Understanding yourself, managing your emotions, understanding others, and managing your relationships – that’s what we call Emotional Intelligence or EI. It’s increasingly accepted that traditional intelligence alone is not enough to succeed. EI is critical to people’s success and this is no different for project managers. As you know from experience, project management is partly people and emotion management: EI is essential for motivating teams, for holding contributors accountable, for running effective meetings, for navigating interests of various stakeholders, and for handling scope changes and complaints. High EI helps you predict, manage, and adapt to these situations. It also helps you deal with people who are in your interpersonal allergy zone. Think of the manipulator, the poor-me-complainer, the last-word-champion, the criticizer or the accuser. There is only one way for you to succeed with these people: understanding how to control yourself and how to best respond to their interests and styles. Anxiety and anger-based responses are often the default response-pattern, however, they cripple your efforts to relate effectively and get the job done. While it’s usually not possible to change these people, it is possible to change the dynamic and your responses, but only if you understand yourself and others better, if you focus on making connections rather than gratifying your ego, and only if you are willing to examine your own assumptions and actions. This program draws from gestalt and cognitive psychology and from Goleman’s EI insights to provide you with specific techniques you can immediately apply on the job.