On October 30th, a very interesting and inspiring event took place at the Alpha Palmiers Hotel in Lausanne. The theme of the event was
Emotional Intelligence: how well do you know yourself and the people you work with?
The speaker was Les Morgan, a person that found his true vocation when he started his business helping people change their lives.
Let’s start from the beginning: what exactly is Emotional Intelligence and why it is so important in our personal and professional development? Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to
the ability to perceive, control and evaluate our own emotions and the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others. Usually we make a distinction between EQ and IQ. IQ refers to the ability to concentrate and plan, to organize materials, to assimilate and interpret facts.
No man is an island: everybody, in everyday life, lives together with others, in the private sphere as well as in the professional one. The ability to understand our emotions, how they influence us and our actions and reactions, as well as the ability to understand others, is a powerful tool: IQ predicts on average 6% of success in a given job; EQ predicts between 27 and 45% (depending on the field).
EQ is something that we can develop during our entire life, the very beginning is to look inside ourselves to accept who we are and to look outside ourselves and to accept who other people are.
I can’t be exhaustive because the topic is complex but one thing is clear: the better we manage our emotions and understand others, the more we can have good quality of life, happiness and personal and professional satisfaction. The topic is so important and actual, considering the society where we live that asks us to be performing every day, that the event was a great success, full of attendees.
The evening started as usual, with some time to network and to eat and drink something; then we moved into the heart of the evening, the conference started and the atmosphere was inspiring and positive!
In my personal opinion, the speaker was brilliant: he had the ability to catch the audience’s attention and to keep it until the end by using different kinds of inputs: his words, music, interactive exercises and a movie. Les stands for active listening and a striking presence and spreads a lot of personal energy. He does not teach or tell, he is.
Even if I believe that many attendees went home with something to think about, I still had the perception that others were expecting something more. As I wrote before, this topic is complex and huge, it touches us directly and personally because I think that the very purpose of life is finding a good balance between who we really are and the society around us. And it’s not always easy! A single evening on this topic can just introduce the subject: it’s up to everyone to understand if and how they want to continue working on it.
I would like to end with a quotation:
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Martina Tassini
MarCom Volunteer