On the evening of April 24, AustCham South China, in collaboration with BenCham PRD, held a workshop on “The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace ”at the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Our EQ coach that night was Ms. Mette Pausgaard from Mimir Consulting. Mette is an excellent individual and team coach in emotional intelligence, coaching and conflict resolution. 25 guests from very different industries joined our workshop and explored together the topic of how to develop our emotional intelligence in the workplace.
At the beginning of the workshop, Mette introduced to us about the importance of the emotional intelligence in the workplace. Many people would pay attention to develop their leadership skills, but few people would pay attention to develop their emotional intelligence in their work. Mette let us close our eyes and feel our emotions at the moment and reflect on how often we had the emotions of anger, fear, joy, sadness and so on. Then she introduced to us the functions of different sections of our brains. She compares “dinosaur” to our reptilian brain and “owl” to our logical brain. And our “owl” can control our “dinosaur”. Our sub-conscious mind can process 11 million bits per second while our conscious mind can process 7 bits or pieces per second. EQ is actually all about making decisions and these decisions are made by our sub-conscious mind at most of the time. And these decisions are affecting our behaviors and words. So better controlling on the decisions we make can help us improve our performance.
To begin the activity of exploring how our participants can improve their emotional intelligence, Mette introduced to us the six qualities of engaging leaders. And then Mette let our participants form 6 groups in which the group members hadn’t met each other before. Each group will discuss about a quality of engaging leader. And first of all, each group member put two crosses on the poster to indicate how important they think the quality is and how significant is this quality in the workplace at the moment. Step two, the group of four made use of the advice on the cards stuck around the posters and narrowed down the distance of the crosses that the group members had marked. The six groups began their enthusiastic discussion over the their own topics under the guidance of Coach Mette. After discussion, each group came out their own conclusions and reflection on their topics.
In the Q&A session, our participant put forward some questions. For example, how we should act when people show their anger towards us; how we can get to know our “owl” and “dinosaur”, etc. The most important thing that Mette stressed was that we should act consciously and be aware of how we behave at present.
Special thanks to the the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for providing the venue, our white wine sponsor Food & Wine Exports Asia and our beer sponsor Duvel. Thanks our participants for their enthusiastic participation and Mette Pausgaard for the excellent lecture. We look forward to your participation in our future events!
