Back in 2009, when Avenor College was still a very small community, the management team met with all students’ parents and asked them what are their expectations from the school. “And absolutely everyone said that they want their children to be happy”, Andreia Mitrea, co-founder and managing partner at Avenor College recalls.

That moment was the trigger for what became a commitment from the school’s management team: creating wellbeing in the school. The first step was to address emotional intelligence as a tool for personal development.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as the ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions and the emotions of others. This means being aware that emotions can influence behaviour and learning how to manage them.

Research shows that emotional intelligence (EI) is a better predictor of success and performance than IQ. According to some studies, people that are better at recognizing emotions can handle better the politics in organizations and the interpersonal aspects of work life. Other surveys show a strong connection between EI and creativity.

“In order for teachers to address this issue with their students, it is essential that they are aware of it. And it is maybe more important for them to be very good models, because children tend to imitate adults in this area of personal development”, Andreia Mitrea explains.

The connection between EI and learning is still controversial, even more so in Romania where it is grounded in the school’s tradition to have objectives related only to IQ. But as years passed by, Avenor’ management team realised that the area of emotional intelligence is equally important and started to target it directly.

The first major step was organising an emotional intelligence workshop for the entire Avenor College team (teaching and non-teaching staff) in the induction period at the beginning of the 2015-2016 academic year. Every member of the team received a DISC profile and took part in a full-day workshop to help them understand the results of this personality test used to recognise and understand behavioural differences between individuals.

“My impression is that (this exercise) helped take down masks, free ourselves of fears – that we are misunderstood or maybe that our behaviour is not appropriate – and showed us there are at least 4 different behaviour patterns and that they are all OK”, Andreia Mitrea recalls. “I think we each found a framework that allowed us to feel better understood by others, a safe environment where we could become more open. It was more about being curious about each other, about the differences in behaviour, without any judgment; just getting to know ourselves and seeing the others through a new filter.”

At the beginning of this year a new personal development workshop was organised for the entire team, also based on the DISC profile, followed by a more personalised approach. “We started to create a framework that would allow each member of our team to develop or learn in the direction he or she is personally interested in”, Andreia Mitrea explains.

Following the feedback from the 2016 summer workshop, the management organised several different courses and sent out invitations to the entire Avenor team. “Wellbeing is about discovering ways in which you can feel good, by addressing also your emotions, your soul and your body. We encourage people to take care of all these aspects.”

Some members of the team attended the emotional self-awareness workshops; others were more interested in the yoga courses. A workshop on transformative communication is scheduled for the end of January 2017 and many others will follow.

Participation to these workshops is voluntary because personal development can only come from a personal desire. Not everyone is open to this idea, maybe also due to the fact that in the Romanian culture fear of failure is significant, which makes it more difficult for people to become vulnerable, accept their mistakes and learn from them. But Avenor’s management team believes that with perseverance and patience the personal development programme will gain ground. The next step is to try to make it even more personalised, based on individual needs of teachers and other members of the staff.

This text was initially published in The International Admissions Bulletin, March 2017 issue.