How to Integrate Emotional Intelligence to Improve Personal and Professional Development

1. How to Integrate Emotional Intelligence to Improve Personal and Professional Development Melissa K. McCollister, MSW, Ph.D. Candidate Child Welfare University Partnership Program Campus Coordinator The University of Akron, School of Social Work, Adjunct Faculty

2. Goals & Objectives • To understand how our own perceptions and personal values can impact our professional work. • To learn about the impact of trauma including PTSD, secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, counter-transference, and burnout. • To gain insight into appropriate self-disclosure, appropriate boundaries, coping with work stressors, and self-care. • To apply the knowledge gained to enhance personal and professional development through the use of emotional intelligence.

3. Part I. Understanding our Own Perceptions and Personal Values • How do we attach meaning to our experiences and feelings? • Where do we get these perceptions? • Where do we get our own personal value system? • How do we separate our own perceptions and personal values while working with clients and other co-workers?

4. Impacts on Human Behavior

5. Motivated By Needs • Each of us aremotivated by needs. • We must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs for survival itself. • Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development. • Conversely, if the things that satisfy our lower order needs are swept away, we are no longer concerned about the maintenance of our higher order needs. Source: (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2009)

6. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

7. Exercise (1): This is Your Life • Take a few moments to reflect on the most memorable occasions in your life. These may include happy occasions, special activities, awards, etc. • Then focus on some of the major negative happenings. These might include illnesses, deaths, or significant disappointments. • Break into small groups of four to five. Share both the positive and negative happenings in your life. • Anything you feel is too personal to share should either be excluded from the discussion or stated in vague terms.

8. Application • How do we attach meaning to our experiences and feelings? (positive and negative emotions) • Examine the effects of various life events and relate them to the ways that similar life events may affect clients.

9. Perception Linked to Past Experiences • Richard Gregory (1970) stated that our perceptions of the world are hypotheses based on subjective past experiences and stored information.

10. Charlie Chaplin Optical Illusion

11. Thoughts, Perceptions, Personality, and Identity

12. Identity Development and Personality Theories • Self-Theories • Rogers (1959) discussed that a persons perception of experiences are influenced by the need for positive regard and based on the perceived attention and esteem received from others. • Looking-Glass Self: • Cooley (1902) claimed that who we are and what we are is determined in part by the way others see and relate to us. Source: (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2009)

13. Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial • Carl Jung • thought the mind was a summation of ones past experiences or a “collective unconscious.” • Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler and Harry Stack Sullivan • all felt that people are best understood from a social context. • Erik Erikson • felt that when forming an identity, individuals went through a series of personality developmental stages of either crisis or resolution. *The most important stage being adolescence. Source: Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2009

14. Defining Personality: Myers-Briggs (16 types)

16. The Big Five Factor Model

17. Personality Self Assessment: (Optional) • Myers-Briggs Personality Online Survey • Identifies your four-letter personality type. • Online Personality Inventory • Identifies your personality trait according to the Five Factor Model: Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience.

18. Choice Theory • Choice Theory • Glasser (1998) developed choice theory to explain how we carry around in our heads both what reality is like and how we would like it to be. Our perception of the world and how we choose to deal with that perception is our own choice. • The only behavior we can control is our own and no one can make us do anything we do not want. Source: (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2009)

20. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus~ 2 millennia ago “If you are distressed by anything external (or even internal), the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimation of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Source: (Goldin, 2008)

21. Dr. Emoto: Messages from Water • The Effects of Distant Intention on Water Crystal Formation • Does intention affect properties of water? “This question is of interest to complementary and alternative medicine research and especially for therapies involving intention, because the adult human body consists of approximately 70% water” (Radin, Hayssen, Emoto, & Kizu, 2006, p. 408). • If the human body is made up of 70% water, does positive or negative intention or perspective impact our personal and professional life experiences?

23. Water Crystals and the Power of Thought

24. Exercise (2): Perceptions and Personal Values • 1- How do you think that your perception influences your style of relating to clients or other co-workers? • 2-Describe how your own past experiences might influence the way you interact with clients, your supervisor, and/or your co-workers. • 3-What value-oriented or ethical dilemmas may arise in your work with clients? Can you think of any particular situation that has triggered feelings of discomfort or connection? Discuss some potential dilemmas you have faced with clients or other co-workers.

25. Part II: Emotional Intelligence • What is emotional intelligence? • Why is it important to be emotionally intelligent? • How do we become emotionally intelligent?

26. Exercise 3: Assume the Emotion • Group 1: Explain the airport experience or what it feels like to fly on an airplane. • Group 2: Describe a recent experience you might have had dinning out at a local restaurant. • Group 3: Describe an evening of bowling with your family or friends. • Group 4: Describe a recent experience you might have had at a grocery or retail store.

27. Why Do We Have Emotions? • Directs attention • Enhances memory • Organizes behavior • Drives social approach and avoidance • Moral development • Adaptive Source: (Goldin, 2008)

29. The Emotional Brain Neo-Cortex – (Thinking Brain) Limbic System – (Emotional Brain) Brain Stem – (Survival Brain)

30. Reasoning and Emotion • Emotions are an important source of information and feedback that help to direct our behavior and social interactions. • “Gut instinct”, “intuition” • Frontal lobe lesions can result in impaired emotional awareness, social reasoning, and decision-making. Source: (Goldin, 2008)

31. Functions of the Amygdala • Emotions and motivations needed for survival • Fight or Flight • Fear, anger, and love (pleasure) • Determines what memories are stored and where in the brain Source: (Goldin, 2008)

32. Today’s Fight or Flight • Today’s saber tooth tigers consist of rush hour traffic, missing a deadline, bouncing a check or having an argument with our co-worker or spouse. • Nonetheless, these modern day, saber tooth tigers trigger the activation of our fight or flight system as if our physical survival was threatened. Source: (Neimark, 2011)

33. How to Reduce the Stress • Change our external social environment • Seek physical, emotional, and spiritual stability • Learn better communication and time management • Change our perception of reality • Seek ways to change our mental perspectives, our attitudes, our beliefs and our emotional reactions to the events that happen to us. • Address distorted thinking patterns (handout) Source: (Neimark, 2011)

34. History of Emotional Intelligence • 1900 - Darwin’s work on emotional expression for survival and adaptation • 1920’s – Thorndike social intelligence • 1980’s – Gardner’s multiple intelligences • 1985 – Wayne Payne coined the term “emotional intelligence” • 1990’s –Mayer & Salovey emotional intelligence model • 1995 – Daniel Goleman popularized the term with the book: Emotional intelligence: “Why it can matter more than IQ”

35. Darwin and Emotion • Animals need emotions to survive • They need fear as a trigger to escape predators and aggression to defend their territory, young and food. • Emotions are maintained from our animal past • We rely on emotions to make quick, often complex decisions. Source: (Goldin, 2008)

36. Psychologist Howard Gardner suggested there are eight distinct intelligences, each relatively independent. (Source: Adapted from Walters & Gardner, 1986. Continued on next slide.)

38. Models of Emotional Intelligence • Ability Model – Mayer and Salovey • The ability to perceive, integrate, and regulate emotions. • Mixed Model - Goleman and Bar On • Learned capabilities • Trait Model – Petrides • An individual's self-perceptions of their emotional abilities. • See EQ Survey: (Optional)

39. Mayer and Salovey Emotional Intelligence • Perceiving emotions — the ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices, and cultural artifacts - including the ability to identify one’s own emotions. • Using emotions — the ability to harness emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities, such as thinking and problem solving. • Understanding emotions — the ability to comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. • Managing emotions — the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and in others.

40. Normal ------ Extreme Emotions • Sadness --------------depression • Anger ----------------unprovoked aggression • Pleasure -------------addiction • Fear ------------------exaggerated anxiety, phobia, panic • Worry----------------generalized anxiety disorder Source: (Goldin, 2008)

41. Exercise (4): Facial Expressions (Ekman, 1972) Take a look at the pictures on the right. See if you can recognize the appropriate facial expression. slight or highly controlled anger slight sadness worry or controlled fear slight enjoyment disgust slight or highly controlled fear fear or surprise contempt or disdain masked anger

42. Exercise (5): Non-verbal Communication • The “non-verbal” gossip experiment • One person volunteers to express a feeling nonverbally to the one next to him/her, who passes it on to the next, and so on until it goes all around the circle.

43. Non-verbal Exercise Questions • What was easy to communicate without words? Hard? • What part of your body did you use most? • Did you learn any ways to improve your nonverbal communications or to make your meaning clearer? • Did you find yourself exaggerating your usual expressions or adding new ones?


44. Part III: Understanding the Impact of Trauma

45. Exercise (6): Trauma versus Burnout • What is the difference between trauma and burnout? • Participants are presented with these statements: • “When I hear the word ‘trauma,’ I automatically think _______________.” • “A burned-out colleague is ________________.”

46. Working with Trauma • Primary Trauma: • A person is exposed directly to a traumatic event • DSM IV TR- 309.91 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder • 1- experienced, witnessed, or confronted with an event that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others • 2- experienced intense fear, helplessness, or horror

47. Examples of Primary Trauma • What are some examples of a primary trauma?

48. Burnout • According to Bach-Van Valkenburg & Burick (2009), burnout is a commonly used term to describe when helpers begin to feel exhausted by their work. Burnout usually begins by affecting ones attitude towards clients and can be relieved with a shift in work responsibility, support, or vacation. Source: (Bach-Van Valkenburg & Burick, 2009)

49. Burnout Symptoms • Physical – exhaustion, tension, being drained, having no energy. • Mental – not wanting to go to work, inability to concentrate, lack of enjoyment in work tasks that were once satisfying. • Emotional – irritable, unenthusiastic, resentful, may start to feel angry towards co-workers and clients • See Burnout Self Assessment: (Optional) Source: (Bach-Van Valkenburg & Burick, 2009)

50. Burnout Research (Maslach & Leiter, 2008) • Exhaustion – Energy • Cynicism – Involvement • Inefficacy – Self Efficacy • Tipping point – fairness = job engagement • Trends: suggest a link between The Big Five personality dimensions (Neuroticism) and burnout.