Developing EQ to get you through tough times

What do The Empathy Toy and Lady Gaga have in common? They’re both noted in this “2015 Gift Guide for Raising Your Family's EQ” published in Forbes by Jenn Choi, founder and editor at Toys Are Tools.

And as a former youth counselor, Jenn is uniquely qualified to speak to the struggle with emotions that many kids face, drawing attention to the fact that “not all children [are able to] sort it out themselves.” It’s difficult when emotional intelligence is overlooked as a key skill to be taught in school, especially as the teen years appear increasingly fraught with emotional challenges — so much that “parents of pre-adolescent children often joke about how they dread that phase of life.”

Fortunately for parents, Jenn is optimistic that you don’t need to be an expert in EQ to give your kids a boost! Toys and games can help kids develop the emotional intelligence through play to better weather “the many devastations” likely to come their way.

Raising EQ in the whole family

Surprising in an article angled at helping parents raise emotionally intelligent kids, Jenn doesn’t shy away from the Empathy Toy’s application as “an incredible toy that works well in schools and in the workplace.” Speaking to Kwadwo “Kojo” Boamah, the lead executive for the sales team at FedEx Canada, Jenn describes Kojo’s desire to use the Empathy Toy to cultivate the “out-of-the-box thinking that he wanted his top-performing sales executives to emulate.”

During an Empathy Toy workshop with Twenty One Toys, Kojo’s team at FedEx were excited to find themselves working on their emotional quotient through play. In an interview for this article, Kojo describes how the Empathy Toy helped his team “to understand how collaboration requires patience, opportunities for error, and time to recalibrate messages and then see things out to final execution.” Jenn goes on to relay how Kojo “sees the exercise being particularly impactful with his team’s communication internally.” Kojo sums it up nicely with the sentiment, “internally it’s so easy to forget that the person sitting right next to me is just as important as the customer in front of me.”