Lead Yourself First with Kia Afcari & Tami Simon

FREE ON-DEMAND CLASS

Lead Yourself First

Emotional Intelligence for How We Show Up, Respond, and Connect

A free on-demand session with Kia Afcari of the Greater Good Science Center to help you navigate difficult moments with more awareness and intention.

Turns out, how we handle ourselves and relate to other people is something we can get better at. Even now. Research shows that there are four core skills behind how we understand ourselves, manage our reactions, read the room, and relate to the people around us. In this free class, Kia Afcari will teach a simple practice for each one that you can use when a conversation gets tense, a comment lands wrong, or you wish you’d handled something differently.

Kia Afcari

Director of Greater Good Workplaces, Greater Good Science Center

TAMI SIMON

Founder, Sounds True

We can become more like the people we mean to be, even in the moments when it’s hardest.

Knowing how you want to respond is one thing. Being able to do it when you’re tired, frustrated, caught off guard, or sitting across from someone who knows exactly how to push your buttons is another.

That gap is part of what makes emotional intelligence so interesting. Researchers generally group it into four areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Together, they help us get better at what happens between something hitting us and what we choose to do next.

Kia Afcari has spent his career helping people take ideas like these off the page and put them into practice. Through his work with the Greater Good Science Center, he brings the research on emotional intelligence and well-being into the kinds of situations we all face at work and in our lives.

Join us for a practical exploration of all four skills. Kia will share a short practice for each one: noticing what’s happening in your body, steadying yourself under pressure, reading the room, and strengthening your connections with the people around you.

You’ll still get frustrated, defensive, nervous, and overwhelmed sometimes. Everyone does.

The goal is to notice a little sooner, understand a little more, and have more choice about who you want to be in the moment that comes next.

In this free class, you’ll learn:

How to notice what’s happening in your body before your reaction gets ahead of you.

A breathing practice to help steady yourself when emotions start running high.

How to read a room more accurately and notice what other people may be feeling or wanting.

A surprisingly simple practice for creating more appreciation and connection with the people around you.

How to create more space between what happens and what you choose to do next.

A surprisingly simple practice for creating more appreciation and connection with the people around you.

How to create more space between what happens and what you choose to do next.

Who this is for…

This class is for anyone who has ever walked away from a conversation thinking, I wish I’d handled that differently.

Maybe you’re good at what you do, but certain people can still get under your skin. Maybe you tend to say yes when you mean no, get quiet when you have something important to say, become defensive before you realize it, or spend way too much time replaying a conversation afterward.

Or maybe nothing is particularly wrong. You want to get better at understanding yourself, reading other people, and staying steady when things get complicated.

You don’t need to manage a team, have “leader” in your title, or know anything about emotional intelligence. You just need to be a person who works, lives, loves people, gets frustrated with people, and would occasionally like to handle all of it a little better.

Meet your hosts

Kia Afcari

Director of Greater Good Workplaces, Greater Good Science Center; Inner MBA Instructor

Kia Afcari is the director of Greater Good Workplaces at GGSC. He has over 20 years of experience helping leaders, teams, and organizations with collaborative change and has served as a consultant to a wide variety of organizations, including tech, biotech, and fintech companies, health care organizations, universities, NGOs, UN agencies, and nonprofits. Kia grounds his work in the science of well-being, prosociality, and contemplative practices and uses creative methods like “instant dance parties” and Boal-informed theater techniques to achieve results. He is a certified executive coach, an Appreciative Inquiry Facilitator, Zenger Folkman 360 Extraordinary Leader Facilitator, and Core Strengths Facilitator.

Kia’s TEDx talk on How We Can Reshape Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Together has over 77,000 views, and his work supporting major culture change efforts at scale earned Chief Learning Officer Magazine’s Silver Award for Innovation.

TAMI SIMON

Founder, Sounds True

Tami Simon founded Sounds True in 1985 with a clear mission: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. What started as a project with one woman and her tape recorder has grown into a multimedia publishing company that features hundreds of leading teachers and visionaries of our time. Sounds True has produced over 3,000 titles, including events, certification programs, and transformational online learning experiences, and is North America’s leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings. Tami hosts the popular Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge, which has been downloaded more than 15 million times. She is also the founder of the Sounds True Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing spiritual education to people who would otherwise not have access.

The research gives us a pretty good reason to be hopeful: emotional intelligence keeps growing as long as we keep practicing it.

No matter how long we’ve been doing things a certain way, it’s still possible to catch ourselves sooner and respond differently when it matters.

So clear an hour on your calendar and join us for Lead Yourself First. Come learn the four skills, try the practices for yourself, and see what might change the next time one of those moments gets the better of you.

A program by Sounds True

In consultation with the Greater Good Science Center