Anticipate the triggers and develop emotional intelligence.

In her Monday session, Britt Andreatta, CEO of Brain Aware Training, laid out a few staggering statistics on workplace well-being. For instance:

• A toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate.

• Eighty-seven percent of employees say they have worked for a toxic manager.

• Thirty percent of employees say they have worked for more than one toxic manager.

It’s easy to understand, then, why Andreatta calls emotional intelligence (EQ) the “mother skill.” Andreatta defines emotional intelligence as “the ability to accurately gather emotional data and effectively use it to solve emotional challenges and build effective relationships with others.”

Despite not being the norm, it benefits companies to make sure their workplaces are emotionally intelligent.

“Emotional intelligence drives all kinds of indicators you want,” Andreatta says. “There’s some research that shows when you’ve got a \[…\] high emotionally intelligent organization, you see that financial performance goes up as a result. Retention of your key talent improves. Your employee productivity goes up.”

According to Andreatta, EQ is two times more predictive of performance than IQ, it accounts for 80 to 90 percent of competencies that differentiate top performers, and 75 percent of careers are derailed for reasons related to emotional competencies.

There are 20 such competencies, divided into four quadrants: knowledge of self, emotional self-control, empathy, and communication.

To improve your EQ, it’s essential to know what your triggers are.

“We like to have people have action plans because it puts them in the driver’s seat of their brain and not feel like they’re being victimized by it all the time,” Andreatta says.

She gave the audience strategies for anticipating their triggers, such as having a plan for handling them (which she calls the “fire drill”), as well as healing them.

A few ways to heal are talk therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, brainspotting, and yoga. Daily activities include journaling, exercising, and practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness can particularly positively affect the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with fear, emotions, and anxiety.

“There is value in engaging in mindfulness programs and investing in them in your organization,” she says. “We know that the research is clear that mindfulness, even doing it for as little as five minutes a day, changes the amygdala. The amygdala physically shrinks and becomes less reactive. It virtually widens your window of tolerance by itself, biologically.”