Emotional Intelligence Training Course for Managers and Professionals

Might this London UK emotional intelligence (EQ)
training be relevant for you?

YES it might be relevant for you if your reason for wanting emotional intelligence training is to develop so that

• your emotional intelligence skills can help you to communicate and connect more successfully with people at work whenever you or they are under emotional pressure,
• your emotional intelligence skills can improve even your most emotionally challenging relationships and interactions,
• your emotional intelligence skills can speak up for yourself with firmness, clarity and integrity while treating others, even those you find difficult, with respect and understanding.

YES if you want a reliable and universal set of emotional intelligence communication skills 

• that are simple to understand and easy to remember,
• that with determined practice you'll be able to master,
• that as you practice them will increase the power of your conversational emotional intelligence.

Click here to listen to our conversation about emotional intelligence training

INTERESTED?

If so, you can have a FREE exploratory coaching session. It'll give you a foretaste of what you can get from the course. You make no commitment to proceed beyond this until you're sure this training is relevant to your own particular need.

How to accept this offer

Simply contact us for a preliminary chat and to arrange your free exploratory coaching session. 

What this session will do for you

In this session we'll aim to give you something practical you can use right away that'll help you handle a difficult situation more successfully at work. All you need do to prepare for this session is think about the kinds of situations you want to be able to handle more successfully.

FAQs

You'll find answers to many of your questions about the content and method of this course under FAQs (in the main menu above).

Want to know more about
our emotional intelligence training?
Read on

Why does a manager need emotional intelligence (EQ) training?

In his well-known book on this subject in 1996 Daniel Goleman brought Emotional Intelligence to the attention of the public and defined it as an array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. On this course we help you improve your communication and leadership performance by developing your emotional intelligence. Here's why emotional intelligence matters:-

• Many of the relationships, conversations and meetings you have to handle as a manager or leader are difficult. What makes them difficult is strong emotion. That's why as a manager you're severely handicapped without emotional intelligence training.
• Emotional intelligence training offers the ability to put feelings into words so that they can be talked about calmly and managed rationally and safely. If we can’t talk about feelings they don’t just go away. They remain beneath the surface even if we're not consciously aware of them, swamping the mind and driving us to behave irrationally. Talking about feelings helps us let off steam safely, calm down and recover our rational minds.
• Becoming more communicative about feelings, in other words, emotional intelligence, is therefore the key to connecting better with others. It can’t fail to bring you greater success and satisfaction in handling even your most difficult relationships, conversations and meetings. 
• Human beings, whether we're conscious if it or not, have evolved with a high degree of alertness to one-another’s emotional states. A very large proportion of the human brain is engaged in enabling us to pick up and respond to clues about the feelings, attitudes and intentions of our fellow human beings. Our survival has depended on this inate emotional intelligence. 
• But many of us have learned as a result of upbringing and social conditioning to suppress or ignore our emotions and to keep our inate emotional intelligence dormant. This habit is hard to break.
• On this course we'll help you break the habit of suppressing feelings by helping you practise and develop the two central skills of emotional intelligence training. Most people already have these skills to some degree, or at least the potential to develop them. Both skills are ways of putting feelings safely into words. The first we call listening with empathy. It's a way of helping others to put their feelings into words. The other we call speaking assertively. It's a way if putting our own feelings into words.
• Even if you think you've never been very aware of your own and others' emotions, by paying more attention to the presence of emotion in yourself and others - through practising these two skills - your emotional intelligence will increase. It's never too late to improve this ability. 

What will enhanced emotional intelligence training enable me to do more successfully?

We'll train you to use the skills of emotional intelligence (EQ) when handling your most challenging situations. The reason why they're challenging is precisely because of the emotion they arouse.

You can pick the most relevant items from the list below, and you'll be able to practise applying your emotional intelligence skills to them as much as you like in safety and with expert coaching:-

• gain people's co-operation and win their confidence when they are resisting or objecting,  more...
• deal with difficult people, more...
• calm people down when they are aggressive or complaining,  more...
• persuade, sell or negotiate strongly but in a win-win atmosphere without becoming entrenched in fruitless argument or appearing arrogant, more...
• resolve conflict and disagreement in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding,  more...
• confront difficult issues without being aggressive or over-familiar,  more...
• stand up for what I think or want without getting a reputation for being arrogant or difficult,  more...
• disagree without getting into conflict,  more...
• say "no" without causing resentment,  more...
• be firm but fair – "tough on the issue but soft on the person",  more...
• give really bad news without appearing arrogant or heartless,  more...
• give genuine praise without being over-familiar or making people feel patronised,  more...
• criticise without making people feel attacked,  more...
• receive criticism without appearing defensive or arrogant,  more...
• appraise, counsel, coach or mentor helpfully,  more...
• handle resistance and negativity in a meeting with confidence and grace. more...

What kind of a learning experience will I have on this emotional intelligence (EQ) training course?

Our intention as trainers is to help you develop and practise the skills of emotional intelligence in as relaxed and practical a way as possible. We're not trying to change you as a person, though this training will almost certainly make a difference to how you're perceived by others. Nor do we tell you how you ought  to behave, though we do aim to give you a wider choice of ways of behaving than you previously thought you had.

A central part of this emotional intelligence training is the feedback you receive.  All the feedback is geared to increasing your emotional intelligence.  The course is a kind of safe laboratory in which you're encouraged to experiment as much as you like and collect feedback. The feedback is about your behaviour, i.e., what you say and the way you say it, and its emotional effect on people. The feedback is factual, specific and constructive - it's all about how people feel when you're communicating with them.

Participants are discouraged from making sweeping negative judgements and criticisms about each other, and instead encouraged to help each other collect answers to the following four very personal questions. These are the questions that will develop your practical emotional intelligence:-

• Precisely what emotional effect am I having on others - both the positive and the negative?  In other words, how am I making them feel?
• Precisely what behaviour on my part are they reacting to? In other words, what exactly am I saying or doing, even unintentionally, that might be having that emotional effect on them?
• Exactly how do I need to change my behaviour if I want to get a different, more emotionally intelligent emotional response from them? (Even small, subtle changes in your approach can have a big effect on how others experience and perceive you.)
• What inner obstacle might make it hard for me to keep up my new approach, and including more emotional intelligence in my communcation with others?  In other words, what old attitudes and patterns of thought and behaviour do I need to unlearn and let go of if the change to my emotional intelligence skills is to be genuine and lasting?

Most of your time on the course is spent not in lectures but in action in situations like the ones you have to handle at work. In order to help you make up your mind whether or not you want change your approach you can see yourself on video and receive lots of feedback about your behaviour and its emotional affect. This is followed by further practice, coaching and feedback until you’re satisfied you are able to come over as you intend and achieve the outcome you want with people. That's the whole purpose of emotional intelligence training.

To make sure you get enough personal attention from the trainer, group size is limited to six. 

Do we use a written EQ test on this emotional intelligence training course?

No, we don't use a written test. Yes, there are questionnaires designed to measure EQ.  The reason why we don't use them is because our objective is simply to help you connect more successfully with people in the workplace. This emotional intelligence training is practical not theoretical. The term emotional intelligence is an abstract way of talking about something concrete - the success of your interactions with people. For practical purposes it doesn't matter what your starting point is, and it's never too late to improve. You'll improve the success of your interactions with people (i.e., your emotional intelligence) as soon as you start practicing the two central skills we call assertiveness and empathy.

You can check on how your emotional intelligence is progressing by asking for honest and immediate feedback from others about how you're making them feel. This approach is not theoretical but practical - here's how you can obtain such feedback:-

• Instead of asking how good a listener someone thinks you are, we’ll train you to say much more emotionally intelligent things like, “I’m not sure how well I’m listening to you. It would help me listen better if you could tell me, on a ten point scale, how understood I’m making you feel?” 
• This question isn’t difficult for them to answer.  The score they give you, though subjective, is reliable.  If they say 8 or above you’ll know you're performing well as a listener.  If it’s 7 or below you know they’d like you to improve your performance by paying more attention to what they’re trying to tell you and listening with more emotional intelligence.

This is the kind of feedback you'll be able to get a great deal of on this emotional intelligence training course, and it'll be of immediate help in enabling you to connect better with people. Once you’ve developed the skill and confidence to give and get direct feedback there’s no need to remain on the dark about how well you’re connecting with people or what score you'd get on a written emotional inteligence test.

Can this emotional intelligence training be done in-house?

Yes. We take a lot of trouble to identify precisely what the need is by speaking first on a private and confidential basis, with both individuals concerned and also with their managers. Our aim is to make sure the training is totally relevant to the needs both of the organisation and the individuals. Here are three examples of common organisational needs for which emotional intelligence training is highly relevant:-

The need for senior managers to be able to give effective feedback to staff  There are few things with more power to motivate people to improve their performance than genuinely constructive feedback. Unfortunately many managers are afraid to talk straight to their staff. Their approach is either too soft, in which case it fails to get through. Or it's too tough, in which case it also fails because it puts people on the defensive. What works is to be simultaneously tough on the issue and soft on the person.  This calls for training in the skills of emotional intelligence.  It's not beyond the reach of most managers to develop these skills.

The need to improve the quality of the customer experience  This is now a highly competitive issue for many companies. Customers quickly sense whether or not they're being handled with emotional intelligence when things go wrong (although they probably call it emotional intelligence). When they are  handled with emotional intelligence their experience is positive. When they're not  it's negative. Training in emotional intelligence for customer liaison or technical support people can therefore be a very worthwhile investment.

The need to be more successful at the management of organisational change  It's not uncommon for people to become irrationally resistant in times of change. Managers' instinct is often to try to suppress resistance, but this only makes it stronger. It requires emotional intelligence training to change managers' approach to a more understanding and less repressive one - but the results can be dramatic.

Yet more reasons why you might benefit
from management training in emotional intelligence

• Talking openly about feelings goes against the grain for you. It's something you've always avoided doing. 
• You've always thought the ability to communicate about feelings was an aspect of your personality, not something you can learn to do with emotional intelligence training.
• In your family of origin people never talked much about feelings, and you've naturally acquired the same habit to avoid talking with emotional intelligence.
• In the organisation you work in people rarely talk about feelings. If you start doing it won't you stick out like a sore thumb as someone who's just come off an emotional intelligence training course?
• You believe feelings are seen as a sign of weakness. It's better to keep quiet about them, or people will take advantage.
• You realise that the emotional atmosphere at work affects the quality of the work people do, but you've no idea how to improve it.
• You don't know whether it would be worth your while learning to talk about feelings, to manage feelings, to pay more attention to your own and other people's feelings by improving your emotional intelligence.
• Far from learning to be more transparent about your feelings, your habit is to try to conceal them.
• You're never been very confident in your social awareness or in your ability to manage relationships.
• You don't trust your feelings.

Is there more information on this website
relevant to emotional intelligence?

Yes. You might also find our pages on skills with people and communication skills relevant and helpful.