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Noodles & Chopsticks

Emotional Intelligence (EQ), Improv, and the art of eating with chopsticks

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First date

What do chopsticks, improv, and teambuilding all have in common?

You are on a first date at the hot new Asian food restaurant everyone is raving about. As you look around, you see how others make it look so easy. They effortlessly use their chopsticks to pick up a single grain of fried rice that has strayed too far from the rest. You are doing your best… but you are just moments away from stabbing the sweet and sour shrimp that’s taunting you as it slips out of your grasp for the fourth time. Perhaps your date, who you wanted desperately to impress, tries to talk you through how to use chopsticks. They walk you through which fingers to use, where to place your fingers, and how to squeeze just right. While the double entendre is enticing, you’re struggling to apply everything they’re telling you and it’s just not working. You’re fully convinced that the sauced up shrimp is going to get the better of you. Luckily the waiter takes pity on you and shows you how to make a contraption using the wrapper and a rubber band. Now you have a set of thong-chopsticks. At least you’re not going to starve.

Date number two

This time your date doesn’t just tell you how to do it differently, they show you how to hold the chopsticks differently. The shrimp that were once vexing you are now rarely escaping your grasp. Now that you have the physical motion down you’re not worried you’ll have to go to bed without dinner. Each shrimp you manage to catch gets exponentially easier and the more you practice the easier it becomes. Your willingness to try something new and maybe look a bit goofy, learn through lots of repetition, and then practicing what you learned were the keys to success.

Chopsticks and EQ

Emotional Intelligence is a lot like learning to eat with chopsticks. They both take practice and you can become more skilled the more you practice.

Your Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a measure of your ability to reason about emotions and emotional information. This includes recognizing, understanding and managing feelings in ourselves and using this to interact with other people effectively. Unlike your IQ which is determined at the beginning of your life and relatively constant after that, your EQ can be trained and improved as you grow older.

No one is born with the skills to be a master at either chopsticks or EQ. But with practice, commitment to improving, and people who are willing to show the way you can learn to use both effectively. Mastering both of them may help you to get that third date.

Or… land your next step in your career. Many experts feel that EQ is just as important, if not more important, than your IQ for being successful at work.

  • In their book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves say, “People with the highest levels of intelligence (IQ) outperform those with average IQs just 20% of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70% of the time.”
  • When writing about EQ for Fast Company Kes Thygesen says, “When someone has these qualities, they have the ability to work well with others and are effective in leading change. However, when someone is just “book smart,” they may not necessarily have emotional intelligence and therefore have a harder time learning from their mistakes.”

So while being intelligent is good, being able to work with others in an effective way is better. If I were asked by a genie if I’d rather have a high IQ or a high EQ, I’d answer, “Both”.  As it turns out if I wanted to be more effective in building relationships I’d most likely be better to go after the EQ.

EQ can be taught

Just like using chopsticks, there are many in the academic world who want to conduct research to see if we can improve our skills as life goes on. Ok. Maybe there is not as much research on chopsticks. On the other hand, John D. Mayer is a professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire and is an expert in personality psychology and measurement. He was interviewed for an article in Scientific American and he lays out the case that adults can improve what he calls “emotional competence”. When talking about curricula focused on a person’s emotional functioning or ability to learn about emotions he says, “…the programs improve students’ social interactions, well-being and sometimes even academic achievement. The few studies that have focused exclusively on adult learning appear to follow the same pattern, so there is a good reason to believe that emotional knowledge and functioning can be enhanced in adulthood.”

the good news is that unlike your IQ your emotional intelligence can be improved. Sure, it takes some training and practice but in the end, you have the ability to improve one of the most important building blocks which defines who you are and how successful you’re likely to be.

Improv as an effective way to train your EQ

/im · prov/: a form of theatre in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted. It is created spontaneously by the performers. – Wikipedia

Successful improvisers get together regularly to “practice”. Practicing seems to be the antithesis of unplanned and unscripted. But in actuality, it is an integral part to the success of creating spontaneously. You see, improvisers have a set of “rules” they follow that help make sure they are all working together and going in the same direction, especially when no one knows the final destination. A good deal of an improviser’s practice time is dedicated to activities that focus on training EQ at the ensemble level so all of the players on a team have these skills. At ImprovThis we’ve distilled these rules into the Three Pillars of Improv™:

  1. Say “YES! And…”
  2. Suspend Judgements
  3. Make my partner look good

Approaching every conversation with the energy of “Yes! And..” leads to finding answers to sticky problems, being more creative in your solutions, and creating a culture of ownership and investment. Suspending judgments of other people’s ideas so that a full discussion of the idea can happen helps to keep emotions in check when the going gets rough. When a team is actively focused on making their partners look good it creates a culture of responsibility and accountability, blaming others and “not my circus, not my monkeys” is rarely heard.

If you read the above paragraph from the point of view of a theater troupe, now take a second to re-read it with the point of view of a manager running a marketing team. Or a call center team leader. Or just about any team in a corporate environment from the C-Suite all the way to the front line sales people. These tools are effective in building strong teams in just about every aspect of life.

Using these skills on a daily basis will help to improve your EQ. But the real power of doing Improv training is that it is a format where your entire team can learn these skills together. Having your team work together on exercises specifically designed to build what Bradberry & Greaves describe as “social competence skills” can help them to recognize ways they can increase Emotional Intelligence across the organization. Taking that step in unison can have a profound impact on the culture of a corporate team.

What sets ImprovThis apart from the rest

Other companies who do improv training may do a great job of entertaining you and your team with a funny show. Often corporate training is a side business compared to their theater shows and comedy classes. We will be entertaining as facilitators, don’t you worry. But our focus is on helping you build a positive, creative, and passionate corporate culture.

 

At ImprovThis our sole mission is to create fun, hands-on workshop style training sessions to build closer, more collaborative teams. We also focus on working with your team so these skills are implemented after the workshop and provide tools to ensure the learning becomes part of the culture.

 

To learn more about ImprovThis or to schedule a time to talk to us, check us out at:

www.improvthis.com

Emotional Intelligence Venn Diagram

Improv helps you develop your EQ (Emotional Intelligence)

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noun: emotional intelligence

The capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
“emotional intelligence is the key to both personal and professional success”

Who are you? Who, who? Who who?
(Hint: It’s your IQ, Personality, and EQ)

You define your world through the three parts of “You” which combine to create a unique person. Think of yourself as a Venn diagram where three distinct circles overlap in the middle to explain who you are as a whole. Those three circles contain your Intelligence Quotient, Personality Type, and Emotional Intelligence. Where they overlap and the way they connect with each other creates a good model to understand who you are and how you interact with the world around you. Understanding how these three parts of you interact and how learning how you can develop your EQ are certain to have a significant impact on your success.

Everyone’s favorite graph: Your Venn Diagram

First, there’s your Intelligence Quotient (IQ). This defines your capacity to learn new things from books, training classes, etc. It’s your ability to reason and solve problems… it’s your “Wonk Factor”. Most researchers believe a person’s IQ is reasonably stable through adult life, it won’t move more than a point or two no matter what you do. Studying and learning will help make you smarter about those topics, but I’m sorry to report those brain training websites are unlikely to make your capacity to learn any better. You’re likely to be as Wonky today as you’ll ever be.

Second, there’s your Personality Type. I like to think of personality type as being a combination of Personality and Temperament. Temperament is like the canvas of a painting, it’s an inherited trait which creates the underlying fabric of who you are. Personality is what you as the artist have built on top of the canvas. No matter if you are a Bob Ross “wet-on-wet” landscape with tons of layers painted on top of each other or a Jackson Pollock “drip” painting with wild sprays of color everywhere, all the brush strokes come together to build the tinted glasses you see the world through. Most of the experts tell us that your personality type is inborn and does not change. Of course, you can train yourself to recognize areas of your personality where you want to act differently and train yourself how to act in a way that is contrary to your personality type. But at the end of the day, you are always going to interpret the world through your specific tinted glasses. Even if you’ve learned to act and react in a way that’s working better for you than what your base instincts are pushing you towards, you can’t change the color your glasses are tinted.

Third, there’s EQ, or your level of Emotional Intelligence. Psychology Today defines EQ as

“The ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include three skills: emotional awareness; the ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem solving; and the ability to manage emotions, which includes regulating your own emotions and cheering up or calming down other people.” Personally, I like to think of EQ as, “your behavior towards yourself and others”.

And here’s the kicker: Your EQ is not set in stone by your childhood or genetic inheritance. EQ id the only part of who you are which can be changed through deliberate training and practice. But like anything that’s worth changing, it takes real work and dedication to make a change.

Be the change you want to see

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzicat writing for the Harvard Business Review says: Good coaching programs do work.

The metrics he’s found in his research are quite compelling. With a well-designed coaching program improvements of 25% can easily be achieved with the most coachable element of EQ, interpersonal skills, showing a 50% improvement in the short term. In his article he points out:

  •          Coaching around Psychological flexibility — the ability to accept and deal with (as opposed to avoiding) unpleasant situations — is effective
  •          No human behavior is unchangeable
  •          Good coaching programs do work.
  •          The benefits of EQ-coaching are not just confined to the workplace, they improve health, happiness, social interactions, and reduce stress
  •          The most important aspect of effective EQ-coaching is giving people accurate feedback

Improvisers need to develop their EQ

Granted, Improv is often seen as nothing more than a night out at a theater. We go to experience actors entertaining us with fun scenes based on suggestions which we, the audience, shout out to them. While that is certainly true, at ImprovThis we take having fun seriously. One way we do that is we teach how to use the “Three Pillars of Improv” in a way that improves your EQ.

In order for your night at the theater to be enjoyable, the Improv actors you’re watching have likely taken classes, worked with coaches, and rehearsed so they can build their EQ. Improv actors realize that their entire world is made up in the moment, based on a suggestion they received only seconds before. In order to make the show work, they need to be able to trust each other and handle the interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. We’re not just talking about the characters in the scene’s relationships with other, but also the actor’s relationships with each other even when they’re not on stage.

You are an improviser everyday

Every non-scripted conversation you’ve ever had is you doing improv. Ok, you may not be on stage and you may not be trying to make an audience laugh in every conversation. But at the heart of it all, you are still talking another person. You’re still working with information you just received. You have no idea where the conversation will twist and turn. If you have a high EQ, it’s more likely that these conversations will flow smoothly and you’ll be building strong relationships.

Improv helps you develop your EQ (and strong relationships)

Speech communications classes, reading about what the great Dale Carnegie called “how to win friends and influence people”, and reading blogs like this are all great places to learn about communicating. Many people find role-playing is also an effective tool. All of those things and many more great tools exist. However, I’ve found Improv training to be one of the most effective tools to improve EQ in existence.

In our workshops, we engage teams who work together every day and teach them how to increase their EQ using the tools of the improviser. We do this by using fun activities and exercises which focus on specific parts of how to improve their interpersonal communication. We employ several exercises which have people slowing down their communication style so they get in touch with increasing their EQ. For example:

  • Listening to understand rather thinking about how they are going to respond while the other person is talking
  • Focusing on the person you are with right now and building a personal connection
  • Filtering out all of the background noise that infects our daily lives and gets in the way of communicating effectively
  • Paying closer attention to the body language of the person you are with and building the skills to interact with them in a way that has them feeling important and taken care of
  • Suspending judgments of other people’s ideas and working with those ideas in an empathetic way

Using these skills on a daily basis will help to improve your EQ. But the real power of doing Improv training is that it is a format where your entire team can learn these skills together. Having your team work on exercises like these together can help them to recognize ways they can increase their the Emotional Intelligence across the organization. Taking that step in unison can have a profound impact on the culture of a corporate team.

What sets ImprovThis apart from the rest

Other companies who do improv training may do a great job of entertaining you and your team with a funny show. Often corporate training is a side business compared to their theater shows and comedy classes. We will be entertaining as facilitators, don’t you worry. But our focus is on helping you build a positive, creative, and passionate corporate culture.

At ImprovThis our sole mission is to create fun, hands-on workshop style training sessions to build closer, more collaborative teams. We also focus on working with your team so these skills are implemented after the workshop and provide tools to ensure the learning becomes part of the culture.

To learn more about ImprovThis or to schedule a time to talk to us, check us out at:
www.improvthis.com