Every now and then you meet someone with extraordinary intrapersonal skills but chances are, you may not even know it. That’s because you usually notice it only when someone has poor skills in this area.

Someone without good intrapersonal skills might be timid, take stupid risks or start yelling and screaming at the drop of a hat. You tend to notice these extremes of behaviour but you don’t notice it when someone is balanced and even tempered.

Intrapersonal skills are the foundations of a successful career. This is emotional intelligence, the ability to know, understand and mange your own emotions.

Years ago, I used to look at senior people in companies and wonder how on earth they got to where they are. With time I came to recognize that a lot of their success was predicated on emotional intelligence and have come to recognize that this type of intelligence has two parts, interpersonal skills and interpersonal skills.

I started looking at this list of interpersonal skills and found a whole slew of them that warranted examination. This isn’t an exhaustive list as there are so many skills you could list in this area

The List

Some people are high in some skills and low in others and no two people have the same set of skills in the same degrees. And the mix probably doesn’t correlate with effectiveness.

You just need enough interpersonal skills in enough different areas to be effective in a work situation..