AyyuB’s journey of LiFe

Date: 1st August 2009

For the upcoming individual assignment, we will have to develop a voice for Lisa’s sexual harassment experience while working for her company. Hence, we will need to write scripts and sort of make out the expected reactions that Lisa will give in the process.

Sexual harassment is taken extremely seriously in Singapore and despite that, that doesnt mean that it doesnt exists here. I cant help but worry for the safety of all women in the working world who have to deal with sexual harassment. The main concern is obviously for the women who does not speak up or dont know have to hanle with such unpleasant gestures. Some of the women might have the courage to stand up to tell off the men that this is wrong, while some women just dont have the capacity to react. It will be really interesting for me to create a script and i am already looking forward to it.

Date: 22th July 2009

The 2 videos were about what emotions were basedand the following rational leads to conclusion. Kevin Roberts noted that the best way to learn and perhaps by failing. I cant disagree with that statement as i find my whole life is mostly full of such processes. One of the biggest problem i have since i was a kid is to contain my excitement or my anger. Since i am always a person who stays true to who i really am, it’s really tough to know when i should or should not release these emotions.

Kevin Roberts then proceeded to talk about having a ‘dream’ which leads to the establishments of goals and objectives of companies. It is also important for any business to contribute something positive in the world. As i have yet to own my own company or business, i wondered if the same can be applied for my own social soccer team that i am managing at the moment. Frankly, it did started out with a ‘dream’ before i proceeded to set goals and objectives on a six months term basis. After 3 months of managing my soccer team, i am overseeing several functions like financing, marketing, communicating and making any final decisions. At the same time, i delegate some duties to able partners of the team and things are looking for my team! If you are curious, please check out www.jawssc.com

The second video was about an interview with Daniel Goleman about his experience as a psychologist. I understood from him that it is important to show empathy as a great leader. By listening more from others’ perspective and then putting their outputs into ideas that suit your objectives and direction will produce a better result or performance. Social intelligence is about how well can one interpret other people’s emotions are showing empathy as well. I cant help but noticed that i do have quite a remarkable social intelligence and also a decent emotional intelligence. These are the qualities that help me to stand out as a leader in various aspects of my life so far: Love, Family, Football and School. I only hope that i can continue to further develop all of these components to be an outstanding leader one day!

Date: 15th July 2009

Emotions certainly ran high during today’s BES class as we learnt about what are the different types of emotions we have and most importanly, how to control it. As the class was asked to pair up, Sya with my partner and Miss Suma asked one of us to go outside where she can tell us to share one secret that will definitely shocked the another! Then, the other partner will then be asked to keep asking the question why? So, i was the first one to reveal a shocking truth to Sya! The look on her face was really priceless as i could tell that she was so suprised to heard that! Hahaha…. However, Sya then recovered from it pretty quickly and started to bombard me with questions of why is it that way. Well, i really find the whole process hilarious because all of the students seemed to engage in loud conversations.

Later in the class, we were tested of how well can we control our emotions and i got a good score. I am pretty sure that a few years younger, i could possibly fail that test! BES is turning out to be fun after all!

Emotional Intelligence – EQ – is a relatively recent behavioural model, rising to prominence with Daniel Goleman’s 1995 Book called ‘Emotional Intelligence’.

Emotional Intelligence is increasingly relevant to organizational development and developing people, because the EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people’s behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills, and potential. Emotional Intelligence is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service, and more.

Mapping emotional intelligence to leadership traits

Emotional intelligence capabilities can be directly mapped to specific leadership traits. The following table illustrates this mapping and outlines the corresponding behaviors:

Fortunately, since emotional intelligence is not genetic, strengthening your EI capabilities is possible. You can learn to improve your EI skills through extended practice, feedback from colleagues, and your enthusiasm for making a change.

Contemporary business leadership calls for generous portions of decisiveness, coolness under fire, and results-oriented thinking. It also calls for courage in the face of conflicting demands. The ability to make trade-offs between people, resources, money, and deadlines—often causing short-term pain for the sake of long-term benefit—remains a vital element of effective leadership.

Likewise, leaders must be future-focused; they must know how their group or unit fits into the bigger organizational picture. They must be able to efficiently organize short-term tasks according to long-term priorities.

Perhaps one of the most important responsibilities of today’s leaders is creating the conditions that enable employees to excel. To achieve this aim, the most successful leaders are also the most flexible: they have learned to adapt their leadership style to the situation.

There are now a number of models and questionnaires aimed at measuring Emotional Intelligence, often based on self-report questionnaires. However, this approach has obvious limitations in identifying levels of self-awareness.

The assessment of EI in leadership is complex. The use of simple self-report questionnaires to explore self-awareness has significant limitations. Team Focus approach the topic using a sophisticated variety of approaches including 360 feedback and experiential exercises. This brings the whole concept alive and allows individuals to go beyond their existing knowledge and comfort zones thus producing real impact, growth and change.

After a very short week of holiday, i am finally back in school again for a new term. I have been wanting to take BES modules for like forever because i heard from my other course mates about the assignments and the module doesnt have an exam paper to do! Plus, Miss Suma was my lecturer for Marketing Communication from my last term and i am very keen to take modules that were taught by familiar lecturers. Another plus point for taking BES is being able to be in the same class with many of my other course mates like Faiz, Sya, Tom, Marco, Dee, Jerifin, Eric, Milli, Joleen, Stephen, Kelvin……( if i continue, you might fall asleep!)

As soon as i arrived in the classroom, i took my place and straight away took the study books for the module. I initially took 2 books because Tom asked me to help to collect one for him as he had an ‘extended’ holiday back in his homeland, Vietnam. However, the fear of having not enough study books printed meant i had to pass Tom’s copy to another present classmate. Once everybody got settled, Miss Sumah began to explain the assessment of the modules as i listened attentively because it is my first time taking BES. Soon, we were asked to break into groups and share our thoughts about what another individual might think of us as a person. Obviously, i thought that it was pretty embarassing to tell others that the person i chose think very well of me. I sensed some of my classmates relunctantly participated as we happily allowed time to pass by. As a student, i love getting into discussions about exploring other perspectives and insights about some interesting subjects. Instead of getting to class to listen to the normal lecture, having discussions and learning from one another seems to be more productive in my opinion.

After the break, we switched classroom to a computer lab. The coolest thing about today’s lesson was in fact to blog! As i have been blogging for some time now, i was so pleased to know that my entries can be made on my own personal blog. Of course, i hope to learn as much as possible in future lessons so that i can put my knowledge into applications and enhance my skills and experience. As for my expectations for my next BES lesson, i hope to get into better group discussions and finalise my assignment group members so that we can start doing our work!