My Journey to Becoming an ECD Certified Consultant

From last year November 2022, I started this wonderful journey with ECD designer Jeremy Dean, learnt different frameworks and ideas on how to use the deck in creating better emotional environment for organisation. I go on this 8-month-pligrimage in searching of how emotional culture could benefit in education, specifically school leaders, teachers and pupils. Now to the very end of the journey, I would like to share the top 5 of what I have found.

Get your team connected

Once the team started to share how they have felt in the past few weeks (this is the check-in activity for emotional culture crafting), they learnt others' feelings, their work or sometimes their personal stories. This emotional sharing helped connecting the team, in both personal and organisation level.

Leaders need to talk more

When I had ECD workshop with them, the common response from the team was 'oh, I don't know you have that feeling' 'I hope to learn more from you' 'I do feel you, but I have no chance to talk with you' 'Thank you for sharing this' ..... They had better understanding each other and the breakthrough usually started by leaders.

Emotional Culture crafting is a powerful process

It was more powerful to have the Emotional Culture Canvas completed - a large poster with what the team could do to promote their favourable feelings and manage undesired feelings. The canvas was posted where everyone could see, reflect and remind themselves what they agreed as a team. It can be reviewed monthly, quarterly or even annually to fit the need.

The conversation is on going

The ECD workshop is not a one-off process. For example, a monthly 30 mins catch up session to follow how the team feel after the workshop and see if there are any adjustment they would like to make. Or the team could arrange internal meeting to do so without my present. They found the tools I provided are useful such as Know Yourself Handbook, Leadership Handbook, Leadership Reflect and Review Canvas and Conversation Canvas.

ECD is a simple tool to achieve greatness

Many participants of my workshop agreed that ECD is simple to use. And the tools comes with it are user friendly. ECD does not have a rigid or complicated rule to follow. And Jeremy always welcome us to 'hack the rule' - it means being flexible to use it and discover as many ways as you can.