Practicing Emotional Intelligence In order to improve your emotional intelligence EQ, you have to practice new behaviors and break the old self-defeating patterns that sabotage relationships and teamwork. Our workshops and coaching programs are designed to empower participants with the tools for practicing EQ improvement every day. Your Emotional Brain Center Neurologists tell us that the human brain is actually made up of multiple brain centers that process events in parallel. The limbic system is the brain center that is responsible for generating emotions. When emotions are triggered, the limbic system can "hijack" the brain, and in the hijacked state, we behave very unintelligently. Emotional intelligence training is about rewiring the brain to operate as an intelligently-integrated whole. The objective is to improve relationships, resolve conflicts and build teamwork, while eliminating behavioral sabotage. Breaking the Insanity of Low-EQ Behavioral Habits This old record player is our symbol for the insanity of low-EQ behavioral habits. Einstein's definition of insanity is "repeating the same behavior, expecting different results." Low emotional intelligence reinforces itself through repeated patterns of thought and behavior. EQ improvement training focuses on identifying and breaking these old patterns and replacing them with high-EQ behaviors. Practicing Emotional Intelligence The workplace is the perfect place to practice EQ improvement. Whether it's in your relationships and interactions with your manager, your employees, your peers, or your external customers, there are always behaviors to improve if you can increase your awareness and use the tools of EQ improvement. Deliberate Practice vs. Repetition of Old Behavior Patterns In every human interaction, you are either repeating old behavior patterns, or else you are consciously practicing awareness and new behaviors. Most people continually reinforce the old patterns day after day. EQ improvement is about increasing awareness, and identifying (and breaking) destructive and unintelligent patterns as they occur, in real time. Your Emotional Intelligence Practice Just as doctors view their work as a "practice," we see EQ improvement as your practice as a professional. When you are fully engaged in breaking old patterns, you achieve new levels of resourcefulness that bring about continual growth in your professional and personal life. Our workshops and coaching programs are designed to launch your new emotional intelligence EQ improvement practice.

Emotional Reactions Can Sabotage Teamwork

The pressure of work, deadlines and interpersonal conflict can cause employees and managers to react negatively toward each other. And when those reactions are emotionally charged, they can serve to sabotage teamwork. Your team members are intelligent and capable, but are they emotionally intelligent? It's difficult to measure emotional intelligence during the interview process, and many otherwise-competent managers and employees have low Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ) levels, which can result in poor teamwork, low morale and excessive employee turnover.

Emotional Intelligence is Learned Behavior

Reactive behavior tends to be destructive, but it can be understood and changed. Emotional intelligence entails learning to convert destructive emotional reactions into constructive responses that build relationships and teamwork. Our emotional intelligence workshops create awareness and provide tools for breaking old patterns and learning new behaviors. Anyone can become more emotionally intelligent with the right training and practice.

Training Managers & Supervisors to Manage Intelligently

Emotionally intelligent managers and supervisors are your greatest assets. They solve problems, resolve conflict and build teamwork. On the other hand, managers and supervisors with low EQs continually sabotage their own efforts to build teamwork. Low-EQ managers fail to tune into the emotions of their employees, and in their efforts to solve problems and improve productivity, they tend to alienate the members of their teams. Often, the place to begin emotional intelligence training is with managers and supervisors.

Many "tough" managers pride themselves on their firmness and directness. While some elements of their style may work well, these managers are generally unaware of how their low-EQ style alienates employees and actually serves to lower productivity. Conversely, "soft" managers often pride themselves on their empathy and caring leadership styles. But they often fail to realize how their failure to address difficult situations directly and their tendency to avoid conflict reduce employee respect and lower team morale.

Our emotional intelligence training workshops and coaching programs for managers and supervisors are designed to increase awareness and break the behavioral habits that sabotage team productivity.

Four Components of Emotional Intelligence

The four primary components of emotional intelligence are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. People with high EQs possess strong skills in each of these four areas, and they practice these skills daily. Our emotional intelligence workshops and coaching programs build a solid framework for understanding each component, and they provide effective tools for daily practice.

Speaking the Language of Emotional Intelligence

For many people, emotional intelligence is an unfamiliar concept. Along with a new framework for thinking about intelligence, we introduce concepts and terminology that view emotionally-intelligent behaviors as essential workplace skills. We discuss many of the new discoveries in the field of neurology and brain research and relate these ideas to daily workplace behavior. After participating in our training and coaching programs, your managers and employees will have the tools to improve their EQ, and to communicate effectively about the process and their progress.

Rewiring Your Brain

Our emotional brains are programmed to unconsciously associate meaning with the events around us. If a fellow employee makes a comment, meaning is associated with the comment and emotions are automatically triggered. Emotional reactions happen before our brains can logically process the event, and depending on individual programming, the reactions can take a variety of forms - from volatile outbursts to smoldering resentment.

The process of improving your emotional intelligence EQ involves understanding these neurological patterns and how they affect our thoughts and behavior. It involves using real-time tools to identify destructive emotional patterns and then to break those patterns in real time. In essence, EQ improvement is the process of rewiring your brain.

Our training classes help participants to identify their framing patterns (the way they tend to unconciously frame emotionally-charged situations) and provide the tools for reframing these situations in order to break the old patterns. When team members are all working on EQ improvement together, they become their own support system, and the old destructive patterns quickly begin to change.

A Fun & Challenging Learning Experience

Don't get the idea that our workshops are complex or intellectual. We certainly provide a wealth of valuable information, but Roger Reece presents it in a style that's interactive, fun and highly entertaining. Each workshop includes classroom training filled with colorful stories and illustrations, group exercises, role-play sessions and experiential learning activities. Every participant is fully engaged from the beginning to the end of the workshop, and each participant receives a self-study guide for ongoing self-development.

Leadership & Teamwork

All managers are not leaders and all leaders are not managers. However, leadership is a quality and skill set that every manager and employee needs to develop. Leadership is a broad topic, and we offer leadership development workshops that cover a wide range of leadership skills and behaviors. But our emotional intelligence workshops get to the heart of emotional-behavioral integration. Consider the kinds of behaviors that cause you to look at an individual and say "that's true leadership!" We believe that high-EQ leaders exhibit those behaviors in everything they do. EQ improvement training is specialized leadership training that focuses on developing behaviors that improve relationships and teamwork.

Improving Your Team's Collective Emotional Intelligence EQ

How would you rate the quality of relationships and the level of teamwork among the members of your team? How would you rate the levels of trust and respect? How well do your team members work with their internal customers in other departments? How well do they work with external customers? How well do they take criticism and feedback? How would you rate attitudes, motivation and morale? If you would like to see improvement in any of these areas, you should consider an emotional intelligence workshop for the team.

Clearly there is a personal focus to EQ improvement training. Each team member needs to look at behavioral patterns that can be improved with a greater degree of emotional intelligence. But as each team member increases his/her self-awareness and practices emotional intelligence in daily interactions, the collective EQ of the team improves dramatically.

Contact us today for more information about how you can schedule an emotional intelligence workshop for your team. Every workshop is customized to meet the needs of the group. Whether you are interested in a one-time workshop or an ongoing program including coaching, we can provide the right program for your team. Start raising the collective emotional intelligence EQ of your team right away.