, planning, time management,
working memory, self-control, self-monitoring, and organization. As an advanced nurse
practitioner, I will apply these executive function skills at my workplace daily to enhance
quality care and working environment regardless of the demanding workplace situation.
Without these skills, a practitioner may find it challenging to focus, handle emotions, and
follow directions, complicating workplace situations.
Social-awareness
In emotional intelligence, social awareness is the ability of an individual to correctly
pick up the emotions of other people and understand the real happenings (Raghubir, 2018) .

4
As a practitioner in complex work environments, I will build my social awareness skills and
apply them to help my fellow workers and patients. They might be suffering emotional
distress to help alleviate the working conditions. To build and improve my social awareness
skills, I will pay close attention when talking with others, improve my listening skills, try to
understand others deeply, and identify the emotional states of others.
Professional presence
As an advanced nurse practitioner, professional presence is necessary as it helps
create a positive work environment and raises productivity (Percy & Richardson, 2018) . To
demonstrate my professional presence, I will apply my executive function skills to improve
my nursing professionalism and show my optimism towards achieving my facility’s goals.
Additionally, my social-awareness skills will help me understand the people around me, their
emotions, and whatever they are going through. With empathy as an integral part of
professional presence, sensing the emotions of others will be easy. To summarize this,
professional presence, social awareness, and executive function are all dependent.
Enhanced mindfulness in healthcare
Increased mindfulness enables a person to carefully process the responses to stressful
scenarios in compelling ways that enhances resilience, well-being, and long-term good
health. For instance, there is a steady healing process when a patient is mindful and
concentrates on the medication. As an advanced nurse practitioner, I will apply my
interpersonal communication and self-management skills to enhance mindfulness in
healthcare. Self-management skills will enable me to efficiently and effectively manage my
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, thus enhanced mindfulness. On the other hand, my
interpersonal communication skills will enable me to process my thoughts carefully
regardless of the conditions to arrive at my decisions and answers.

5

Positive social presence to promote a sense of caring and belonging
Social presence is the aptitude for projecting the physical and emotional presence and
feeling that experience when interacting with others. For a person to feel a sense of caring
and belonging, I will have to create a positive presence in every way to make them
comfortable and even open up deeply to me. To achieve this, I will use my interpersonal
communication skills such as creative listening and thinking, give clear answers when asked
a question, and appropriately communicate with the person in a non-judgmental manner.
Additionally, I will use my social awareness skills to accurately pick the person’s emotions
and understand what is going on. With these two social and emotional intelligence power
skills, a sense of caring and belonging is achieved.
Culture of joy to solve incivility in the workplace and initiate organizational change
In nursing facilities, the phrase ‘joy at work’ is usually used. The culture of joy at the
workplace creates a happy, productive, and engaging work atmosphere for the employees,
thus making them have psychological and physical safety (Balik, 2018) . On the other hand,
incivility has become a common problem in healthcare centers, mainly between providers
and patients. To eradicate incivility, I will use interpersonal communication and freely
communicate with everyone to create a joyful work environment. My executive function
skills will be necessary for initiating organizational changes. To achieve this, I will use my
organizational, planning, flexible thinking, time-management, and self-management skills to
effect changes.

6
Implementation of the “IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work” in the workplace
As an advanced professional nurse leader, I will implement the IHI framework by
applying my social and emotional intelligence skills such as social awareness, interpersonal
communication, and executive function skills. Below is how I will implement the four steps
and the strategies I will deploy.
Step 1: Ask staff, “what matters to you?” (Balik, 2018). – As their leader, I will engage
everyone to get to know what every person wants and thinks of. To implement this, I intend
to use questionnaires that will be more private apart from collecting accurate information.
Step 2: Identify unique impediments to joy in work in the local context (Balik, 2018). Here, I
will talk to them and inquire about the circumstances and issues that make them not achieve
what they want. I will use the questionnaires to implement this step.
Step 3: Commit to a systematic approach to making joy in work a shared responsibility at all
levels of the organization (Balik, 2018). I will work with the different teams as they come
together to share the responsibilities of tackling the impediments. To implement this, I will
use the help of the leaders of each disciplinary team.
Step 4: Use improvement science to test approaches to improving joy in work in the
organization (Balik, 2018). Other leaders, staff, and I will come together and put the
procedure to the test through scientific improvements. To implement this step, I will do the
‘joy at work’ evaluation to see the improvements.
As Reflection
an advanced nurse practitioner, possessing social and emotional intelligence skills is
necessary when working in a challenging environment (Beydler, 2017) . Having all these
skills helps us understand the emotions and characters ourselves and those around us and our

7
environs to work hard towards attaining better working conditions (Balik, 2018) . As
demonstrated above, we can develop a culture of ‘joy at work’ to help eradicate problems
such as incivility (Bernard, 2019) . In conclusion, creating a joyful work environment helps
improve the employees’ productivity and ensures their physical and psychological safety at
work which in turn improves service delivery.

8

References

Balik, B. (2018). Joy in Work: The Vital Role of Nursing Leadership. Nurse Leader, 16(4),
220–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.MNL.2018.05.006

Bernard, N. (2019). Resilience and Professional Joy: A Toolkit for Nurse Leaders. Nurse
Leader, 17(1), 43–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.MNL.2018.09.007

Beydler, K. W. (2017). The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Perioperative Nursing and
Leadership: Developing Skills for Improved Performance. AORN Journal, 106(4),
317–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.AORN.2017.08.002

Ikpesu, O. C. (2017). Self-Management Dimension of Emotional Intelligence as
Determination of Academic Administration in Public University. Journal of Higher
Education Theory and Practice, 17(1), 49–57.

Percy, M., & Richardson, C. (2018). Introducing Nursing Practice to Student Nurses: How
Can We Promote Care Compassion and Empathy. Nurse Education in Practice, 29,
200–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.NEPR.2018.01.008

Raeissi, P., Zandian, H., Mirzarahimy, T., Delavari, S., Moghadam, T. Z., & Rahimi, G.
(2019). Relationship Between Communication Skills and Emotional Intelligence Among
Nurses. Nursing Management, 26(2), 31–35. https://doi.org/10.7748/NM.2019.E1820

Raghubir, A. E. (2018). Emotional Intelligence in Professional Nursing Practice: A Concept
Review Using Rodgers’s Evolutionary Analysis Approach. International Journal of
Nursing Sciences, 5(2), 126–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.IJNSS.2018.03.004

9
Rasheed, S. P., Younas, A., & Sundus, A. (2019). Self-Awareness In Nursing: A Scoping
Review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 28(5–6), 762–774.
https://doi.org/10.1111/JOCN.14708

Vaughan, R. S., & Edwards, E. J. (2020). Executive Function and Personality: The
Moderating Role of Athletic Expertise. Personality and Individual Differences, 161,

109973. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.PAID.2020.109973