Advanced Emotional Intelligence:
Interpersonal Skills

"Be not disturbed at being misunderstood; be disturbed rather at not being understanding."

Chinese proverb

Imagine a strong personality with powerful sense of presence that everyone seems to look up to. Would it not be wonderful to be this person? Knowing what to do and how to communicate with others in social settings is a skill we all need to master as we go through life. Some of us seem to be a lot better at this, which is perhaps to do with our upbringing or specific life experience in discovering the value of emotional intelligence. Fortunately, knowing how to efficiently navigate the social scene is a learnable skill and we can all become better at it by practicing and reflecting on our behaviour.

This course follows on from Emotional Intelligence course and allows delegates to focus more specifically on interpersonal skills. Delegates explore topics that fall under two main areas; social awareness and social facility. Within these areas, a range of EI competencies are explored such as empathy, attention, rapport building, understanding others, influence, acting and so on. You can use this course in combination with EI: Personal Skills to cover all of the competencies within EI.

The course is designed around a series of exercises that help delegates to practice communication skills by focusing on specific EI competencies. Through these exercises, delegates can explore various methods to deal with everyday social situations and discover what methods work best for them. Various examples such as business meetings, interaction with colleagues, managers or even friends are explored throughout the course.

Comprehensive guidelines are provided on how to run the exercises as well as suitable key points to discuss with delegates to raise awareness about specific areas. The workbook provides content for delegates to keep as reference for future so they can repeatedly go back to it to master the competencies.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Social Intelligence

• What is social intelligence?
• How does brain process emotions?
• How do we communicate and how can this communication fail?
• What is neural jujitsu and what are the implications?
• What is the role of social knowledge within EI?

Social Awareness

• What is social awareness?
• How can you build rapport?
• How do you react to people who express negative emotions and what are the implications?

Attention

• How can you achieve mutual attention?
• What are the physiological and psychological significance of eye contact?
• How can you show that you are paying attention?

Empathy

• How to show empathy
• How to show sympathy
• What verbal or nonverbal techniques are suitable to show empathy?
• What can you learn from examples of empathic communications?
• How to make empathic communication

Verbal and Nonverbal Synching

• How to mirror others and establish rapport
• What are the significant verbal and non verbal areas you can focus on to encourage others to open up?

Acting

• How can you show presence and charisma?
• What are the benefits of acting?
• How can you use acting to show confidence?
• How can you become better at acting by following a series of simple yet effective exercises?
• How should you use acting in a social setting to enhance your performance?

Influence

• What is priming?
• How can you take advantage of priming to influence others?
• What is crowd contagion?
• How can you influence meetings that are about to become toxic and guide them towards a direction of your choice?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: Emotional Intelligence. It is assumed that delegates are familiar with the basics of emotional intelligence as the course explicitly focuses on Interpersonal EI Competencies.

Course Duration: 1 Day.

Course Level: Advanced

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Identify social intelligence competencies and learn how the brain processes information and emotions
• Understand the importance of positive interaction with others and what it takes to establish rapport
• Keep your focus and show that you are paying attention
• Communicate empathically and strengthen your relationship with others
• Recognise other people’s contributions and improve your understating of others
• Use mirroring techniques to establish rapport with others through indirect and subconscious signals
• Act according to your desired target, show presence and appear charismatic
• Influence others and manage runaway emotions in social encounters and guide the interaction towards a direction of your choice.
• Monitor your relationship with others and be aware of the consequences of concern

Emotional intelligence is divided into a number of competencies. The focus of this course is on social intelligence. EI went main stream in the 1990s, though since then there has been significant research in social science, neuroscience and countless studies on behaviour and EI.

This course takes advantage of recent research in this area and focuses on helping delegates to practice communication skills. It is assumed that delegates already know EI, so this course builds on that by introducing results of new studies on human behaviour and how our brain communicates emotionally.

The course is structured around several exercises and the content is presented in such way to lead to these exercises. Since this is an advanced course, trainers are encouraged to spend more time during these exercises, engage in discussions and go through examples related to the exercises to cover key points. Comprehensive instructions are provided to facilitate trainers to achieve this aim.

Being good at social intelligence is sometimes all about awareness of some key concepts such as mirroring, empathy, priming and so on. Hence, the course is full of key study results which trainers can easily expand on using the references provided.

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