The objectives we wanted to achieve by implementing the project were to improve education by giving the facilitators a set of extra skills and weapons for their performance thanks to the contact with Emotional Intelligence. In a second step, students and clients will benefit from those skills, generating better professionals and better citizens for the European society. Moreover, we wanted to raise awareness of the importance of emotional intelligence in adult education, highlight the particular implications of andragogy, identify the most important emotions involved in the formative process and how those emotions affect the daily performance of trainers, detect risks and opportunities of those emotions in the training process, make trainees participants of a better management of their own emotions, promote benefits of Emotional Education for adult educators, improve the level of adult training, promote exchange between adult educators and trainers, both at the regional level but also between countries. By creating tools for improving soft skills of trainers and trainees, the consortium achieved the objective of the project: highlight the importance of Emotional Intelligence and social skills in the new economic environment.
In recent years the crucial role of emotions in learning has been a hot topic. It has been proven that emotions have a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behaviour. As a consortium of SMEs working in adult training, we had realised that the role of Emotional Intelligence had been established in the field of education, but not yet in adult training. We strongly believed that trainers and facilitators need to be trained as well in emotional intelligence. Our target group was dual. - On the one hand, the final beneficiaries were participants in any adult training process (whether in-company or in another training institution or organisation). They had learned to identify and manage their emotions during the training process, as it has been scientifically proven (McLean, The Theory of the Triune Brain) that emotional management is closely linked to the success of the cognitive processes of learning and internalisation of concepts.