Emotional Intelligence: Boost Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotions - problems for us to deal with, or opportunities for us to be more effective in the way we use them? For years they have been pushed aside in business, but now they are seen as the distinguishing factor for success. Find out why, and how!

Explore our social reluctance to share our emotions and think about what we and others are really feeling – with a great tool to help people open up.

Emotions are the most powerful things that control our lives - they make us love, hate, fight or flee. But in a modern business context, what is their role, and how do we understand and develop them.

In this podcast-style module, Chris Preston shares a short intro to this area, with football as the starting point. What can we learn from the game... well, from one player, it would seem a great deal.

He also outlines the major components of emotional intelligence and the route we need to take to improve and grow our capability.

Download the 'Additional Resources' supporting document for some additional resources.

Understanding how our emotions impact our well-being is a key part of building emotional intelligence. This module covers the 'red and black' concept of paying in and out of your 'bank account' and will help you understand your own emotional status.

Step 1: These tips are for you to use in conjunction with an emotional snapshot spreadsheet to try and help you address any hot-spots where you are more ‘in the red’ than ‘in the black’. Once you’ve completed the spreadsheet, take a look at the tips below and pick the one you feel will have the biggest impact.

Step 2: A short selection of really practical tips that we have seen implemented to great effect and know work. Choose one and try it for yourself.

Step 3: Download the 'Additional Resources' supporting document.

Understanding your relationship with strong stimuli - how it moves you emotionally - builds on our capacity to manage those emotions. This module gives you ideas for spotting the 'source' and recognising the triggers for emotions.

Step 1: As this module is about better understanding our emotions, we’ve provided a downloadable PDF to help stimulate, identify and record some different emotions for you to work with. Download the 'Identifying Emotions - Your Spotters Guide' supporting document.

The worksheet has an ‘emoji challenge’, areas to capture emotions stimulated by videos and music, and a question about the emotions you feel when you’re performing at your best. You can use it as a printed resource, or download it to your computer, save it and type directly into it.

Step 2: The next supporting document is a list of different videos that we find elicit a wide range of emotions in us. As a reminder, you do not have to watch them all, pick a few different ones and notice what you feel while you’re watching them, makes some notes of those emotions on the PDF provided.

Step 3: The next supporting document is a list of music that we love, whatever emotions they bring out in us - this time we’ve asked our team members to write what the tracks made us feel to give you more of an insight.

As a reminder, you do not have to watch them all, pick a few different ones, or simply bring up your own music, and notice what you feel while you’re watching/listening to them, make some notes of those emotions on the PDF provided.

When do we do our best work? When do we recover and recharge our batteries? When do we grieve or suffer failure? This module shares the emotional scale - a powerful way of looking at how our emotions drive our actions and outputs.

Step 1: Download and use this sheet to work through the emotional scale with us.

Step 2: Capture your own notes on the emotional scale - record what feels important to you, what resonates, the areas you want to remember. We’ve put some placeholders in to help, but you can use the space as you see fit.

Step 3: Download the Additional Resources supporting document.

Working with the resources in the Our Emotions section, this final module gives you a practical path to start developing your own emotional capacity - awareness, understanding and impact.

Download the 'Your 14 Day Challenge' supporting document.

In daily interactions, emotions are the make or break factor, but, when things are tough and stress is high, they have the potential for an explosive impact. This short module gives you some practical thinking around emotions when things are tough.

Raise your awareness of where you, and other people around you, are during tough times – how we are all more volatile and likely to be constantly shifting around the emotional scale.

A warm welcome from your instructor Jane Sparrow, who sets the scene for what’s to come. This course is packed with practical ways that you can build on your emotional awareness and really learn how to take ownership of your emotions and your impact on those of others. It’s full of practical advice, stories, tips and plans to help you become even more effective in your own work, and in how you lead and/or manage others.

In this lecture, Jane unpacks more around our 'Emotional Scales', looking at where you tend to spend your time, why, and what the impact is.

Then she moves on to look at the practical things you can do to prevent yourself from getting emotionally hi-jacked, to notice when it happens and to shift yourself back to a positive place when it has happened.

If you’re interested in finding out more about emotions, here’s a selection of additional sources you can look at, including articles, videos, podcasts and books.

This lecture is all about how we recognise, acknowledge and manage emotions in others for success and performance – around change, and reactions to things in broader life – in order for them to reach their potential and to maximise our positive working relationships.

We’ll utilise different tools and approaches in order to understand and empathise with other people’s preferences and the situations they are facing, navigating the emotional landscape along the way.

We can't (and shouldn't) control the emotions of others, but we can help them find better ways of managing them. Importantly, we can adapt what we do to ensure we are not impacting on the emotions of others - key themes for this lecture.

Workbook

To accompany our section, we’ve designed the 'Managing Emotions in Others' workbook to help you apply the content. Download the Appreciation Starters supporting document too and use the questions to capture your thoughts and actions.

Appreciation Starters

Sometimes it can be hard to find the right words to properly appreciate someone, especially if we’re trying to make it meaningful. This is a simple set of starter sentences to help you think about how you appreciate different people, and what you appreciate them for.

How to use it:

• Think them through and see what comes up that you should appreciate in someone else.

• Make a list of people that matter to you at work and at home, what do you appreciate in them/about them/about what they do that you haven’t properly thanked them for or don’t thank them for enough?

• When you’re about to say ‘thanks’, use one of these instead to prompt you to go into more detail.

• Proactively plan to use one of the above each day for a week and reflect on what happens (for you and others).

Further Resources

If you’re interested in finding out more about emotions, here’s a selection of additional sources you can look at, including articles, videos, podcasts and books.