Control The Room

At the heart of what we do as presenters and facilitators is connecting with our audience. If as a presenter, I can connect with the cognitive, affective and behavioral parts of the mind I know that the work covered in a facilitation isn’t going to be put in a binder on a shelf, never to be dusted off again. If I connect with all three parts of the mind, research shows there’s a much greater likelihood for change and implementation, our ultimate goal as presenters - we want the work to be put into action. The missing link for most facilitators is leveraging emotional intelligence to connect with the hart of their audience members. A study published in The Leadership and Organization Development Journal showed that effective leaders, ones that were leading profitable companies, distinguished themselves by showing much higher levels of emotional intelligence in key areas like reality testing, problem-solving, empathy and decision making. In fact, EI simply on its own was able to predict the profitable from less profitable companies almost 90% of the time. In other words, emotionally intelligent leaders lead their companies to profitability with greater ease and with more success than their emotionally unintelligent counterparts. EQ has twice the power of IQ to predict performance. EQ is also a better predictor than employee skill, knowledge, or expertise. In my workshop, I’ll use an interactive model to help facilitators understand how to employ EQ to better help their audiences put their material to work post facilitation.