Emotional Intelligence

Activities for Developing You and Your Business

Ann Cartwright, Amanda Solloway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138433571
• eBook ISBN: 9781351940481
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Building rapport, communicating and establishing trust with people, as a line manager, as part of a department or a temporary project team, involves a fundamental set of human and business skills. And yet this set of skills is also the area where the majority of managers feel least equipped to cope. Emotional intelligence is, at its heart, all about self-awareness; an understanding of how people relate and respond to you. This collection of training activities provides managers and employees with a series of proven exercises for raising personal and social awareness, skills for managing self and relationships with others. Each activity includes detailed instructions for the user or facilitator as well as copies of any handout materials. The collection is available as a looseleaf manual or on CD ROM.

CHAPTER 1

Core Emotional Intelligence Skills Activities

COMMUNICATION SKILLS: OVERVIEW

Listening for Real

The Chinese symbols used to make up the verb ‘to listen’ include the symbols for the eyes, ears, heart and undivided attention, and confirm the fact that we do not just listen with our ears we also hear what we see and what we feel and as a result we sometimes get mixed messages. In addition they confirm that to be a good listener we must also give the speaker our undivided attention. The Listening for Real activity picks up on this idea and focuses on the different levels at which people listen, consciously and unconsciously. These different levels can be described as Head, Heart and Soul. This activity enables learners to identify their own predominant level of listening and to practise listening at different levels. The activity can be used in a variety of situations and learning processes, especially when people need to develop their ability to listen well.

Steps of Communication

We all communicate at different levels and the levels at which we communicate often depend on how well we know that person and what we have in common with them. It will also depend on what we are looking to communicate. For example, a sustainable marriage typically involves a couple with the same values and beliefs, who discuss and verify these on a regular basis, or at the very least live their life by them. Sometimes, though, we establish rapport instantly with people. As part of social awareness, it is useful to understand the levels at which we communicate in order to build rapport and understand a group. This activity is useful as a group activity, as it demonstraters how individuals within a group differ.

Language, Body Language and Voice Tone in Communication

The exercises in this activity are designed to encourage learners to discover how language, body language and voice tone can impact on communication and how if they learn to pick up on this they will be able to pick up the messages that people are giving them so much more easily. This selection of exercises can be easily adapted to the size of group and can also be fun to use.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

This activity is designed to focus learners both on giving feedback and recognizing how much feedback they can take. We all know that there are some people for whom, however much feedback you give them, it just seems to wash over them like water off a duck’s back. Then there are those to whom you just have to say the slightest thing to and they take great offence. The skill is judging who is which type. This activity is useful for anyone who ever has to give feedback and can be used both in the work environment and personally.

Understanding, Recognizing and Using Your Inner Dialogue

The activity is designed to enable learners to listen to their inner voice and understand what it is saying. We all have an inner voice even if we don’t currently acknowledge it or listen to it. The trick is to learn to understand what it is trying to say to us and to act on it. Using our inner dialogue can be a great help for emotional intelligence, as it helps us analyse situations. Since the dialogue also operates across all quadrants by making us aware of what is going on inside us, we can learn to manage, understand ourselves and others more fully and thus apply our emotional intelligence more effectively. This activity is useful in a wide variety of situations and allows learners to see that it is perfectly natural to have inner dialogue with yourself – it is the way we sort things out.

EMOTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS: OVERVIEW

What Pushes My Buttons?

This activity is designed to let learners identify what it is that pushes their buttons and sometimes actually pushes them over the edge. It is designed so that they can identify why all of a sudden they may become agitated or even, in extreme cases, lose control. This is a really useful activity for someone to understand what winds them up and will help them become more emotionally aware. This, in turn, helps learners to manage and control their emotional trigger points.

Recognizing, Accepting and Using Intuition Effectively

This activity is designed to explore intuition. Sometimes we just know when something is or isn’t right and this activity is designed to check out how people use intuition to enhance their everyday and work life. It is extremely useful for encouraging learners to trust their intuition and to apply it more fully within their work environment. As a core skill of emotional intelligence, intuition makes up a large percentage of how we make judgements and decisions in our life. It can be used in conjunction with the activity Working with Intuition.

ACTIVITY 1

Listening for Real

DESCRIPTION

The Chinese symbols used to make up the verb to listen include the symbols for the eyes, ears, heart and undivided attention, and confirm the fact that we do not just listen with our ears we also hear what we see and what we feel and as a result we sometimes get mixed messages. In addition, it confirms the fact that to be a good listener we must give the speaker our undivided attention.

The Listening for Real activity picks up on this idea and focuses on the different levels at which people listen, consciously and unconsciously. These different levels can be described as Head, Heart and Soul.

The activity enables learners to identify their own predominant level of listening and to practise listening at different levels.

Situations

This activity can be used for a variety of situations and learning pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Recommended Reading
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Core Emotional Intelligence Skills Activities
• Chapter 2 Self-awareness Activities
• Chapter 3 Self-management Activities
• Chapter 4 Social Awareness Activities
• Chapter 5 Relationship Management Activities
• Chapter 6 Inspirational Leadership Activities
• Chapter 7 Sample Workshop Outlines