An ironic choice perhaps, given tomorrow I will be giving a talk entitled “I don’t want to be a manager…now what?”, but on the other hand this term (which is all of a week old) I have just started being an ADoS which involves ‘managing’ a small group of teachers amongst other things (again, the irony of this, given tomorrow’s talk, is not lost on me!) and I am hoping I might pick up something useful here…

Elena runs a language school in central Russia, she does some teacher training and emotional intelligence training. She works with people (like most of us) and she helps ELT teachers/managers to develop a friendly learning environment to keep both students and teachers happy, as that is key to success in language learning. She has studied a lot about emotions – how to regulate own emotions and manage them in others – and it’s relevant for working with teachers. Emotions are something that humans have and we have to deal with them in order to do our job better.

The talk structure:

• What is emotion?
• What is EI?
• 4 parts of EI
• How to develop EI
• Follow up – do you lead with EI?

Emotion

Emotion comes from the latin for movement, something that moves. The reaction in humans to the environment outside or inside our bodies. Being a manager/coach/teacher, we do not always need to be “happy”. It’s not about being happy or fun all the time. There are no positive or negative emotions. It is a complex cocktail of emotions that drive us in work. We need all emotions to live. “Negative” emotions can be life-saving or help us achieve goals too.

EI is the capacity for recognising and appropriately managing our feelings and those of others. 4 domains: recognising our feelings and those of others, managing of our feelings, and those of others. Being an effective manager is not only about task setting etc but also about rapport, trust, the feeling of team, organisational culture, and how the manager does that is all emotional intelligence competences. The same with teaching in the classroom, we need to build rapport with students, interpersonal relationships have a big effect.

4 basic components of EI

= self-awareness, other awareness, self management and managing emotions of others. The good news is, EI can be trained. The bad news is you can’t jump straight into the fourth component!

Self awareness – understanding the ability to be aware of our own emotions. Being able to recognise what we feel and hopefully to understand why. It’s a physical reaction, sometimes you can identify the reaction in your body e.g. anger = tension, loud voice, sweating, red face. If you are nervous, your stomach is tense. If you are scared, your heart will race. The problem with self-awareness is that the only way to train it is self-reflection. <We had to do a little activity and then say how we felt after – there were lots of different reactions> Then, write as many words as you can describing emotions and feelings. Mine: Excited, happy, sad, upset, disappointed, amused, bereft, jumpy, agitated, anxious, stressed, relaxed, chilled, angry, frustrated, worried, delighted. The point is that to self-reflect, we need some words to describe our feelings. The vocabulary. There are 3-4000 words that describe feelings. Why do we need it? Emotions are very different and in order to understand what we really feel and proceed with regulating the feeling, we need a fine-tuned tool to name it. If we only have “good” or “bad”, it won’t help a lot. So we need to develop emotional vocabulary and become able to name our emotions. Meditating, writing/journalling, reading. Set a reminder in your smartphone with a question: What are you feeling? Randomly and during the day, when you get the reminder, stop for a second and identify what and why.

Self-management – the problem is, the emotions we feel lead to (sometimes unpredictable) behaviour. Of course we don’t want to do that in the office (or with our family!) <We looked at some situations and had to write what we usually feel and do. Child spills milk on carpet – annoyed but oh well sh*t happens. Overwhelmed but your boss gives you more work – anxious and ‘how the fk should I do all this?’ Etc. Then we had to write down how we would like to react. So for the first, maybe I want to stay calm and not be annoyed. For the second, again I probably want to stay calm. How to get from 1 to 2?

1. recognise that you are having an emotional reaction
2. label the emotion
3. determine what triggered the emotion
4. choose what you want to feel and what you want to do
5. actively shift/downshift your emotional state

Then we had to discuss ideas for no 5. Take a walk/step back, talk about it, write down how you feel. We also discussed tendency to avoid confrontation where possible.

Suggestions from Elena:

• Shift your mental focus
• Change your posture
• Smile (looks silly but works!)
• Give yourself a hug (or hug someone else!)
• Dance
• Breathe (count in 1-2, out 1-2-3-4)
• Watch your language
• Rituals (e.g. making a cup of tea) – gives you time and possibility to slow down.

If the level of emotion is very high, cognitive level dips and vice versa, so thinking/focusing on something lets your emotional level go down.

Awareness of others (aka empathy)

How can we get an idea of how other people feel? Ask them! Be a bit careful about this – in some places there is no culture of sharing emotions and they may be taken aback if you ask directly. So you could use indirect questions. Never use “If I were you…” because you aren’t and never will be that person.

Managing emotion of others

The algorithm is quite simple. We need to know our goal in the communication and have an understanding of what emotion is required to achieve that. When we regulate our feelings, people will start to mirror. If someone is shouting and you respond in shouting, then the situation will escalate. If you speak in a calm voice, then you can de-escalate it. There are lots of steps that lead from a calm emotional state to a highly charged emotional state and the same is true in reverse. Calm voice, rituals, hugs, smile etc.

• recognise and understand your emotion
• that of a partner
• define the goal reflecting both of your interests
• choose what emotional state will help reach the goal
• bring yourself to this state
• help partner to feel appropriate emotion

The best way is to avoid things getting emotionally charged. Build trust, listen. If someone is upset, firstly:

• Let them talk
• Say verbally what you think s/he feels
• Stay calm, do not rise your voice, control your gestures
• identify what you can agree with and say “yes” (there is always something you can!)
• Agree with facts but do not get into details
• Accept the importance of the problem
• Show empathy
• Show empathy again

Elena also showed us a tool called Do you lead with emotional awareness? Which is from http://www.hbr.org Caveat: be skeptical of these tests, it’s not like testing IQ or language knowledge, it’s more about testing your behaviour in different situations, which is influenced by cultural background, upbringing etc. It’s just to have fun with. This test shows your position and majority position and gives you some recommendations of things to look at.

ekuz@interlingua.edu.ru @1expertedu