Developing your Emotional Intelligence - Budget Friendly ways for PMO Professionals to develop their EQ

You know you need to develop your emotional intelligence but you don't have a budget for that.

Over the years, I have noticed how much easier it is to get budget to spend on the tools of our trade and other tangible things than it is to get authorisation to spend on things like your development, let alone soft skills development.  And I understand that,  it is much harder to quantify what will be different as a result, and given the current economic climate and uncertainties, the need to be prudent is magnified.

And that leaves us with a quandary: we need to develop our EQ to be as impactful as our organisation needs us to be, and if we are being brutally honest, to protect our careers, but we have little or no budget to develop the very skills we need to do that.

Why you need to develop your EQ

Whatever leadership or project role you are in, your emotional intelligence matters just as much, if not more than, your technical skills.  This is especially true in roles like the PMO, where you are bridging the gap between strategy and the teams charged with executing that strategy.  The constant project pressures, stakeholder demands and the sheer number of projects in our programmes and portfolios serve to emphasise this key differentiator between an adequate PMO person and a PMO Professional who makes an impact and adds valueWhen we have a higher EQ (the measure of our Emotional Intelligence) you can expect to experience many benefits which fall into these categories.

  1. Building deeper levels of Trust and Credibility

  2. Navigating Resistance and Change with more ease

  3. Making better decisions under pressure

  4. Developing high-performance project and PMO teams

  5. Becoming strategically influential

If you would like to know more about why developing your EQ matters and the benefits you can expect from doing so, please check out this blog post.

So how can you develop your EQ in a budget friendly way?

So I am going to share two things that can help!

  1. How to use Applied Curiosity to develop your EQ
  2. A free download with over 40 budget friendly and free tools and techniques you can use to develop your EQ

The Applied Curiosity Model is a power tool that can be used in a number of ways to develop your Emotional Intelligence.  You can use it to structure your development, to develop each of the elements of Emotional Intelligence and within each development activity.

The Applied Curiosity Model

The Applied Curiosity Model is a power tool that can be used in a number of ways to develop your Emotional Intelligence.  You can use it to structure your development, to develop each of the elements of Emotional Intelligence and within each development activity

The Applied Curioisty model from Bekka Prideaux at the Curious Choice

The Applied Curiosity Model is a virtuous circle that consists of three interconnected stages that, in this context, will provide you with a roadmap to develop your EQ.  It can also be used within your day-to-day activities to unlock the power of your emotional intelligence.

The stages are pretty self-explanatory, but let’s look at each stage in a little more detail and work through how you can use them to develop your EQ

1. Research: Moving Beyond Assumptions

By nature, many of us are used to jumping into citations and providing a solution, after all, to an extent that is what we are employed to do.  However, when we do that, we are not at our most effective.  We would not trust a doctor who gave us a prescription without diagnosing first, so why should people trust what we do when we jump straight to a solution without doing our research?

As we plan to develop our EQ, this phase is about learning about EQ, understanding where are starting from, observing our performance and noticing how our emotions play out in the workplace.  It is about gathering feedback and noticing patterns

2. Reflect: Creating Meaning from Multiple Perspectives

This is the powerful pause between something happening and how we react.  It is about creating the time to think, to challenge ourselves and our assumptions, to consider the context we are working in.  We need to synthesise all the different inputs, all the research and think about how everything links together.  It is our chance to consider the trade-offs that there will be from various courses of action.

As we create our plan to develop our EQ the reflection stage would include considering which tactics we are going to use to develop the particular skill, how we might evaluate our progress and the potential impact of each. At this stage, we are generating options rather than committing ourselves to a specific set of actions.

3. React: From Insight to Value-Adding Action

The React Phase of the Applied Curiosity Model is where we truly unlock the power of our Curiosity.  Without this phase, our curiosity remains an interesting but academic exercise.

The reaction phase transforms insights into actions we commit to taking, in this case, to develop our EQ.As PMO’s we know the benefits of sequencing what we are doing, so we need to decide which tactic we are going to employ first, what precisely we are going to do and how we are going to measure our progress.  


I find it helpful to think of it as creating an experiment with a new approach or tactic to be able to see how effective it is for me.  When you then capture the results of that experiment, you are completing the cycle as this is the research for your next Applied Curiosity Cycle.

Download the free Ebook

I have collated over 40 tools and techniques that you can use yourself and with the people you work with to develop your Emotional Intelligence.  All the tools and techniques are either free or very low cost, and you can start using them right away.

You can download your copy here.  

You will be asked to create a free account so you can download the ebook and I  promise you will not be bombarded with multiple or regular emails when you do!

Conclusions

Developing your Emotional Intelligence will allow you to leverage your technical skills and support you in many other areas of your life, both in work and outside work.  It is something that we can all always work on, but it does not have to cost us a fortune to do it.  Yes, Coaching and Mentoring are the best ways to develop your EQ, but we don't always have the budget for them.  Using the Applied Curiosity Model is a great place to start, and the 40 tools and techniques in the free ebook will support both you and your team in developing your EQ and your effectiveness.

The questions I would like to leave you with

What is the biggest difference you think developing your EQ would make to you and how are you going to start?

Curious to know more about developing your Emotional Intelligence?
Book a call and let's chat

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