Month 9
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE & EMPATHY
Understanding both our emotions and those of others to improve relationships.
PRE-WORK
Here is messaging to send to your participants prior to this meeting. Feel free to modify to fit your personality:
Thank you all for your participation in last month’s MIBE Meeting. This month we will be talking about Empathy and Emotional Intelligence. No pre-work is necessary, but please bring something physical with you to the meeting that represents emotional well-being for you personally. I will be asking you to share the significance of that item during our discussion. Thank you all, I’m looking forward to another great meeting!
AGENDA
Intro from facilitator (2-5 min)
The Why: Use this opportunity to communicate with your team as one group. It’s powerful for them to hear the same message together and a great opportunity to recognize participants in front of their peers.
The How: Choose the things that are most relevant for your company to go over.
Suggestions:
• Welcome – Reinforce your mission/vision/values – Why do you exist as a company?
• Announcements
• Celebrations
Centering Exercise (5 min)
The Why: This exercise helps everyone to be present and focus their attention on the meeting. The quick-fire questions keep participants on their toes and force them to think about what they’re feeling right now.
The How: Go around the room and have everyone complete the sentence one at a time. As the facilitator, you should go first. You can reverse the order of who responds after each question if you want to mix it up. Remind participants that this is meant to be fairly quick and their first thought is often their best thought, so don’t overthink it and go with what pops into their head right away.
Examples:
• Today I’m excited about _________
• I recently learned _________
• I’m ready for _________
• I would like to improve my relationship with _________
Video from MIBE® (10 min)
The Why: Anthony will provide an intro to the topic and give more information about the overall program. Each month, educational and inspirational information will be shared through this method. The video should make your job as the facilitator easier so you are not responsible for having to “teach” the lesson.
The How: Use the video below. It will be helpful for you to view it prior to the meeting. You will just need to be prepared to show it on a screen to your team. We recommend testing ahead of time to help avoid streaming/buffering/internet issues!
Discussion (45-60 min)
The Why: This is the opportunity for the group to share, collaborate and build trust. Ultimately the goal of these meetings is to move the people in your organization forward as leaders and improve your overall culture.
The How: As the facilitator it is very important that you seek participation from everyone at the meeting and that you create space for people to be open, honest and vulnerable. We will provide you with the content each month, it’s your job to facilitate the discussion around that content.
1) Review the ground rules for these meetings (1 min)
You don’t necessarily need to go over the post it notes, just review the rules and hang the poster in the room as a reminder to all participants. If there is something that needs to be added or modified, you can also do that at this time.
2) Culture Update (5 min)
Take a few minutes to give an update on the culture initiatives that you have been working on. Since this work started a couple months ago, it’s important to share progress with the rest of the leaders on your team and ask for any help necessary from them to advance some of those initiatives.
3) Emotional Intelligence Discussion (40-50 min)
The majority of this meeting will be spent having a discussion on this topic. Your job as the facilitator will be to keep the conversation going, engage with all participants and encourage participants to go beyond the surface as they share examples. The four factors of emotional intelligence that are discussed in the video are: Self Awareness, Managing Emotions, Recognizing Other’s Emotions (empathy), and Social Skills (or handling relationships).
For the first factor, Self Awareness, start with the physical item that each of the participants have brought in:
Go around the room and have each person share what they brought and why it represents emotional well-being for them. This exercise will hopefully have two outcomes, the person sharing will have stronger awareness of something that has a positive impact on their emotions and the rest of the group will learn something new about that person and have a better understanding of who that person is.
The Feelings Wheel - The feelings wheel is simply an additional supplement. It doesn’t have a set place on the agenda. If you feel like it would be helpful to review it with your team, then you can print it for everyone and incorporate it into the discussion. You could give one to everyone as a takeaway after the meeting for them to be aware of, or just use it for your reference.
View & Download Emotion Identification Wheel (The Feelings Wheel)
For the second factor, Managing Emotions, use the following questions to guide the discussion:
What is a time when you feel like you didn’t manage your emotions very well?
Why do you think that happened?
What could you have done differently?
What is one piece of information that if you found out after the fact, would change how you felt during that time? (For Example: the person that cut you off during your morning commute, was actually racing his wife to the hospital to give birth to their child)
How can we more frequently broaden our view of the circumstances we face?
For the third factor, Recognizing Other’s Emotions/Empathy, use the cards provided in the box for the exercise below.
View & Download Emotional Awareness Exercise
Watch the second video from Brené Brown about empathy:
Make sure you have a card for each participant and pass them out at this time - they should not share what is on their card with others. Start with the emotions. Have each person act out their emotion and have the rest of the group try to guess which emotion is written on the card. It is important to notice when it is easy, and when it is difficult to recognize certain emotions and be aware of the cues people give when they feel a certain way. As the facilitator, you can ask those questions after each person goes.
Next, use the phrase “Last night I fell and broke my leg.” Then have each person respond in a way that corresponds with the response on the card (their common response that gets in the way of empathy). Again, have the group guess what response they had. Once everyone has gone, ask the group: What response bothers you the most when you are in a situation where you need empathy? What response do you personally most commonly use?
*For larger groups, you may have half the group do the emotions and the other half do the empathy portion.
For the fourth factor, Handling Relationships/Social Skills, have a discussion about what each person has learned today and how they will use it moving forward. Go around the room and ask each person to answer:
Taking an interest in others is a great way to build camaraderie and trust with others.
How do you know when someone else is interested in who you are or what you have to say?
What questions do they ask?
What actions do they take?
Reflect on your answer to the centering question from earlier, “I would like to improve my relationship with ______.”
What is one thing from today that will help you improve that relationship with the person you mentioned?
*For those that didn’t pick a person, simply have them relate it to a person.
Recap Video from MIBE® (1 min)
The Why: Anthony will close the meeting and summarize the content with an inspirational message. This is also our opportunity to share our post-meeting action items for participants.
The How: You will need to queue up the third video below. Again, it will be helpful for you to view it prior to the meeting and we recommend testing to help avoid streaming/buffering/internet issues!
