Videos for Emotional Intelligence with Roger Reece Seminars

Emotional Intelligence and Un-Insultability
'Un-insultability' is one of the most powerful tools of conflict management and team ecology, and it is among the most crucial skills you can use to strengthen relationships and improve communication with the people around you. In essence, un-insultability is the skill of listening without defensiveness. It requires a degree of empathy to understand the effect an emotional reaction can have on a person's state and frame of mind, and the need to let off steam when the pressures of stress and frustration build up. Not allowing yourself to be derailed by reacting to what an emotional person says to you is a skill that takes a lot of practice to master; but this one skill alone can bring remarkable changes to the interactions you have with the people close to you every day.

Four Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is made up of four competencies - Self Awareness, Self Management, Social Awareness and Relationship Management. Self Awareness is your sense of your own reactions, in the moment those reactions occur, and how well you can recognize long-term patterns of behavior in your reactions. Self Management builds on Self Awareness, because Self Management is your ability to govern your behavior in the midst of an emotional reaction, and to resist reactive patterns that run counter to your goals. Your Social Awareness is to a large degree your capacity for empathy: it is your ability to recognize and understand the emotional reactions of others, in real-time, as they occur. Finally, Relationship Management is the level to which you are able to keep your ongoing relationships with others in mind in moments of stress or conflict.

The Collective Emotional Intelligence of an organization is the direct result of each individual's skill-levels in these four competencies. Whatever a company can do to raise individual employees' EQ scores has an exponential impact on the success of that company as a whole.

Emotional Intelligence & Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness is the beginning of Emotional Intelligence. A lot of people are not aware of how they come across to other people. Being self-aware means being able to detect how you are coming across to other people - not just in a general sense but in real time, at the moment you are interacting with them. It involves tone-of-voice, facial expressions, body language and the words you choose. Accurate self awareness also involves asking a lot of questions when you are communicating, and getting confirmation, whenever possible, on your assumptions.

Most importantly, though, Self Awareness means knowing when you are having an emotional reaction. Many people have a hard time recognizing that they are in the midst of a reaction, and as a result, they identify with and operate from the reaction. Most of the time, when you have a reaction, it results in some form of self-sabotage. Self Awareness is a critical skill to develop in order to combat this tendency.

Emotional Intelligence & Self Management
Self Management means creating new behaviors. Self Management is the component of Emotional Intelligence that allows you to recognize patterns of behavior caused by your emotional reactions, and break out of those reactive patterns that sabotage your goals. Self Management means recognizing, in the "moment of truth" (your self-awareness that you are having a reaction), that you have a choice. You can choose not to reinforce old habits. You don't have to do what you have always done. Self Management is the practice of consciously choosing new behaviors to respond to your emotional triggers. It is your ability to do something you've never done before, to behave in a way that is uncharacteristic of you. Developing self-management skills does not mean that you no longer have an internal reaction to the conflict or stressful events or people that set you off - but it does mean you realize that your emotions do not have to control what you do.

Emotional Intelligence & Social Awareness
Social Awareness is tuning in to other people. Social Awareness is your degree of connection to what another person is feeling when you are communicating with them. Clearly, this is closely tied to empathy. Relating this to DISC style-profiles, we can predict that for the task-oriented styles, the 'D's and 'C's, the most likely mistake will be in under-tuning - in not seeing the value of empathy, or lacking the practice to maintain this skill in moments of crisis. At the same time, there is a less-obvious but just as crucial pitfall for the people-oriented styles, the 'I's and 'S's, in over-tuning to the point of making assumptions on feelings and motivations in the other person that don't exist, or lacking stable grounding in their own state of mind through a dependence on the other person's moods. This is why, for all styles, Active Listening - the process of focusing attention on all facets of communication, beyond what is said to non-verbal signs and behavioral cues, and continually asking open-questions and voicing assumptions to get accurate confirmation - is so important.

Emotional Intelligence & Your Brain
Rebooting the 'operating systems' in your brain: The 'Know' System - the prefrontal cortex - is the most advanced part of your brain. This is the center for advanced thought in your brain - what neurologists call 'The High Road.' The 'Go' System, or 'Low Road,' is the amygdala & limbic system, which controls emotions and quick reactions. These are like different 'operating systems' in your head. Your most complex reasoning and memory is handled by the Know system, but the speed of processing that information is very slow compared to the Go system. The quick response-time of the Go system, on the other hand, comes with a very rudimentary, sense-driven system of memory storage, and an extremely limited space for storing reactive patterns to events. (In fact, most of those patterns are already formed by the time you learn how to talk.)

The Low Road has the advantage of speed - it will always arrive at an emotional response quicker than the High Road can process external events. But the High Road can conceive of doing things you've never done before; the Low Road can't. If we can learn not to act on our emotional reactions, we can do a 'reboot' of our operating systems and put the High Road back in control. Then we can practice new behaviors to bring more positive results.

Emotional Intelligence: When Your Brain Sabotages Itself
Emotion can sabotage intellect in your brain. The brain is a complex organism, with many specialized systems to process different types of information. Most of the time, these systems seem to work together in harmony. Unfortunately, though, they do also conflict with one another at times. As humans, we have a remarkably large and highly developed prefrontal cortex - the area of the brain responsible for complex, abstract thought and information storage & retrieval. However, as mammals, we also have a powerful and active limbic system to process emotion and sense memory. When external input registers through our senses and triggers a response from our limbic system, our intellect has the potential to be entirely sabotaged by our emotions. This happens because a primary function of the limbic system is to act as a sort of 'emergency-alert' system for survival. Information stored by the limbic system is at once closely tied to body function and far removed from higher thought; it is encounter-based memory made to mobilize the body for self-preservation, whether that is to defend, withdraw, or attack. In addition to that, neurologically, it takes less than 1/3 the time, in nanoseconds, for sensory input to reach the limbic system than it does for that same information to make it to the frontal lobes. This means that whatever your senses perceive that is going to trigger an emotional response in you, will have already triggered that response before your higher mind is even aware of the input. This leaves the intellect in a state of forever lagging behind the emotions, struggling to make sense of processes already in motion. This leaves all of us vulnerable to "neural hijacks" in highly-charged situations - moments where extreme emotions have taken control of our perceptions and actions.

Managers Need Emotional Intelligence
When managers exhibit low-EQ behavior: It takes a high EQ (Emotional-intelligence Quotient) to be an effective leader. Developing Emotional Intelligence is like rewiring your brain. Unfortunately, a number of people who are somehow promoted to management positions do not comprehend or even realize the importance of this skill, and as a result do great damage to their organizations. Ironically, often these are the managers who think of themselves as 'results-oriented.' What they don't take into account is the loss of productivity and morale that results from their reactive behavior.