Emotional Intelligence

IQ vs EI. New dispute about who's the most clever. But both options are crucial.

IQ is an estimation of analytical possibilities, and EI is how you're efficient emotionally and socially. It's my limited and simpliffied understanding of this subject.

While IQ is relatively stable throughout a person's life, EI can be significantly enhanced over time through learning and practice. It's often considered as similar to "Technical or Hard Skills" and "Creative or Soft Skills" terms, overlaping in some areas, but not the same.

As Motion Design is a mix of technical and creative skills I find this really important to be aware of EI topic. It's important to be skilled in Animation, Design, 3D software. But if you wish to make a polished product, it's necessary to understand the viewer's expectations, "feel and communicate" through the motion. Simple example: you know how make a jumping ball animation. But what will be the "character" of the ball. Is it reflects someones personality? Is it a small active ball or elder slowly bouncing sphere? This emotional features are adding creative flavour and can help solve creative problems much faster and efficiently. Which affects productivity and deadlines of the project. Which is usually considered depending on hard skills.

Track thoughts with notes

Another side of EI is an ability to recognize and control your own emotions. Losing good idea or losing the track of the process is a common problem. It's sad when you start with a great idea and later readjusting the process to meet the deadline and accepting the result far from what you've expected initially. Usually this happens when you leave imagination on it's own flight. To track the idea it's very important to leave notes. Daily journaling is really helpful to store you emotions and experiences. Setting goals and writing down the route to reach the goal can be a starting point for a half-year projects or small complicated runtime tasks. But if you simply don't have this habbit - you'll never start to leave your thoughts elsewhere, except your mind. The similar thing happens, when you share your thoughts with someone. Somebody can remind you about important stuff, but it's not someone's responsibility to remind you about your thoughts. Journaling is a useful skill to learn.

I found helpful writing my blog, but it's important to have a convenient analogue version that will be always nearby. I've tried options with my Galaxy Note to draw and sync notes with OneNote, it's quite comfortable, but adds just another layer of interaction with the device - which is stealing your attention while thinking about the main goal. Simpler is better.

Defining Goals

When you have control over your emotions and well acknowledged about your current goals, it helps you avoid impulsive reactions on stressful circumstances. And gives some predetermined options to adapt for a new situation.

Emotional Intelligence provides better resistance to changing environment. If you're practicing meditation it can help you retain focus and harmony in a shortest time. Sometimes it's just impossible for people, who stuggle to find the solution and even can start work with a single option and just wasting too much time on emotional stress. In this case 30 minutes meditaion session is not too much.
When you settled down all emotional part, good analytical skills will start to shine.

Stress sources

It's fun, but stress typically comes from miscommunication. When goals aren't quite clear and both sides can't comminucate well due to some reasons, like busy, unavailable, low communication skills. Empathy and understanding simply eliminate most of bad sides of communication. When you just killing your emotional judgement and trying to listen, understand and receive as much helpful information as possible. Better understanding helps envision the goal and idea much closer to understanding of your counterpart. Sometimes it's impossible. But these stress sources can be reduced to the minimum. No matter how technically savvy you're, small details are destroying good work. Being focused and well balanced in communication, collaboration and conflict resolution defines the life around you.

Effective interpersonal skills plays a huge role in a professional and personal life. "Being Nice" for a motion designer is a good but too simple statement. It requires additional practice and work to meet new levels to collaborative remote work. Any smallest detail can play huge role in building relationships via internet too. Emotional intelligence is what deteriorates but still transmits via cables. Team members, clients, family all need your attenttion, support, love. This can and should be provided.