Co- led class- Emotional Intelligence

I saw the blank slot- all three of them actually so that prompted me to sign up for the class.

As I thought about it, it seemed intimidating at first.  For whatever reason, be it worldview, personality type, age even, or just the age old curse of being really passive [or really shy].  That’s what was my mentality going into the whole thing.  As they say it’s better to be fearful than arrogant and over confident.  Plus working with two more than likely ambitious, motivated, and driven ladies really had me re calibrating the whole situation.

They were great.

Emotional Intelligence was a great opportunity because I’ve been told I possess a decent amount of it and I was curious as to why some would diagnose me as such.  It was an interesting process just learning about EI in this particular setting of leadership because I find emotional intelligence fascinating in general in the relational aspect.  Previous inquiries have told me that women possess a far more greater capacity to be emotionally intelligent than men.  As the two articles were presented I could easily see the primary audience of this topic being men as males [in my strictest opinion] hold most top leadership/ executive roles.  And one of the causes of “derailment” being lack of interpersonal relationships  among male executives, I found this to be an opportune time to observe this phenomenon in a class room of a statistically proven high EI group.

The results were somewhat surprising.

Some of the activities we had planned went according to “plan”, while some others I noticed a more and highly sensitive empathy tactic was deployed.  The most surprising bit being when groups were prompted to vote off a member; the outcast was quite okay and actually advocated for self removal because of the skill set in which they possessed implying that they had the best chances to survive.  A keen framing/ contextual effect was used here and I thought that was awesome.  I don’t think I would have approached it the same way honestly.  There was far less confrontation in this particular stage of the main activity as well [the Relatedness and Fairness sections] than anticipated and expected.  That was the one area I guess we tried to over compensate for.  I felt that Maddie and Amanda did very well as Maddie was the brain trust for most of the ideas behind the activities.  Not to say I wasn’t pulling my load for the class, but it was very clear that she had put considerable thought into the whole matter.  I commend and admire her for that.  Amanda did well as she carried her sections throughout the activity as well.

The class was very receptive to the way and structure the day played out.  All were very cooperative and willing [not to mention very patient] with us, especially me.  I was simply trying to not blow it and hold the group back.  Both and all were kind to me and cared to understand  my role in the whole process.

Overall it was a success and I learned a great deal.