Emotional Intelligence
Training Exercises and Resources

This exercise helps delegates explore the concept of temperament, understand what it means, how it is formed and how it can influence their emotional intelligence. Temperament refers to aspects of an individual’s personality that are mainly biological or innate as opposed to learned. Temperament is basically life-long traits that we have acquired early on in life or simply inherited. Here are some examples:

• “I am shy in social settings. I feel uncomfortable if I suddenly find myself at the centre of attention. I guess it comes from my childhood when I was brought up to be a quiet kid.”
• “I was never very sporty or physical when I was growing up so engaging in sports these days doesn’t appeal to me much. Where I grow up, it was frowned upon for girls to do sports.”
• “I like talking. If I enter a room and it is quiet I have the strongest urge to talk and get everyone to listen. I got this from my mom I guess...” [Carries on talking for a while until stopped!]
• “I have always been sporty, even though I was a girl I always liked any sport even if they were predominantly for boys. I guess I got this from my dad who was very athletic.”

In this exercise, delegates explore the nature of their temperament and discuss this with others to better understand what it means.

This exercise helps delegates to understand and appreciate the power of eye contact and how it can affect emotional connection and emotional states. It is ideal in teaching emotional intelligence, body language and communication skills.

You can get the most from this exercise with the follow up discussions so make sure you allocate enough time for this.

Use this exercise to motivate people and help them to view an experience differently. This exercise is fairly simple to execute and yet quite effective. The essence of the exercise is to show that even the most negative experiences can be quite educational and useful in the long run and that if one does not see the benefits, others might be able to see it and bring it to their attention. This exercise is also useful to practice improving emotional intelligence and empathising with others.

All of us go through some experiences in life where we feel victimised or wronged. The negative emotions and feelings generated by these experiences can stay with us for a long time afterwards and make us feel overtly emotional, weak, stupid or even unworthy. One way to deal with this emotional baggage is to acknowledge it and take responsibility for it. The idea here is that sharing difficult experiences and the feelings generated by them will allow delegates to acknowledge them to another person and therefore more easily come into terms with them.

This exercise helps illustrate an important point on body language. As soon as we see a person, we read their body language quickly to establish their mood and we can be fairly good at this. The problem is that the mood of the interaction is then set from that point onwards and this can be contagious. This emotional contagion can then work against us as we may react with the same negative emotions even when there is no cause for it. The exercise helps people see this non-verbal phenomenon and increases their awareness. For example, this can help people at workplace to control their body language when interacting with colleagues and also helps them not to get affected by other people’s moods and emotions, thereby improving their relationships.

This is a simple exercise that anyone can use to measure his self-awareness. Simply think about answering a series of questions and through that become more aware of how you feel and how others feel about you.

Knowing how we feel is part of our self-awareness. The more we are aware of our feelings, the better we can control our behaviours and understand those of others. This exercise helps delegates to become more aware of their emotions and learn to describe them. It also encourages them to think of ways to get to a target emotion, such as happiness.

The purpose of this exercise is to help delegates understand the concept of crowd contagion. This is particularly applicable to business meetings where emotional comments can easily lead to a suboptimal meeting. Crowd contagion captures the idea that emotions are contagious and if not controlled come to dominate a group meeting. If one person becomes angry, others are likely to become angry soon as the emotion is passed from one person to the next.

Some leaders seem to be too controlling. They want to exert their power and position on others to get them do what they want. On the other hand, some leaders seem to understand others and are much friendlier and open to new ideas. They seem to be much more logical and are viewed much more positively than those who are too controlling.

Research shows that those who are too controlling of others and their environment are usually insecure. Their insecurity is expressed by forcing others to comply and they see this as the only way to bring balance to their world.

This exercise helps delegates to become more aware of this concept and learn how to ask questions from themselves on how they treat others.

This simple exercise allows team members to share important information about their life with each other. The aim is to gain a better understanding of why people behave in a certain way and to help putting team members' actions into perspective.