Issue 3 April 2005 Welcome to Issue 03 of AppliedEI – the ezine that answers how to put emotional intelligence into practice. In the April issue we bring you part 2, the conclusion, of Tim Sparrow’s The Lowdown on EI Measurement. A fantastic resource showing how to select the right EI profiling tool for your requirements. In Experiential Learning and EI, Amanda Knight explains (from personal experience) how outdoor challenges can provide ideal opportunities for teams and individuals to develop and apply emotional intelligence. In With a little help from our friends… Amanda also introduces the CAEI’s partners JCA (Occupational Psychologists) Ltd and Activate. Each of our feature articles this month expands on their work with us and goes some way to illustrate the breadth and depth of the Centre’s approach to applying emotional intelligence. This month we include the second of the CAEI’s Eight Principles of AppliedEI – No one else can control our feelings. And we continue our illustration of applied emotional intelligence with a moving example of Regard for Others taken from Cooper and Sawaf’s Executive EQ. Issue 03 is in pdf format as a complete ezine. This means if you prefer to print off the whole copy, as opposed to just the articles, your complete version will now be completely aligned and accurately formatted. You are welcome to use the content of this ezine – we request that you credit the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence www.appliedei.co.uk or www.emotionalintelligence.co.uk whenever you do. All the content is copyright the CAEI unless otherwise acknowledged. How many people do you know who would be interested in receiving AppliedEI? Just click on the link opposite so that they can receive this issue and then subscribe if they wish. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions and suggestions on e-zine@appliedei.co.uk Maureen Bowes Editor In this Issue: Experiential learning and EI Feature article – The Lowdown on EI Measurement (Pt 2) Introduction to the CAEI’s Eight Principles No. 2 Profile of the CAEI’s partners – JCA and Activate An Example of AppliedEI – Regard for Others Products and Services listing

Activate and JCA (Occupational Psychologists) Ltd are partners of the CAEI www.activate-training.co.uk www.jca.biz

“Come along to our ropes course, and try it for yourself.” he said. So I did. I merrily traipsed along one rather cloudy afternoon to a quiet, leafy idyll in the heart of the New Forest. “This will be a great place to bring corporate groups,” I thought to myself “to get them out in the fresh air, working together and building some personal bonds and camaraderie.”

Then I saw it. The ropes course. Or should I say the high ropes course. That’s when I first noticed an uneasy feeling somewhere inside of me. “This is our ropes course – great isn’t it? Fantastic for helping people step out of their comfort zones and achieve personal challenges.” he enthused. “Yeah, it’s great.” I lied. I could feel the colour beginning to drain from my cheeks.

I’d never been good with heights. From quite a young age I’d become very quickly aware of my mortality. I never took physical risks, and had never broken a bone in my body.

“You’ll need to put this on,” he explained, handing me what turned out to be a sit harness, “and one of these – a chest harness”. And as he handed me a wonderfully flattering ‘brain protector’, the feeling of dread began to spread from the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t get out of this – the realisation hit me hard. Somewhere deep inside I knew this was going to be an important experience, not just for me, but for the many people I hoped to bring this experience to subsequently. I had to walk my talk. There’s no way I could put people through this experience without having done it myself. Me and my damned principles!

He started talking to me about comfort zones, and ‘challenge by choice’ … “You’ll be perfectly safe – we use the most advanced rope systems that have an excellent safety record.” “Yeah, but nothing’s 100% safe,” I reassured myself.

The next few minutes were a bit of a haze really. I remember him tying some pink rope through my harnesses, reassuring me that the ‘figure of 8’ knot was a self-tightening knot. I then vaguely recall starting to climb up a telegraph pole like a BT engineer. My heart was starting to pump like a steam engine.

“Now step on to the beam Amanda,” I heard someone saying in the dim distance. My vision seemed to have become myopic. All I could see in front of me were trees – well, the boughs of tall pine trees. “Whatever you do, don’t look down,” I commanded to myself. So I did. That’s when the wave of fear came rushing up through my body to my throat. “Oh my God, I’m stuck … I can’t move.” I wanted to cry, to get the hell out of there. “But remember, Amanda, you need to do this – you know really you want to do this.” “Yes, but I might die! What if I fall and he lets go of the rope, and I plummet to the ground … Oh my God, what am I doing here?”

My arms were at this point wrapped around the telegraph pole. I was glued to it, like a limpet. Hell or high water wouldn’t be able to shift me. For 15 minutes I was up there, tree hugging at altitude. I didn’t want to go back down, but I couldn’t move forward either. I was stuck, paralysed with fear. Fear of dying … fear of failing.

He was very patient. In hindsight of course I realised he knew exactly what he was doing … and what I was going through. During those long 15 minutes I could hear gentle, reassuring noises floating up to my ears. “Yeah, yeah, of course you’d say that – I bet you say that to everyone,” I sulked. And then suddenly, out of the blue, he asked me, “Amanda – do you trust me?”

It was like I’d been in hysteria and someone had slapped me round the face to bring me to my senses. The realisation of my self-centredness suddenly hit me. I’d been so wrapped up in my experience, my anxiety, my feelings, that I hadn’t even considered that I was actually being supported by someone.

“Oh God, of course I bloody trust him.” The remorse and the relief flushed back down through my body, pouring oil over the troubled waters of my fears. A peace came over me, and suddenly my focus sharpened with such intensity that the branches and the leaves around me glowed with a new vibrant vitality. My body gradually released its grip on the telegraph pole, until I was just touching it with one fingertip. This is it, the moment to let go, and trust. I inched along the beam, a slow exhilaration beginning to build inside as I realised with such relief that I was actually doing it!

I reached the other end, and a smile began to form on my face. I breathed a huge deep breath. “Can I come down now?” I urged him. “Of course – just come back into the middle of the beam, face away from me, and sit backwards into your harness.” Suddenly I could feel the panic rising again. To face away from him would be to lose contact, and then to sit backwards into fresh air … “Come on girl, you can do this. Look what you’ve just achieved. Remember, you trust him, he does this all the time. Hundreds of people have done this same short trip down to terra firma.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and prayed, as I sat backwards … I opened my eyes to find myself sitting in a swing, gently being lowered towards the ground.

That experience had a profound effect on me, personally and professionally. I reflected for some time on what had gone on for me – the different thoughts and feelings that had whizzed round my head and through my body, and how they had impacted on my ability to make any kind of decision or move.

Whilst it’s not every day you hang around on a high ropes course, I was able to recognise the patterns of responses that happen within me when I’m feeling anxious or fearful. I then started to work with the concept of building experiential challenges into the development of emotional intelligence.

With advances in developmental thinking, encompassing the concepts of Multiple Intelligences, Heart/Brain learning and particularly emotional intelligence, we’re creating a new breed of development training. Deeper understanding of how we learn, what makes us tick, how our emotions (like it or not) are intrinsic to our decision-making, has led to a change in the way training programmes need to be structured. The immediacy of personal learning in the outdoor environment makes its validity as a development training medium suddenly so much more apparent.

As Amanda experienced, the learning process is accelerated through experiential learning ~ learning by doing. This requires the creation of stimulating learning experiences using a range of development tools and challenges adapted to the developmental needs of the learner.

“I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand” (Chinese proverb)

Experiential learning facilitates emotional learning:

We can understand how our behaviour is an expression of our emotions
We can experience how our emotions cannot be separated from the body or the mind
We are able to recognise how moods are created and how they can be managed
We can build our self-esteem and regard for others

By using real challenges in real situations in real time, experiential learning creates the ideal environment in which to practise and develop new personal attitudes, skills and habits.

Experiential learning, and in particular, outdoor experiential learning, facilitates personal growth.

Personal growth can be viewed as making new connections in any of several directions:
upward to achieve one’s full potential;
outward to make contact and encounter others;
inward to increase our awareness of who we are, and what we want, need, sense, feel, think and do;
and
downward to touch earth, to be grounded, and to connect
(Giges and Rosenfeld)
This model suggests that individuals grow through their potential, their relationships with others, their self-knowledge and their connection with the environment - all of which are experienced through an outdoor experiential learning programme.

How the outdoor environment accelerates learning
The outdoors in particular is highly conducive to immediate personal growth spurts! This vastly under-rated medium is viewed by most either in trepidation, recalling the images of people being forced to swim beneath a boat in a freezing Scottish loch, or as a bit of a ‘jolly’ ~ great fun, but where’s the business relevance in a pile of rope, planks and barrels?

Of course, as with most things, the memory remains, whilst the reality moves on.

First and foremost the outdoors creates a ‘neutral’ environment – away from offices and hotel conference rooms. It is a great leveller ~ and immediately reduces and has the potential to eliminate hierarchy – people can come into their own.

Immediately we can identify people’s different attitudes towards the unknown, change, comfort and security, and facing irrational fears.

For many it provides new and unexplored experiences (like Amanda’s first experience on a high ropes course). It can be challenging but ultimately should always be positive for real learning to stay with you.

The outdoor challenge provides an opportunity to experience emotional situations out of context of the ‘real’ memory. We can experience a different outcome. We can develop our presence ~ presence of mind. “Yes this is reminding me of a bad experience, but actually is it the same?”

The outdoor challenge also requires us to deal with the combination of emotional and logical thinking ~ dealing with fear and working out what to do next. This demonstrates how emotions can inhibit, and indeed enhance, logic and action. “What’s the worst that can happen here?”

The outdoors takes us ‘out of context’ of our everyday lives so that we can explore our familiar emotions in a different context and gain a different perspective on them. We can explore our potential in a safe, natural and neutral environment.

At the same time, for any organisation to justify sending employees away from the workplace the outdoor experience needs to be practical and relevant. It is also important to make the learning relevant to the needs of the group or individual by relating issues and key learning points directly back to the workplace or appropriate ‘real life’ situations.

It needs to:

have practical scenarios with learning which is directly transferable to the workplace
be in real time requiring planning, teamwork and leadership
have real challenges exploring beliefs, behaviours and emotions

The perfect combination
But the experiential challenges themselves need to sit within a developmental framework to enable learning to be explored, reflected upon, and taken forward.

Through our own continuous research and exploration we find that emotional intelligence always sits at the heart of any personal development issue.

A simple formula for developing emotional intelligence, comes from Timothy Gallwey, the sports psychologist, who wrote the ‘Inner Game of Tennis’, and other ‘Inner Game’ books. This simple formula states:

Performance = potential – interference

The key is to identify, manage, and ultimately dismantle the interferences that impact on the achievement of potential, and which inhibit performance. Emotional intelligence is in fact about this process of managing our interferences.

By combining emotional intelligence with experiential learning, particularly outdoor experiential learning, we are able to create programmes that facilitate true personal learning which then has a direct impact on an individual’s performance and effectiveness.

Using the P = p - i formula for reviewing experiential challenges, we can help people develop themselves in terms of their emotional learning, achieving potential, and enhancing relationships with others.

The formula works just as well on macro levels with a team, a department or indeed a whole organisation. Here’s an example of how it can be used in an experiential review of a team task:

	TASK	TEAM	INDIVIDUAL
PERFORMANCE	What did the team actually achieve?	How well did you relate to each other as a team?	How well did your individual effectiveness contribute to the team?
POTENTIAL	What was the potential? ~ objectives, ideal etc	What additional qualities could the team have demonstrated?	What more could you have done as individuals to help the team achieve its potential?
INTERFERENCE	What got in the way of achieving the full potential of the task?	What inhibited the team from working together at your optimum?	What were you feeling or saying to yourself that inhibited your own performance?
IMPROVING PERFORMANCE	How would you undertake the task differently next time?	What have you learned about the team’s relationships that you will take forward?	What have you learned about yourself in this exercise?

As for Amanda’s experience, 6 years on, she’s still working with high ropes courses and all manner of outdoor and indoor challenges through Activate to help people develop their emotional intelligence. And yes, she does revisit the high ropes course herself every now and again.

“I now have a healthier fear of heights! It’s still there but it’s more rational than before, and I’m able to manage my internal interferences so much more easily now that I’ve brought them out and examined them in the cold light of day. Particularly interesting for me has been the realisation that these interferences are made up of both thoughts and feelings, and how they are intrinsically linked, perpetuating one another and stifling one’s ability to move forward or to make clear, comfortable decisions. Creating experiential learning opportunities through which people can explore this aspect of themselves is an essential part of developing emotional intelligence.”

Last month we looked at the difficulties inherent in measuring Emotional Intelligence, and at the history of EI measurement – how it has evolved. Now we look at the requirements of EI measures for different purposes, and summarise our conclusions.

Why are you measuring EI?
The other big issue about measuring emotional intelligence is what you are trying to use the measure for.

Broadly speaking there are two reasons for measuring EI: to assess people (usually for recruitment or selection purposes); and as a basis for personal development. The criteria for choosing a measure for each of these purposes will be different.

To begin with, if you are selecting a measure for development purposes it is important that the process of administering the measure, feeding the results back to the respondent, and handling their responses to them, should be a process which facilitates the development of EI in the respondent, rather than the opposite.

The normal model of psychometric testing involves, in our view, an emotionally unintelligent process, along the lines of a medical diagnosis and treatment. Here’s what we mean. Below are 3 models of intervention. Which one to you seems to be the emotionally intelligent process?

The Medical Model
(1) Diagnosis	(by doctor)
(2) Selection of treatment	(by doctor)
(3) Application of treatment	(by doctor)
(4) Treatment consequence	(in patient)
The Medical Model in Testing
(1) Diagnosis	(by test, interpreted by professional)
(2) Selection of treatment	(by professional)
(3) Application of treatment	(by professional)
(4) Treatment consequence	(in profilee)
The Empowerment Model
(1) Increase in self knowledge	(in coachee)
(2) Selection of change plan	(in coachee)
(3) Implementation of plan	(by coachee)
(4) Chosen change achieved	(in coachee)

The first two models seem to us ‘parental’ or ‘authoritarian’ in their approach, so the second model is unlikely to foster emotional intelligence in the profilee.

The person who feeds back the findings of the measure to any profilee/coachee needs not only to be knowledgeable about the measure and about emotional intelligence, but also needs to have good skills as a facilitator, needs to be emotionally intelligent themselves, and needs to come from a position of non-judgment.

So what does an EI measure need to have so as to facilitate an empowering developmental process? It needs to be diagnostic rather than evaluative.

The test needs to convey as much information as possible so that the coachee can understand how their score was arrived at – i.e. which areas they scored themselves high in, and which areas are suitable for development and why. The information they need, we have found, includes a copy of the questionnaire, individual scores for each question, and a list of the items on which they scored low (in EI terms). Giving this information also has a significant impact on the issue of ownership.

In order to feed back a lot of information, you need to have a lot of information, and this is not necessarily the case with tests designed for assessment purposes. The way in which these are often designed (to obtain high item-item and item-scale reliability) means that the mean score effectively conveys only one piece of information. The score shows for example that the coachee is low on Goal Directedness, but does not explain which aspect(s) of Goal Directedness the coachee needs to develop. The score could have been brought down because the coachee has difficulty in knowing what they want and identifying their goals. Or it could be because they know what they want but distract themselves from going after it by paying attention instead to other people’s needs. Or it could be because they know what they want but interrupt their progress towards it by distracting themselves by other short term needs (like wanting a chocolate bar when their goal is to lose weight).

For diagnostic and development purposes, therefore, assessment tools are of little use.

Another important aspect that we mentioned just now is the issue of ownership. The test needs to provide the information in a way that the coachee can understand and take on board and make their own – otherwise their increase in self knowledge (stage 1 in the empowerment model) and consequently their ability to select an appropriate change strategy (stage 2) will be impaired. The difficulty here is that a lot of information and a lot of concepts are involved and some people may find it all overwhelming. What is important for this purpose, therefore, as well as inherently, is to have a clear and comprehensible conceptual model underlying the various scales and relating them to one another. And also not to have too many scales. A measure like the ECI-360 with its 25 scales all with the same ontological status is a lot for people to get their head around.

In our model there are two scales, which in combination, affect all the others. These are Self Regard, and Regard for Others. They correlate with the concept in Transactional Analysis (TA) of ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. If the coachee is low in either of these it is most improbable that they will be able to behave with truly high emotional intelligence in any of the other respects which may be measured. We spell out the relationship between scores on these two scales and scores on the other scales, and that – as well as in our view being an appropriate representation of reality – allows people to have a simple structure which holds all the scales together. Similarly the scores in the scales which measure Awareness (Self Awareness and Awareness of Others) are likely to cause high and low scores in other scales – you need these awarenesses in order to be able to carry out the aspects of self management and relationship management measured by the other scales.

Setting out a clear and comprehensible conceptual model underlying the measure, and sharing full details of their responses and scores with the coachee greatly enhances their ownership both of their responses and the whole process of dealing with them. In TA terms it becomes an ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’ respectful process, and quite apart from any change strategies adopted will in itself be enhancing of emotional intelligence.

If these are the criteria for a development measure of EI, what of an assessment measure: how are the criteria different?

An effective EI development measure will of its nature constitute an effective intervention in and of itself - just taking it, without getting feedback of the results. As and after they complete the measure, people tend to be stimulated and to start thinking about and reacting to the issues raised. And an effective measure will be addressing fundamental things about a person that should not be brought into awareness and then just left hanging. For these reasons it would not be ethical to administer such a measure without offering the people who complete it the opportunity to discuss their results with an appropriately qualified person. Obviously, this means that it is a non-starter for many recruitment campaigns: the cost of providing to all applicants an exploration interview with an appropriately skilled person would be too great. From this point of view, what is required is an EI measure for assessment purposes in a format which does not in and of itself raise awareness. Not statements which need to be consciously processed, therefore, but something like the list of adjectives which the Simmons EQ profile uses.

The other issue which bedevils EI measures to be used for recruitment and selection is that of faking. In a development measure, you can point out to the coachee that the only person they are going to be conning if they give an artificially inflated view of their emotional intelligence is themselves. And you can tease out and explore the reality of the picture conveyed by the responses in the interviews which follow. With an assessment measure there may be no feedback process to allow a check up. And most tests are designed in a way that makes it fairly clear which end of the scale is the ‘right’ one – any EI measure of this common form is not going to be suitable for assessment purposes. Once again, what is needed is something like a list of adjectives, checked quickly in a way which largely bypasses conscious thought.

So does this mean that the kind of effective development measure we have discussed cannot be used at all for assessment purposes? For standard recruitment, yes. But for high value posts, where the cost of bad judgment is great and it is worth spending a little on the recruitment process – such as the recruitment of graduates – then they can be used as part of an assessment centre type of recruitment process, including EI exploration interviews, for shortlisted candidates. That way, you not only have a good idea of their development needs, but those that you turn down will be remarkably well disposed towards your company because they will have had a useful development experience and will be able to use their increased self knowledge in the rest of their job-hunting.

So how can we overcome this problem of ‘faking’? A question linked to the self awareness issue we discussed earlier: people may give inaccurate answers about themselves either deliberately or out of lack of self awareness. Either way, the question arises: how can you check the validity of an individual’s answers about him/herself?

The obvious answer to this is to use a standard 360º procedure. However, since an EI measure which covers all the relevant aspects is going to take half an hour or so to complete, asking five or six other people, as well as the profilee, to complete the measure incurs a prohibitive time, and therefore cost, and motivation penalty. On the other hand, if we don’t use a 360º approach, we can’t trust the answers we get. How can we square the circle?

The best way we have found to achieve this is to add an extra scale “Self Assessed EI”, consisting of one question related to each of the other scales (or, for the bipolar scales, of the subscales measuring either end, and the middle, of the scale separately). This provides an “internal 360º”, by comparing the answers in the ‘Self Assessed EI’ scale to each corresponding scale.

This same final scale can also be amended slightly to create a simple and short 360º measure. The beauty of this is that it takes just 5 minutes for each rater to complete: the information output will not be as comprehensive as completing the whole questionnaire would have been, but the essence of the issues will be highlighted, which is all that is needed in the hands of a proficient EI consultant. So, without consuming an inordinate amount of time and money, we get the same outcome – an effective, insightful, EI-based 360º process.

Using an EI measure – the role of the EI consultant
There is a paradox here in that the empowerment model of EI measurement, although it returns to the person concerned the responsibility for planning and implementing personal change which will result in enhanced emotional intelligence, nonetheless has high requirements of the consultant who feeds back their results to them and helps them on the journey. They need to be knowledgeable about emotional intelligence, familiar with the particular measure being used, a skilled facilitator and coach, and emotionally intelligent themselves. This is one of the reasons why the CAEI encourages people to train on their nine month Certificate Course in Applied Emotional Intelligence, rather than just doing a two day product oriented training.

Summary and Conclusion
Given our stance that EI levels are largely determined by attitudes rather than by capacity, we see the requirements for an individual EI measure to be:

Must have a strong, comprehensible underlying conceptual model.

That model should give attitudes and values a central role.

	The measure should have enough scales to cover all the aspects of emotional intelligence, but not scales covering irrelevant extensions. Not too few (the EIQ has only seven), not too many (the ECI-360 has twenty five).

	The scales should not all have the same status, but the greater causal significance of some elements of EI should be acknowledged, and the scales should be inter-related.

	There should be a mixture of linear (“more is better”) and bipolar (“you can have too much of a good thing”) scales, to cope with the fact that some variables are linearly related to performance, and some produce an inverted U graph when plotted against performance.

	The bipolar variables should be measured in a way that distinguishes between scoring high in the middle (high EI) and scoring high at both ends and low in the middle (low EI).

	There should be provision for validating self awareness and the accuracy of the responses, that is not too expensive in terms of cost and the time needed for completion.

	For development purposes, the nature of the feedback to those who complete the measure should be full and detailed, enabling them to diagnose their own interferences, and they should be given skilled assistance to do so.

	For assessment purposes, the form of the measure should be such that it does not raise issues with respondents which require a follow up interview.

Colour coding:

	= uniquely true of the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire, designed by Tim Sparrow and Jo Maddocks, and marketed by JCA (Occupational Psychologists) Ltd

= true of the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire, and few others

= true of the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire

= not true of the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire.

From the foregoing, you will not be surprised to learn that for all purposes other than large scale assessment and recruitment we regard the IEq to be the individual EI measure of choice.

Part 1 of this article can be viewed online at: www.activateoutdoors/news/issue02.html

Printable version of this article

Principle No. 2
No-one else can control our feelings.

This one originally read; “We are each of us in control of, and responsible for, our feelings”, but people wouldn’t buy that. In the long run, we still believe that to be true, but in the short run we have to recognise that people have psychological buttons that other people can press. However, only if we let them. It is always us choosing what response to have.
The old psychological paradigm used to be
– a stimulus leads automatically to a corresponding response, and that would suggest that one person could control another’s feelings.
And then about fifty years ago academic psychologists got really sophisticated and realised that the full picture was:

– a stimulus goes into an organism, which is effectively a black box and we don’t know what goes on inside it, and then a response comes out of the organism, but it may not always be the same even when the stimulus is the same.
So we may give a number of people the same stimulus, and they will have different emotional responses, or the same person may have different emotional responses to the same stimulus on different occasions. This means we can give someone a pretty strong invitation to feel something, but they are in charge of how they respond.

© Tim Sparrow 2005
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

1.	We are each of us in control of and responsible for our actions.
2.	No one else can control our feelings.
3.	People are different: they experience the world differently; they feel different things; they want different things.
4.	However you are, and they are, is OK. Though this does not mean that whatever you and they do is necessarily OK.
5.	Feelings and behaviour are separate. Being in touch with our feelings does not mean being out of control of ourselves and our behaviour.
6.	Feelings are self-justified, to be accepted and important.
7.	Change is possible.
8.	All people have a natural tendency towards growth and health.

There has been much scepticism about emotional intelligence since it became popularised following Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book on the subject in the mid 1990s. By some, it was seen as merely the latest fad, or as just soft skills dressed up in another buzzword.
And some of this scepticism was justified, partly because some training organisations did jump on the bandwagon and re-label what they were already doing as EI, and also because organisations were looking for the quick fix and invested in EI on a short term basis only.

The CAEI’s original vision for EI back in 1999 was to create a standard for EI development that ensured that training interventions were ethical (for the individual) and effective (for the organisation). And this still stands today – for EI development to be effective it needs to be:

Individual-oriented – because each person’s EI development needs are different

Developmental – starting with an assessment and continuing with supported development

	About attitudes – developing emotionally intelligent attitudes and habits that lead to effective self and relationship management

Over time – to sustain the changes in attitudes and habits over the long term

Ethical – provided by qualified practitioners who have developed their own EI

A Powerful Alliance
We are delighted to be supported in our work in promoting this vision for EI by two organisations who share our passion for ethical and accessible EI development. Together, combining our individual strengths and energies, our three organisations are working to bring the CAEI’s powerful EI development programmes and resources to organisations and individuals throughout the UK and beyond.

The diagnostic: JCA are occupational psychologists. JCA’s Jo Maddocks developed the ‘ie’ and ‘te’ profiling tools with our founding director Tim Sparrow

The experiential: Activate are development training specialists who have pioneered the use of emotional intelligence with experiential learning.

Near the river the man and his wife spread quilts on the grass and prepared a meagre picnic lunch, asking me to join them. I shared the food I had in my pack. After the meal, I thanked the family and rose to leave.
‘Wait,’ said the father. ‘My son wishes to teach you a phrase in Tibetan.’ He motioned to one of the boys, who was about five years old. The little one stepped forward and looked me straight in the eyes. He said happily, ‘Tashi deley.’
I nodded, understanding, repeating the phrase. He smiled from ear to ear. ‘In Kham, in eastern Tibet,’ said the boy’s father to me, ‘we greet all people this way. For several years now, it is again allowed.’ I felt my chest tighten, remembering my experiences with the elder who, fifteen years before, had lost his entire family for saying such a greeting, a prayer, aloud. The man brought his palms together in front of his chest and his wife and children repeated the gesture. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘ I honour the greatness in you. I honour the place in your heart where lives your courage, honour, love, hope and dreams. I honour the place in you where, if you are at that place in you and I am at that place in me, there is only one of us. Tashi deley.’
Wordlessly, I brought my palms together in front of my heart and looked into the eyes of this family, people who, only an hour before, had been total strangers to me.
‘Tashi deley.’ I said.
‘Now, teach my children a word in English, please.’ asked the father in Tibetan.
I thought for a moment and said, ‘In America, when we greet each other we say “Hello”. I remembered a professor once telling me it was Thomas Eddison who had popularised the use of the word.
‘Hello!’ shouted the children, beaming. ‘Hello! Hello!’
I grinned at them. And then something happened that I will never forget. One of the youngest boys came up to me and tugged on my sleeve. ‘In America,’ he asked expectantly, ‘when people say ‘Hello,’ do they honour the greatness in each other?’
His question struck a chord in me. At once I felt tears brimming up in my eyes as I looked into his earnest, bright face. ‘No,’ I said, and then I added, ‘but I wish they did.’
Think about it. When you greet other people at work, in your travels and at home, what – exactly – do you feel? Do you look everyone in the eye? Without a word, do you honour the greatness in them, even if they are strangers? Or has greeting other human beings become, more often than not, a rote formality, something shallow and distant, going through the motions? It took a journey to Tibet to make me realise that, by and large, it had for me. It was then and there that I made a promise to myself that I would do all I could not to let it happen again.

Executive EQ Robert Cooper and Ayman Sawaf

Printable version of this article

Printable version of this article

Printable version of complete ezine

Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence
Buckholdt House, The Street, Frampton on Severn, Glos, GL2 7ED
Tel: 01452 741106 Fax: 01452 741520
Email: info@appliedei.co.uk
Web: www.emotionalintelligence.co.uk

Applied EI will use the email address you submit for the sole purpose of providing you with our monthly ezine. Applied EI will not sell or distribute your email address to third parties. Applied EI will honour all requests to unsubscribe from our ezine. All the contents of this e-zine are © CAEI 2005. For permission to reproduce any part for commercial purposes please contact the CAEI at the address above. ie and the ie logo, and te and the te logo, are trademarks of JCA (Occupational Psychologists) Limited. JCA reserves all rights and is the exclusive worldwide publisher (www.ie-te.co.uk). AppliedEI logo © CAEI. This ezine designed & produced by MGCreative Ltd (www.mgcreative.co.uk)