Bounce Back: Emotional Intelligence Trait in MBA Essays

Your academic performance is clear with the GPA. GMAT Score maps your English and Math ability on a global competitive scale, but Essays remain the only barometer to measure your Emotional Intelligence. Even though most schools change the essays every year, the questions measure four qualities: Communication, Creativity, Leadership, and Emotional Intelligence.

How you analyze failure, summarize the lessons learned, and explain the comeback reveals a key characteristic of someone with a high emotional intelligence: the ability to bounce back. With the narrative, it becomes clear whether you are faking the comeback or you have genuinely learned the lessons, took a course correction, and finally achieved the objective that seem unassailable in your first attempt.

1) Context

Without a context, the narrative as to how you overcame a challenge is uninspiring. Context explains the difficulty of the task. Did the task require you to learn fast, make quick decisions, and coordinate with team members of different temperament? How was the group dynamics? Was the management interfering in your decisions? Set a clear picture on the environment, the timeline, the deadline, and the opposing forces that interfered in your decision-making and implementation. Rarely will you have a task that is devoid of any opposition, either with forces within yourself or your environment.

2) Time Period

The fake comeback stories try to replicate the timelines of movies where you are given another opportunity immediately after a failure; something that rarely happens in real life. Most likely, you will lose the leadership position or would be in-charge of a lower prioritized project. Convey your frustration in the essays, and explain how you overcame the negative emotions with positive reinforcement, or by reliving moments of success before the failed project.

3) Intelligent Questions

It is a challenge to come out of a slump if you don’t ask intelligent, balanced questions. Most professionals blame the failure on their personal shortcomings. Individuals with a higher emotional intelligence show signs of disappointment but they are quick to ask intelligent questions. Did I lack the core skills? Did I communicate poorly with the team? Did I misread the reaction of my team? Were they overworked? Did I fail to listen to my team? Have I failed to anticipate a critical factor? If you have the answer to one of the questions in detail, and to other questions in a short form, you know where you are lacking. For applicants with high emotional intelligence, after figuring out the cause, they focus on motivating themselves back to the old self.

4) Self-Motivation

Business Schools need management professionals who don’t wither under high pressure, and lose focus when the chips are down. They want the self-motivating candidates who look at their failure holistically and ask questions that pick them up. Most professionals with high emotional intelligence explicitly ask themselves about the lessons learned: what lessons have I learned from the failure? For one, they will use the lessons learned for future challenges, but more importantly, they are gaining closure on a period of their life that seem the least satisfying.

Your way of self-motivation need not be in a question format. You can explain techniques that have worked for you. Some use incentives to work hard (two movies back to back after completing a tough task) while some count their successes and note it down in their line of sight (in front of their desk or as a desktop background). The most effective professionals divide their major goals into small chunks of achievable tasks and focus only on the small tasks that can add up and eventually achieve their major goals. Whatever be your strategy, give an insight into how you motivate yourself after a failure. The admissions team wants to learn how you react to failure. If meditation has helped you to focus on the present, share how you applied meditation techniques to motivate yourself.

5) Action

Eventually, it is all about action. Candidates with higher emotional intelligence have a bias towards action: any action. The ones, who spend the majority of their time analyzing their failure, and noting them down, rarely achieve anything spectacular. The action-oriented professional will spend 20% of their time on analysis, and 80% on actions. They know that from the hundreds of missteps, one-step will lead them to their goals. The creative applicants know that out of the box thinking never translates to anything substantial if concrete actions do not follow the thought. Explain how your focus on action has helped you bounce back.

Learn how to highlight your Communication, Creativity, Leadership, and Emotional Intelligence with F1GMAT's Winning MBA Essay Guide