Decision Making: Solve Problems with Emotional Intelligence

How effective are you at processing information from your environment and using emotion to drive your decision making?

How rational and objective are you in problem solving and decision making?

From the decision to rise in the morning to the decision go to close your eyes and go to sleep at night, you are constantly solving problems and making decisions.  Throughout each day you are confronted with a variety of problems and decisions that require a rational, thoughtful response underpinned with good emotional awareness.

This course is about proactively working towards solutions that help you to make timely decisions as you solve work problems to bring value to your company and your customers. In addition, the skills, processes and tools taught in this course can bring value to other aspects of your life.

Good decision making means that you can grasp problems and mindfully devise effective solutions. It means that you can deal realistically with situations as they arise and manage emotions and impulses that may disrupt effective decision making.

Both creativity and mindfulness form a basic part of solving problems along with intuition. Intuition is a decision making process that is often overlooked in business. Applied in a mindful way, and used well, it can add richness and speed to developing realistic solutions to problems.   Critical thinking to work in an emotionally intelligent manner forms a major component of the skills of decision making to overcome unconscious bias.  This is covered in detail within the course.

The course is based around the Decision Making component of Reuven Bar-On's comprehensive assessment of emotional intelligence.  You do not need any knowledge of this model or about emotional intelligence to take the course.  (It is important for me to stress that I have no commercial affiliation with Reuven Bar-on and the EQ-i 2.0 assessment.)

This course is a standalone course for anyone interested in understanding how to solve problems and make good quality decisions more effectively.  It forms part of a comprehensive course that explores emotional intelligence in more depth.

The course covers the ways to stimulate creativity and looks in detail at the fashionable business technique of mindfulness.  Within this course, mindfulness is applied to decision making.

You'll receive all the information that you need and will be coached using loads of practical hints that you can use straight away.

The course is made up of a series of lectures and contains course notes. There are a series of interactive practical activities that involve some interaction with other people and some reflection.

The course material makes up a one to two day workshop so is equivalent to 8 -12 hour's training. It forms part of our advanced emotional intelligence course endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management.

By completing this course, you will be able to

• Identify how to make better decisions through critical thinking and creative problem solving

  
  

• Recognise and remove barriers to creativity to foster an innovative work environment producing practical solutions

  
  

• Discover ways to move beyond familiar ways of thinking and seeing the world

  
  

• Investigate new ways of listening, leading, responding, and innovating

  
  

• Use mindfulness to evaluate all attributes of the different options available and make more informed decisions

  
  

PLEASE NOTE - This course is NOT for you if you are not prepared to work through the practical activities that make up a fundamental part of the course.  Your decision making cannot be developed just by watching the video lectures.  It requires you to do some reflective thinking, to get some feedback and to discuss your development with others.  I'm afraid that you won't get the best from the course unless you are prepared to do this.

There are EIGHT practical activities included within the course that are designed to help you to develop your decision making capabilities.  These are

1. Reflecting about the Emotional Intelligence Course

2. Assess your Decision Making

3. Understanding your Reality

4. Problem Solving with SCAMPER

5. Impulses and Gratification

6. Mindfulness: What Affects your Energy?

7. An Exercise in Critical Thinking

8. Learning Review

For example, by completing the practical activity "Problem Solving with SCAMPER" you will enable to come up with new ideas when you're trying to develop or improve a product or service.

This course is being continually refined and updated to ensure it remains current and relevant.

The course contains a series of Lightbulb Moments resource cards, which have been created to provide you with handy reminders of key points around topics covered within the course.

All PDFs can be completed online and are Section 508 / ADA Accessibility compliant.

All videos are High Definition recorded in 1080p.

All videos have grammatically correct English captions.

Latest update - November 2026