5 Things we understood about our current COVID-19 Corona challenges while facilitating a global online meetup on Emotional Intelligence
We recently hosted an open online session for around 60 people from all around the world (more than a 100 registered for the event) on the topic of emotional intelligence and how we are all dealing with the quarantine. Little did we expect what we would discover by facilitating this session.
1. We are left alone in quarantine with our emotions
We started our session by diagnosing our participants and how they had been feeling during these days. The results were shocking. Our greatest giveaway from the crowdsourced answers was that the abrupt suspension of the division between work and personal life had a tremendous toll on our emotional health. If you were neglecting how you felt by escaping to work before, there was no way around now. You were now under quarantine dealing with your emotions and being fed with fearful media. And we discovered that there were not enough outlets and safe spaces to talk about this emotional contagion with empathy and deep listening. Not just for our customers if we represented a business, but also for our colleagues, family and friends.
2. Empathic Listening might be just the pill that the doctor prescribed
Borrowing the concept of working with ‘’a challenge’’ from design thinking, our participants co-created an online canvas of crowdsourced tips to navigate these times. We asked them: how might we improve our self-awareness, self-management, motivational resilience, our empathy and relationships in these times of Corona? The result was as impressive as the process of creation by itself.
Being part of a safe space with individuals from around the world that were dealing with similar struggles opened a gateway for empathy and listening to understand one another, and to realize that our egos are not so alone in this crisis as we thought. Verbalizing our emotions, being aware of our little habits to manage them and finding international commonalities is already a huge step forward towards decreasing our fears and anxieties.
3. Emotions can be trained, balance is conquered every day
We are constantly told that emotions are beyond our control. This cannot be further away from the truth. We learned together that we can train ourselves in our personal and social life to be more aware of what we are feeling and to determine which is the best way to deal with our emotions according to the situation. And this realization becomes especially relevant in these times. We can decide to see the glass half empty or half full. Moreover, it is up to us to help others find their resilience nowadays. But we must first start with ourselves. And this is not a battle easily won from one day to the other. It’s ongoing and it starts with determination.
4. The unspoken privilege of staying home
One participant had a very relevant remark. While we are at home, safe, flattening the curve and dealing with our emotions, out there are many real unsung heroes putting their life on the line for us and for our comfort, like doctors, nurses, taxi drivers, pharmacies and restaurants doing home deliveries. All around the world there are now initiatives to show gratitude to the medical staff. In Italy we listen to serenades from balconies. This gives us hope in humanity again. Because only as a thankful community, beyond our egos, with solidarity, will we find our way to motivate each other and be resilient through these dark times.
5. Creativity can still flourish in times of Corona
At Alreal Consulting we have been generating expertise in consulting and creating sessions and trainings for our clients with a lot of interaction and inclusion. We co-create collaborative activities around the topic of EQ (also known as EI, Emotional Intelligence), we then reflect upon the result and then we apply the key findings to our daily life.The Corona Pandemic hit us hard. We had to reinvent ourselves and going online was the logical step forward. We were uncertain, but we also remembered the reason why we started. The people. And if we were affected, we could only imagine how our community was holding on. So,we did our homework and looked for the best affordable online tools to keep the essence of our methodology.
Zoom gave us a great way to split participants into breakout groups Menti was a great option to crowdsource word maps to diagnose our status quo. Slido helped us keep track of the questions of our over 60 participants. Finally, Conceptboard allowed our community to co-create a digital canvas of tips to improve our emotional intelligence. Bundled up with great facilitation, the tools became magic for live collaboration. We were on the quest to create an online safe space to save human interaction digitally. And it felt so good to do our bit.
During April we will be facilitating more online sessions. The Community and Dialogue initiative is focused on belonging and empathic listening, while our April EQ Innovation Lab will bring more expertise, tools and collaboration around self-awareness, self-management, motivational resilience, empathy and relationships for teams,entrepreneurs and leaders. They can all be found in our website and you are welcome to join us and to spread the word!
Conclusion
Even though these times are without a doubt a big challenge for humanity it is also true that this is the best time to have realistic optimism. We stand on the shore of a sea but there are 3 bridges we can cross to get to the other side, to break the gap between where we are and where we will get, that place we know is out there even if it looks blurry nowadays.
The first one is to realize that we are flooded with emotions both externally and internally but there’s always something we can do to manage the situation. The second one is that even though some things are affecting us now in a negative way, not everything is affected. So, we need to step outside our own needs. And finally, that time is passing, and the future will be different. But as of now, we only have the present to start.
Helping others we help ourselves. Optimism is viral and it promotes innovation.
We shared our experience building a global community around the topic of EQ, but we are very curious to know: what are you doing to adapt your business to the global changes, to have a social impact and to help others do the same? Let us know and let’s start a dialogue!
