Emotional Intelligence is just as important to professional success as technical ability. It can be a comfortable space having your head down modelling or solving complex problems, what about when you need to communicate your solution, how well do you fare? The way we communicate in the ‘Tech Space’ is important and can be critical for the delivery and success of any project.
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Hi. Thank you very much, Chris. And for that wonderful introduction and welcome to everyone globally, I can see lots of messages coming in from people around the world, so thank you very much. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Wherever you are. Thank you very much. This session is on emotional intelligence intake. So a little bit about me, as Chris has just said, my name is Rosemary Wilson. I am in the second chapter of my career. I used to work in finance and technology finance separately and then technology, eventually into Fintech. And now I am the founder of Pragmatica Coaching, and I also speak around the globe when I can travel. And I'm also a mentor and facilitator. You can use the QR code as well. If you would like to connect with me a little bit less about me and more about you. So this is your session. What would you like to learn today? You've seen the heading, you've seen the write up, you've seen the description, you've seen the title, maybe. Perhaps it's just a piece of knowledge that you want to learn more about. Perhaps it's just you're just intrigued. What would you like to learn out of this session today? Just a couple of words. One, two. Not long paragraphs. I'm just going to stick to time. What would you like to learn out of this session today? Let's have a look what you're saying. Let's hear what you're saying. Pop it in the chat box or feel free to let me know and I can read away if you can't think of why you're here, that's fine. Maybe you'll think about it later on. So let's move on. The content I will be covering today will be what exactly is emotional intelligence? We'll talk about the five elements. We'll talk about the five elements. Those five elements that you can see to the right. I was just slow on the update. I can see the messages coming in now. Curious about this talk emotional intelligence at work. Okay, wonderful. There's a few more there. I'll leave them for now. So we'll talk about the five elements and how that relates to you both in your professional life. But you can also use it in your personal life. I'm going to be talking about effective communication when it comes to, especially when it comes to EQ emotional intelligence. And I'm going to talk a little bit about being aware of types, that's personality types and learning styles. And then we'll open up for Q and A at the end. So from my point of view, the perspective today is I'm making an assumption that your technical ability or your hard skills is already in place and that you know what you're doing from a professional point of view, or you're learning and working on them. So that's my point of view. So I'm going to be sharing soft skills today. So I'm going to assume that your technical ability to do what you're doing is in place or you're working on learning them. My focus around emotional intelligence is using it when you communicate, and that could be whether it's in person, over online or in written communication. So this is the foundation. Emotional intelligence is the foundation and a starting point. So let's look at the definition of emotional intelligence, so it's quite worthy. And I'm just going to hide the panel. It's quite wordy. And for me, it's the capacity to be aware of control and express one's emotions and to handle interpersonal relationships, judiciously and empathetically. So that's the definition. I said they're not my words. I've literally taken them from a dictionary. So if you look at that, it's the ability to manage your emotions or to be aware of and manage your emotions or express them and to handle those you interact with in a way that is of good judgment and with empathy. That's quite a wordy way of what I'm going to display or share with you today. So let's get into the practical steps. It is about emotional intelligence is about understanding yourself and managing your emotions. So it is really about managing self first, so you can't control or change other people. You can only manage, change or control yourself, your behaviors, your actions, your thoughts. So that's the important part of that. First of all, you are the foundation and then how that plays out with interaction with others. So how do you interact with others? Whether you are angry, happy, sad. How do you interact with others? Whether you are in a good mood, whether you're having a work discussion or a professional discussion or a personal discussion, how do you interact? How does your personality type and the style of communication interact with others? The five key elements of emotional intelligence are self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. So I like to see these as the foundation for this whole session, how you interact with others and how you manage your own yourself. So let's go into what this actually means in more detail. So for me, when it comes to emotional intelligence, it's really an important part and foundation of communication and inclusion, how you use your words and how you use your behaviors and action. And we know that inclusion is important for different types, not just what you can see, but for different styles for different learning styles, different personality types. They're all important. So what about you? Your self awareness? How aware of you of your emotions? How aware of your emotions are you? Are you good at observing your emotions and behaviors when you are feeling a little bit under the weather, not feeling great? Do you stop yourself or do you still go ahead and interact with people? And how does that land when you interact with people, when you're perhaps not in the best of moods or the greatest of moods or the most productive of moods? How do you manage that? How do you self regulate? And I'm not talking about being numb? I'm talking about do you allow these feelings of that might not be particularly helpful. Do you allow them to impact yourself and others? How does that work for you? How do you find that for yourself? These are questions I'm asking you for now so that you can start having a bit of self reflection about your own emotional intelligence, your motivation, what drives you? How do you do use it to motivate others? Or how do you motivate yourself? And I'm not talking about the kind of quick wins the immediate gratification sitting on the couch, eating popcorn, watching Netflix, which is great. Other channels are available. But what drives you in the longer term? What do you want in your life? What are your longer term goals? And how do you help and support others? Empathy? Do you often think about other people when you're having a conversation, or is it always about you? Do you try to understand from another person's point of view? Do you try to place yourself in another person's shoes and try and understand what's going on for them? Is that something you do regularly or not? Social skills. How do you reach out? We're obviously not seeing a lot of each other, depending where you are around the globe. But how do you reach out to people? Are you someone who starts talking about yourself when you see people? Or do you build bridges and ask questions about other people? How do you build your relationships? So that's just a bit more framework, a bit more words, practical words around what emotional intelligence means. So for you, we have a poll. Where do you currently place your level of emotion on a scale of one to ten? One being the lowest, ten being the highest. Where do you place your emotional intelligence or your level of emotional intelligence? I know it can be a bit of a difficult question in terms of you haven't measured it as yet. But where would you consider given what I've just shared with you? Where on the scale do you currently place your level of EQ? You should be able to start responding to that so we can have a look at your answers and then you can get to see what everybody else is saying. I don't know if that's coming in. I'm not privy to the immediate responses, so I'm not sure if that's going ahead. Okay, right. No tens yet. So where on the scale do you? So that's wonderful. So about 52% in the mid range, 5% to seven. So, yeah, we didn't do the whole 123-45, 67, 89. 10. We've just got the kind of a band. So most of you are around the middle and you probably are a lot higher as we go through, you'll be able to see where you are. And there's a great resource that we'll be sharing with you at the end so you can actually take some couple of quizzes that you can actually scale and measure and see some of the questions that come out as you answer. Where you place yourself on the scale of emotional intelligence, which is really quite helpful as well, just to see where you are, what you can improve on and what areas you can improve on, which is really helpful. So thanks very much for sharing where you are. So seven to nine. That's great different levels there. But most people at the mid range people skills and wherever you are, wherever you work in tech, you have to speak to people. You have to communicate. People and communication are important wherever you are in terms of your role, even if you like quietly coding or quietly writing or building, you have to at some point get your head out of the parapet and connect with people and speak to them. Some people do it really well. Some people enjoy it. Some people don't. Some people prefer to be a bit more a bit more quieter. Some people are thriving right now because they don't have to go out and speak to people. But some people are really struggling. So there's that balance. But wherever you sit on this, people's skills are important, and the power of empathy is also incredibly important. When you place yourself in someone else's shoes and you just give them space to think, space to speak and then you listen. You give yourself space to listen. It can be so powerful when you just take that time and just breathe rather than talking really quickly. You just give people space to think about what they want to say, think about where they're coming from, think about what they want to add, think of it. They want to maybe brainstorm. They want to share some ideas with you, and then you help them to evolve their ideas. If you give them that space, the space to speak, the space to contribute, the space to communicate with you rather than racing all the time. And people can be much more innovative and creative when they're given that space to think about what it is that they've got whirling around in their head. I heard a phrase that someone can talk to a tree and they would feel encouraged and helped. So imagine if they are able to because the tree doesn't speak back. Right? So imagine when you speak to someone and that person just listens to you. They give you the space to get everything that's going on out in your head outside of it. That really is quite a powerful thing to do to develop those people skills, and that empathetic side of allowing someone to just breathe, to speak, just to share that's really, really powerful. So I encourage you all to think about how you are with the power of empathy and your empathetic side. And as I was saying, that using emotional intelligence as a common language if we all just develop our emotional intelligence just a little bit things, lots of different areas. This list is lengthy, but I've just put a few things in here as to why using emotional intelligence as a common language will be so much better for your communication, the way you communicate at work. So if you're on this session now, I don't know if your work colleagues are with you, but you could just say to them, I went to this really good session. Well, I'm saying it's really good. It's a really interesting good session on emotional intelligence and how it focused on taking the time to communicate, improve our communication, communicate better. You'll see so much growth personally and professionally because you'll speak a different language that helps you to understand yourself and to help you understand others. This is the framework that's the foundation at the heart of this, and your behavior starts to change because you're less egocentric, you're less thinking about yourself. You're thinking about the collective and also when it comes to being diversity. So open to diverse ways of thinking. Again, I'm not talking about what people look like. I'm talking about diverse ways of thinking, diverse personality, all areas but diverse personality types. When you just take a moment to stop and allow that to come forward rather than saying, oh, that person is not like me. I'm not going to speak to them anymore. You just allow that diversity to unfold. You allow acceptance of the differences and you recognize how balanced your team will be and your life will be is when you have diverse people around you. If everybody looks like you and thinks like you, then you're just going to get more of the same same all the time. But when you've got this common language of acceptance and being open and empathetic and aware, it really does evolve into something really remarkable in terms of your acceptance. And then you start saying, inclusion. You start saying, Well, that person is different from me. I can see how we balance each other out. I can see how our combined skills, our combined way of thinking, our combined differences are so amazing and how we can evolve our decision making. We know that diverse teams are much more effective. They're better at problem solving, more effective over the long term and more successful decision making becomes enriched, richer. The culture becomes enriched because you're learning from each other. And why would we not want that to contribute to our success and our goals? That's really key and important. I'm very open as you can probably tell or see, I think that being more open to other people's ideas and other people's way of thinking is much more enlightening and enriching for my life. And that's very important for me. So when we start using emotional intelligence as a common language, where we all start to learn from each other, we can then build better environments where we work professionally and beyond that as well. So assumptions. Let's talk about assumptions. Assumptions is one of an evil in the communication world because assumptions are unchecked facts. Right. We go around boldly making them all the time. But what type of assumptions do you often make? Would it be communication, be it what someone looks like, what they might be thinking. I've got so many stories of being in a room speaking to people where people look really, really bored and then focusing on a particular group and then speaking to them after the session and they say, Well, English is not my first language. So I was holding on to every single word you said, but I was thinking they were bored because they looked like they were not really listening to me or engaging with me. That was one of the assumptions I've made. I make assumptions about. Well, I don't do it so much now because I'm aware of them about religion or people's being married, people having children. I've done that quite often. I also make assumptions about my partner. I'll say, X-Y-Z, and I think he's heard XYZ and he's actually heard ABC. I am making assumptions. So now I've learned to check in and make sure that we are in agreement and speaking the same language. So what type of assumptions do you make? Are you guilty of making assumptions? Are you ready to admit your assumptions, or are you a bit shy about that? What type of assumptions do you make? I'll let you just get through that. I think you're probably still thinking. So I'll let you think for a little bit assumptions. I was just shared. I'll tell you a funny story. Well, it might not be funny, but I was traveling. I was in Argentina, and I was staying at a facade, and I met a gentleman and he was with a small girl. And I said, oh, how your granddaughter is lovely. She's so pretty. She's really lovely, just playing with her dolls. And then he said, It's not my granddaughter. It's my daughter. And I was like, I was mortified. That was a long time ago. But these are the types of things that I've done that really highlight that making assumptions is not the space that you want to be in. You aim for clarity rather than making assumptions. I'll let you think about some of the assumptions you make, and maybe that's something you want to take home. What assumptions do you often make? And there is power in your assumptions, because if you assume something about fact checking, case in point, things going around, fake news going around on the news. If you make assumptions, there is power in those assumptions. There's lots of power in the assumptions we make. And there is also power in the words you use so often, we don't think before we speak, we just blurt things out. And if you've been assuming something and then you blurt it, out, you can't take it back. So choose wisely. And this could be your first step in thinking about the assumptions you make, especially at work with your colleagues in your environments. When you're building something, you're on a project, really think about the assumptions you make and if they're not needed, ask more specific questions so that you stop making assumptions and that you have more clarity because projects are important as well. When you're working on a project in the tech space, most of you probably are working in tech space. Projects are essential. Communication is essential in projects to get them off the ground and to get them completed and finished. And when you come to your project, everyone comes with their own area of expertise and we know what we know. We hang on to what we know. We become attached to our ideas and our skills, and sometimes that makes you inflexible. Sometimes that makes you not want to move on something because you want to dig your heels in and that can contribute to setbacks or delays. So it's something to think about if you're digging into something because you are attached to it, and sometimes the collective skills are much better. So there's that balance. Again, that diverse thinking will help and support your outcomes to be much more effective. So there'll be less rework because you're talking to each other and sharing those collective ideas and your outcome. Your problem solving or your journey will be much more efficient. And that's what we're all aiming for. So that the communication on your projects is really important and the use of emotional intelligence on your projects. So what's the impact if we're not speaking out loud or speaking well, communicating well together your state of mind when you go into these conversations and I know perhaps right now your state of mind is perhaps not where it was a year, two years ago, but it's still a contributing factor, and your language is really important to the projects that you're delivering all the work you're doing. So when you think about gaining clarity for projects that you're undertaking or as a group or as a team, when you start speaking about perhaps let's use requirements as an example about user requirements or outcome requirements or project requirements. Now, when we get more clarity from the outset, things change incredibly more effectively. So when you start having those conversations around rather than assumptions being made, or I thought you said this or I thought you said that. Use your questions well and then develop your listening skills so that you understand what's being said. So when you write it down or you capture them, you are capturing really good information, really good data so that your agreements and your expectations and your outcome become more enriched and better developed, so that's the impact of your state of mind and language communication. If you go into a meeting and you're tired, you're not feeling well. Something happened to you the day before, you might be disengaged. So it's really important that when you go into a situation conversation that you have your state of mind looking for the best outcome, or you excuse yourself and say, Can we do this another time because XYZ is going on or you self regulate for that meeting or for that conversation to make sure that you are in tick top condition. Here's a little table. I've got a little table. It's a big table I've put together, which is a really good, helpful way for you to assess your mind, your language, what you're doing for the best outcome when it comes to emotional intelligence and communication. So you can ask yourself a few of these questions. It's a starting point. Once you start working on your developing your emotional intelligence and communication, you can add to this, but you can see the types of questions I've got in each category. So that was really helpful for you. So I've got the self awareness and the self regulations that's for yourself, motivation is for yourself and for others. Empathy is how do you interact with others? Are you understanding where they're coming from and then your social skills, again, is how you interact with others. So you can take a screenshot of this, or I can send you this slide. Well, you'll be able to watch the replay, but it's a really good starting point for you to develop your communication skills and your team play and empathetic skills when you're interacting with your team and the people around you. And we're all looking for success. I'll leave that up for a second, just in case anyone is looking for that. I'll just have a quick look at the chat. I was wondering if there were any responses to what I said earlier, but there you go. I'll leave that up for you. So we're all looking for success. Nobody's working in tech and not looking for success and success means different things to each of us individually, as a team, as an organization as a whole, we all have different waiting on success, but for the most part, we all want success and how you get to your outcomes is really important when it comes to again, the communication piece and the basis that the emotional intelligence. When you start using even some of the tools and techniques I'm suggesting today or ideas that you'll come up with for yourself, you'll start to become more agile, more fluid, more easily, adaptable, more flexible. You'll still have the skills as the basis. But you'll start developing this common language to speak with your teams and the people around you. So you become more agile, you become more fluid and you'll have the input to your plan that will also help you to plan better. Whatever you're doing, your releases, your sprints, whatever you're doing, whatever your area you're working on, and then the input to your project management. How does that all roll out in your individual two weeks sprints or however, you work when you got good input to your project, good data, good communication from your team. It just makes your deliverables again more enriched because you're having these different levels of conversations rather than seeing everything as a problem. You're coming together to communicate in a way that helps you to deliver your projects in a more efficient and effective way. And people are at the heart of this. We're going to have people everywhere. As I said earlier, and when it comes to people, you have more understanding and you'll have better interaction because you're all understanding from the same point. Nobody said, Well, I didn't go to that training, so I'm not interested in emotional intelligence. You're all going to say, Well, what can I do today? What can I do differently? How can we work together rather than being annoyed with someone because they're too slow because they're spending too much time thinking. You'd rather say, oh, that person is thinking about something because when they say it, it's going to be really helpful for this project. So you start using your skills, how you learn about people to help your environment, your culture, your organization, your teams, your deliverables, your outputs. You'll have much more of a balanced way of viewing success and people's input to the organization or to the outcome of the project and that's connection and collaboration as well. When we start learning about personality types and learning types, both of those which are very important. Again, you've got different personality types, and I've seen so many different personality types in the text space visually. Or if you hear me, you think of me as someone who's quite extrovert or quite loud, or I'll go into a room and I'll talk to anybody, but I'm actually quite introverted. I do like to spend time on my own. I like to spend time reading so introvert and extrovert. That's about where you get your energy from. So I get my energy from being silent and quiet and learning quietly on my own. I'm not a team player when it comes to sport. I like to do sports on my own. For instance, I like to learn in a very structured way. If you tell me something and you want me to lay it out for you, I like you to give me a step by step guide and after this one, after this step, I'll do that. And then that's how I like to learn. However, I can pick up on things very quickly. I'm quite astute I'm quite fast when it comes to learning and picking things up. But if I have to really take it away and do something, I have a different learning style. So it's about appreciating different personality types and learning styles. How many times have you become frustrated with someone because they're not picking things up as quickly as you did or as quickly as you want them to. So you start developing this kind of patience behind the scenes, and you might secretly still get a little bit frustrated. But then you start putting yourself in that person's shoes and saying that's their personality type, that's their learning style. So you give them that space. You start adjusting your expectations and then you ask or you check in. Are you okay? Do you need more time? Are you okay? Then you become more inclusive as well as different personality and learning types. All types. When you're in a meeting, you've seen that quiet person who they're trying to speak, but nobody won't let them because they're so quiet because everybody else is talking over them, which I often think is not fair. I always notice the person that isn't being given the space to contribute. So sometimes you can speak up for them, say, oh, I think Bob or sue or David or Jackie wants to say something, maybe help them out to be more inclusive and work on that. Then you start to connect and collaborate more because you start to give people the space to build the space to create in their own style. And we can all learn from that. We can share because we can share ideas better we'll evolve. And then there we are again, success, project success, personal success, professional success. Whatever that looks like for you really important the benefits. I've been talking a lot about what you can do and what you can do differently, what you need to think about. And this is obviously a very short session I'm sharing with you different ideas. I've gone relatively quickly on this, but hopefully I've sparked something in you to think about. And then the resources that I share afterwards will also be helpful for you. So what are the benefits? What's in it for you? Why should you bother to develop your emotional intelligence? And the phrase that comes to mind is, it's not me. It's not you. It's me. So start with self. First, start with your self awareness, your self regulation. The other benefit that I haven't put in here is resilience. But when you start becoming more self aware and you start regulating, start becoming, seeing things, identifying solutions for what you can do for yourself. To feel better for different outcomes. It's actually quite a marvelous place to be. So you start to manage your emotions. You start self regulating again. I'm not saying go numb. And then you'll start experiencing completely different outcomes. And when there's two of you together and then three, and then four of you doing the same exercise, the conversations become different. They're much more fluid. They're much more patient. They're more efficient, more effective, improved communication. What's not for love? Don't you want to be understood more? Don't you want to understand more really beneficial? There improved communication. And then you can start to keep on developing your people skills. That empathetic side that patient side that listening side. That motivational side. And you can build your network either extensively if you want to, if that's your personality type or you can have a really good, strong foundation of people around you. Again, you can have those types of people that you connect with when you move on to your next role, where you've built a really good relationship with them. And you know that when you move on to your next role or you are looking for introducing someone else to a role, you can call on that person. So there's lots of ways that you can develop your people skills and build better relationships, and you start breaking down barriers. So there's lots of barriers, definitely in the tech space. Barriers when it comes to communication in the tech space, people speaking different languages, people not understanding each other, different countries, different cultures coming together, people not understanding different cultures because, oh, we don't do that here. We do something differently here, but then you can start understanding, asking people about their culture. Oh, in I don't know, ex country. You do y. Oh, that's interesting. This is how we do it here. Oh, did you know that? Oh, you just have different conversations that spark a completely different approach and different perspectives, and then you start to have greater team synergies as well. You start rather than blame culture. You didn't do this. You didn't do this very well. You start working together and appreciating your differences. Obviously, that will optimize your efficiency because you're not having this knocking heads kind of thing because you're working to understand each other and speak at a common language. And the wonderful benefit of emotional intelligence, especially in the tech space, is understanding differences and creating that space for being inclusive, inclusion and belonging. So people feel safe. They feel that they belong. They feel like a sense of trust. Nobody wants to be the one left on the outside because they're slightly different or because they operate in a different way. Nobody wants to be that person. So that's really important. These are some of the benefits. This again, the list could be endless, but I'm limited on time. So there you go. So what can you do? What can you do differently? Hopefully, I've sparked something in you today. One thing, hopefully that you can either bring back into your community. I don't know. Again, if your team is here or if you're working individually or you're on this call individually, perhaps there's something I've said that you can bring back to your team or your organization, but make time to do something after this session. Well, I say I know we're busy. No, we're not. We're in lockdown. We are in the UK anyway. Make some time, create some time. Ten minutes, 20 minutes before your next team meeting or set up another meeting. Ten minutes, 20 minutes. I've heard about this wonderful emotional intelligence. What can we do differently? How can we incorporate it into our daily work who's willing to do something differently so we can communicate better? Start asking people. Get to know your team, get to know their learning styles, their personality types just get to know people ask different questions. Use that table that I shared with you and discuss different styles. Work out where you're miscommunicating or misunderstanding each other and start to network. Start to ask unusual questions, not the same boring if you go out networking, what do you do? So what do you do? Start having more creative questions about what's your learning style? How do you prefer to communicate those types of things? What do you like? What's your learning style? Do you like to listen to something before you input? Or do you like to just brainstorm and get brain dump and get all the ideas out of your head? So start thinking about what you can do differently and make the time to do it. Don't just say, oh, it'll take care of itself and then ask people what's going on for them. And is there a gap between you and a different team? Is there a gap between you and a different person in your world in your workspace? What can you do? What's the first step you can do to bridge that gap when it comes to communicating and understand each other, understanding each other to show that side of you that empathetic side and start asking questions around that. So finally, my last question is, are you committed to changing one thing to develop your EQ? So those who were already up at the nines, is there something you could do? Is there something you could do better? There's always room for improvement. I'm a good listener, but I can definitely listen better when I'm in different moods. If I'm thinking about a work thing, then I know that my partner starts talking to me. I'll know I have to either leave the work thing or tell him I've got something going on in my head. I'll catch up with you in a bit, so I know that there's always something I can do to improve my emotional intelligence. My patience is the other thing. I'm always working on that I've come a long way, but there's still a ways to go. I definitely could do being more patient with different speaking styles for sure. So let's hear you. Are you committed to changing one thing to develop your EQ and start thinking about your questions as well? There might be some already that have come up or some are in the chat box. And let's see what the poll is for this session. I'm just going to check the time. Okay? I did okay on the time I went through that quite quickly because I wanted to make sure I covered everything and give you some time to ask questions as well, or for me to respond to them. We've got the poll open, so I'll wait for the responses to come through. Even if you are up at the seven s and nine s, there could be something you could do to get to a ten. I'm not at a ten. I wait for the day when I say I'm at a ten also depends on different days, but I'm quite high with my EQ. There's always room for improvement. Rosemary, that was absolutely great. Thank you. I first and foremost, when I say I've gotten to know you a little bit, I find it very difficult to believe that you're impatient, but maybe you're a good actor in that regard. So many things come to mind. Rosanna asked, regarding, how do you find yourself developing patients for different speaking styles and language barriers? And what have you do you have any advice in that regard? So the first thing is awareness of what you do when you are being impatient. So my thing is I drift off. I start looking at the window right now, I start looking out the window or start tapping or start reading something so I can get quite distracted. So in terms of developing my patience for it, is becoming aware that I'm drifting off and then bringing myself back in to what the person is saying. So everybody that speaks has got something important to say, whether you can hear it at the time or not. So it's really important to be aware and then focus on what that person is doing or saying and then having that conversation, this person is contributing something. It might be different from me, but it's really important that they get this out of their mind, get this off their chest, that they share it. So then once you start becoming aware of your impatience or, I don't know, boredom, then you can start doing something to rein it in, so to speak. So you give the person the chance to speak or learn or do it their way because everybody deserves a chance to be listened to? Mike asks, and this is a tough one. If you could change one thing, what would it be if you could wave your magic wand? My magic wand is that it would be that people are more emotionally intelligent because we do work on our hard skills or technical skills. We work on them a lot. People don't work on their emotional intelligence skills often enough, and I know I've said it, but if you work on your skills to be more patient and more accepting of other people, we would live in a completely different world, and there would be less divisiveness. I'm not going to go political, but there'd be less fighting, as in physical fighting or disagreeing, and less trolling, less anger in general. So, yeah, my magic wand would definitely be that people take the time to be more emotionally intelligent and more accepting. So what if someone thinks differently from you? You don't have to live with them. You think one thing, they think something else. Why does it bother you that they are different? Let them be and just do your thing? I'm quite passionate about that. So yeah, I would waive my ones for people to be more emotionally intelligent. I like that a lot. So we have a fair amount of software people and technologies here. And I know you're also comfortable in those waters. And I chuckled earlier when you brought up requirements and requirements gathering and with so many software projects that go off the rails or get derailed, at least temporarily, how often do we hear? But we were just following the requirements, and I wanted you to kind of maybe expand upon that. Like what we can do absolutely better in terms of are there specific things we can do in the requirements gathering process? Is it better face to face? Is it better with weekly check ins, all those type of things? Because I think so often what happens is we try to be agile, but we throw things over the transom and hope that they'll go okay. Yeah. For me, when people are speaking, they hear something. In fact, they hear what they want to hear very often. So when we talk about communication, people hear what they want to hear and we don't physically say you said this. So therefore we don't map it. So this means X or Y. We don't start thinking about if I do this, then the outcome will be X. So there's not that much thinking about what's going to happen down the line. So when you have these conversations to begin with and you're having a conversation about the product that's going to be delivered, how effective is the questioning style during those sessions? Are you being specific? I'm very, very specific. When I'm asking questions around something people say, oh, I'll be there in a moment. Well, when you say it can be that simple, what does a moment mean that's non measurable is that five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes. So be as specific as you can. And if you're not sure, don't think you're sure, be sure to ask again. Check in to make sure that those initial questions you have really good data from those initial sessions. And yes, and then when you have the subsequent meetings or regular check ins, which can be very boring. But also these sessions become boring because people aren't being specific. There's rambling and waffling and people going off into the tangent. And rather than focusing on the agenda, people bring out other things into these meetings. So I think that's another thing I could change when you're going to a meeting, stick to the point, stick to what needs to be discussed and have an idea for what you want the outcome to be. So be specific with what you want the outcome to be. And don't let people railroad these conversations and talk about something differently. There are two tips there. So be specific and begin with the end in mind. That's perfect. Perfect. Wonderful. I love that summary. So apart from the ones in the slide that you had, are there any resources or exercises you would recommend so that attendees can improve their EQ? There's probably a host of links that I've got that I could to share with you. And if you can do that after the session. But there's another book that I think is great. My head is right behind me. Highly Effective People. Everyone reads that completely gone. Seven Habits, seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Kobe. So definitely important. But from when you go into these, here the Calculator, et cetera. They actually spin off. There's quite a few different resources. There's really good site that people can find more information on as well. Great. John asks, how do you handle people whose motivation is to promote themselves rather than get the project done? I think we all know those people. That's a great question. I often come across these types of people. I call them the sorry guys. I don't mean men. I mean guys and girls with the big egos. So there are often people with, unfortunately, big egos, and it depends on your Constitution, how strong you feel, how important it is to you. But one of the things I do I enjoy doing is self reflective questions is something like, I don't know, and it depends how brave you are. Do you realize when you say that X happens? Do you realize when you behave in that way, it detracts from the outcome, whatever that is. So they're self reflective questions. And you're not blaming them. You're asking them to check in on themselves. And it does require quite a strong Constitution, as it were. You need to be quite firm, stern, but fair, but get them to understand what they're doing and they probably know. But they think that you're not aware of that kind of hiding game. And frankly, if they're not aware, then they're probably appreciative of somebody bringing that up. Like I didn't know I was being perceived in that regard. And in other cases, you're very politically or casually calling them out on that and letting them know that you're onto their game. Exactly. That's a good one calling them out. Yeah. There's different ways to call people out. Yeah, right. Someone else asks. Pardon me. There can be a fear to share personal issues with colleagues. That's natural. Do companies, therefore have a responsibility to embrace and encourage a culture of openness and care among their workforce, perhaps in turn making management and staff more open and more empathetic. I do think organizations have a culture to look after their environment, look after the culture of the environment, and that includes the people in them. I do believe that. So for me, it depends on where you work, because sometimes the culture of an organization can be so sorry, toxic that people just will not share. Regardless, they're like, I don't trust them. I'm not sharing. So that speaks to the heart of the culture of the organization. If the culture of the organization is not one of trust and it's going to be very difficult to get people to share, people are more likely to share when they feel comfortable and safe. So it depends on what's going on in any organization. But if you might need to rail that back and start creating, which is a whole different ballgame of a culture of sharing and openness. But I think you can use also surveys as well, anonymized surveys as well, where people start to understand what the culture of an organization is and start sharing feedback rather than personalizing the feedback. But I do think that having open feedback, having honest feedback is really helpful, and it shouldn't be a blame feedback again, because I think people react badly when they feel called out in a way that they feel blamed for something. So the way that you structure that feedback is also important because you're probably trying to get a change in behavior. How you get that out of people is quite important. So the way you phrase that will be around your communication as well. I agree. I think that we all know that changing the culture of an organization is not easy. It's really incredibly hard. But what I really like, and I want to applaud you here is that you've given us a bit of a roadmap toward going with that, and it goes to the major lesson which you put forth, which is start with yourself, start with your self awareness, know how that's going, and then slowly that will impact and recognize also that you are impactful. And I think that we've all dealt with this, like if somebody you just like, there's certain people you don't enjoy dealing with as much because they always kind of bring you down. So if everybody can kind of realize that that your mood rubs off on everybody from the boardroom to the street, it's all the interactions that you have, you can impact. So this is great. I really very much enjoyed the session. I think that our audience got a whole lot of it wonderful. I'm really pleased. Great questions coming in as well. I never know what I'm going to get, so they're always really good questions for some of these sessions. Good. Well, I'll just say thank you one more time on behalf of Skills matter, that was just a terrific session, and we really appreciate you taking time out of your day, Rosemary, to share with us. Wonderful. Thank you, Chris. I really enjoyed it. And thanks to Ali for setting us up as well.