Our performance is as much about our underlying attitudes as it is about our skills and knowledge. And our attitudes are predominantly made up of feelings. Understanding and managing how we feel is therefore essential for improving our performance and achieving sustainable success – and to be able to live more fully as our whole selves.
Understanding how our thoughts and feelings impact on our behaviour, and ultimately our performance is what is meant by being emotionally intelligent. We have found that emotional intelligence (EI) lies at the heart of any people development issue.
AppliedEI™ is the attitudinal approach to emotional intelligence development known as ‘applied emotional intelligence'. An intuitive look at this approach is explored in the accessible book ‘Applied EI’, which was co-authored by one of our directors, Amanda Knight.
All our EI coaches and facilitators are trained in the AppliedEI™ approach to people development.
The mind-body link
Our emotional intelligence is projected through our bodies. Feelings are chemical responses that course through our bodies and directly impact on our health and wellbeing. PNI – otherwise known as psychoneuroimmunology! – is a new science studying the connections between the key systems in our bodies – the brain, the heart, and the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems.
Dr Alexandra Concorde of The Concorde Initiative is undertaking pioneering research in the UK into PNI and related subjects, in particular stress, and the links between our psychology and our biology. We build Dr Concorde's PNI and stress-related concepts into our programmes to help participants understand the links between their emotional intelligence and their health and stress outcomes.
'Living the values' is easier to say than do. We can't expect ourselves or others to just 'do' honesty, trust, flexibility or respect - it requires changes at a deeper, attitudinal level.
