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Keep Your Battery Charged

By Kari Ure, Extension Assistant Professorwoman hugging herself

Most people are quick to notice a low battery on their cell phone and act right away to find a way to charge the battery.   They wouldn’t think of waiting a day or week or month to charge their cell phone.  So why do individuals often wait to charge their emotional health batteries?  It takes practice to notice when one’s emotional battery is low. 

Emotional intelligence is important in recognizing a low emotional health battery.  Emotional intelligence includes recognizing, expressing, and controlling one's emotions.  Being able to use this understanding in relationships, challenges, stressors, and conflicts is an important aspect of emotional intelligence (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009).  Conative style is the general way one goes about completing a task (Hallowell, 2011).  Recognizing your conative style and the styles of those around you is a great way to increase emotional intelligence. 

One researcher, Kathy Kolbe, identified four conative styles:  fact finder, follow thru, quick start, and implementor.  Individuals range on the spectrum of resistant to insistent in each of the four areas.  The four points make up the overall conative style of an individual (Hallowell, 2011).  There is no right or wrong conative style, but the key is to know one’s style and be able to recognize the styles of those around them.  Learn more about the styles here.   

Think about the differences in how people learn a new game or assemble a product.  Some read the instructions many times before starting, some refer to the instructions periodically, others ask for help, some may disregard the instructions altogether.  Consider what happens when two people with differing conative styles need to work together on a task and they don’t understand each other's conative style.  The differing opinions create conflict that makes it difficult to complete the task effectively.  

Try this relationship building activity to explore conative styles in a family or other group:  

  • Give each person an identical kit.  This can be a model building kit or you may assemble your own with a random assortment of popsicle sticks, glue, fabric, felt, foam, string, etc. 
  • Observe how each person goes about exploring and creating.  Some might ask further questions, others might jump right in and experiment, some may get frustrated and wait for better instructions, some may ask others for suggestions, some may search on the internet for help.
  • Discuss as a group the differing ways each person went about completing the task.  Recognizing how others work through tasks is important to knowing how to work together and improves emotional intelligence.    

Keeping your emotional health battery charged makes daily challenges easier to work through and improves relationships.  Family, community, and professional relationships improve when problems and new tasks can be worked through effectively together.  

To explore more about conative styles visit:  https://e.kolbe.com/knol/index.html  

References