EQ Workshop with Larisa Halilović

What would an event be without a bit of personal and collective insight and inspiration at the very end? This time, we had a blast listening to and interacting with an expert on Emotional Intelligence, Larisa Halilovic. She held an eye-opening workshop for us called “Emotional Intelligence at Work”. We had so much fun and learned a lot about ourselves and the people we work with.

To warm things up, Larisa asked all of us to briefly present ourselves, which was a great way to include everyone in the room to the conversation and loose up the strings that hold us back from participating. We concluded that most of us are developers, with a couple of software engineers as well.

Following the presentations, an activity that stirred things up was the task by Larisa to stand up, talk to as many people in the room as possible and try to find out and remember the most interesting, weird and rare thing about the other person. This activity again warmed up the sharing part of ourselves, making it easier to talk about the harder topics that were coming up. We also learned that we have among ourselves a colleague with two spleens, a couple of people that love to swim in a freezing cold lake at 2AM and a colleague that is an honorary citizen of a town in the US!

Larisa then shared a picture of an iceberg, one third above the water level and two thirds below water, much like this one:

Larisa tasked all of us to take 4-5 minutes and write down what we think are our core values. We had a bit of help with four questions that would help us come up with the right words for our core values. Those are:

1) What drives you?
2) What is non negotiable?
3) What are the main pillars of your being?
4) What are the characteristics of a good person in your view?

After writing down answers to all of these questions, we had all had at least three core values on our papers (some even more than 10!) and the fun could start – we were asked to walk around the room and compare our core values with the core values that other people were holding important to their being.

This was hands down the most engaging and the most valuable part of this workshop where we learned that not all of us hold the same values or, even more importantly, we have people in our midsts that hold and share the same values as we do, but we would not have assumed that in the first place, judging only by the external behaviors of that person. This strengthened some friendships between our fellow colleagues and opened doors for new ones to bloom. More importantly, it opened doors for introspection and revision of our own selves and what makes us how we are right now.

We took so much time in these fun activities and follow-up questions to Larisa that the two hours that were booked for this session were gone in a second! We had only so much time for Larisa to talk about the last couple of topics till the end of the session, which were closely tied to emotions. We talked about different kinds of emotions and concluded that they all stem from the eight basic emotions which are fear, anger, sadness, trust, disgust, anticipation, joy and surprise.

To conclude our inspiring workshop, Larisa talked about the Propeller core values she managed to compile from the content on our Propeller webpage. With a couple of suggestions from her side, it was clear that we need to revisit those and update the values we present outward to the visitors of our webpage but to ourselves within the company as well. This is an opportunity to think through what Propeller stands for and what values are non negotiable, what makes a true Propeller and what behaviors we would not like to see in our work environment.

We want to deeply and honestly thank Larisa Halilovic for a one of a kind workshop which we all enjoyed and which inspired all of us and taught us how to perceive and think about ourselves and people we work with. Till next time!