Gaining mastery over one’s emotions is an art. There are many promising leaders who have been undone by their emotions and this is why emotional intelligence is very much in the spotlight nowadays. It can prove to be a game-changer in critical situations. As renowned leadership expert, John.C. Maxwell famously said, “Good leaders know when to display emotions and when to delay them.” Applied Emotional Mastery founder Jennifer Day is an emotion coach, trainer, and consultant who specializes in helping business leaders and parents boost their emotional intelligence and exhibit mastery of their emotions in both their personal and professional lives.
Jennifer never thought when she started her career as a professional dancer, and then went on to train as a teacher, that she would become an emotional coach. But these stages in her life shaped her abilities in her current role to help people build emotional resilience.
Jennifer started off her career as a dance teacher with lessons in classical ballet and then moved on to jazz and more commercial forms of dance. It was during this time that Michael Jackson and his moonwalk became popular. This era was marked by the advent of music videos and a surge in demand for dancing lessons. During this time, Jennifer lived in Trinidad and in Norway as well.
Her interest in inner healing and emotional mastery was sparked by a personal crisis – the breakdown of her marriage – which meant that she lost whatever she had gained in her life so far, other than her 10-year-old daughter. Her personal crisis made her turn to psychology and the exploration of techniques like meditation. She had used visualization techniques while teaching dance to her students to help them with their interpretation and achieve movements and steps that they struggled with. When she took to meditation to relieve her stress, she found that this same technique of using her imagination to visualize what she could be and gaining inner strength, would be handy to help her master her own emotions as well.
Jennifer studied counselling and meditation after moving back to the UK in the wake of her divorce. She found that the field of psychology was too academic and didn’t offer the practical tools and solutions for the management of stress and emotions. The search for those solutions became her focus. Since there were not many takers for such ideas in the UK during the late 90s, Jennifer ended up traveling and studying various techniques, particularly those backed by science, in great detail over a period of nine years. She eventually moved base to Hawaii in the United States where she focused on working in private schools. There, she partnered with schools in running programs that specialized in helping children experiencing emotional issues through techniques, including visualization. Her techniques proved to be so effective that parents began asking her for written scripts that they could follow when dealing with their children. This prompted Jennifer to write her first book ‘Creative Visualization with Children’ which has been published in 10 languages and is still in print today. It offers parents several practical tips on how they can use creative visualization techniques to help resolve emotional difficulties in children.
As she worked with children, Jennifer realized the emotional issues that they faced were often rooted in situations they faced at home. She then started holding programs that involved both parents and children. Some of the parents who were entrepreneurs and held senior corporate roles felt that her techniques would be effective in a business setting and asked her to conduct training programs for their firms.
Jennifer Day, Emotional Intelligence Coach to Executives and Parents, says, “We fail to master our emotions when our mind-body connection goes haywire. Through my years of research into techniques like meditation and studies in neuroscience and psychology, I have discovered several techniques that can help people to gain mastery over their emotions so that they can make better decisions, collaborate and communicate in more effective ways and do not lose their temper or become anxious unnecessarily. In business settings, emotional mismanagement and outbursts can have significant impact and can even affect the bottomline of a company and the morale of its employees. This is where an emotion coach like me can make a difference through the use of simple techniques.”
Some of the techniques that Jennifer uses are posture control, breathing exercises, creative visualization, and journal writing exercises, while building increased self-awareness. For example, sitting for long hours on end can affect the inflow of breath into the lungs. Instead of breathing normally, one ends up, often unconsciously, taking shallow breaths for hours at a time thus giving the brain signals that it is under stress. The solution is to step away and take several deep breaths. This has been recognized by modern science, and many companies are now providing employees with the option to have standing desks. Breathing exercises coordinate the flow of energy between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Buddhists have a practice of ‘inner smile meditation’ which involves being very much centered on emotions and being aware of them so that one does not react under stress.
Through her training programs, courses and books, Jennifer Day has turned practices that were once considered strange into norms for best practices in a business setting. This has helped many business leaders across the world become emotionally intelligent and better communicators as well as experts in their own fields so that they can lead their companies to greater success.
About Applied Emotional Mastery Ltd
Through Applied Emotional Mastery Ltd, Jennifer Day, the company’s founder, helps parents and business executives gain mastery over their emotions and enhance their emotional intelligence so that they can do greater justice to their roles.
