Schools across Nigeria have been closed for about four months now, and it has been a challenging period for stakeholders in the educational sector. To this end, on Saturday, 11 July 2020, Greensprings School organized a virtual event to motivate all staff. The event was tagged “Purpose and Personal Wellbeing”, and the guest speaker was Lebari Edo-Ukpong, a certified emotional intelligence coach.
The Lekki campus PTA chairperson, Mrs Iyen Ekong, gave the event a thrilling start with an inspiring story and words of motivation. She appreciated our teachers for their efforts in ensuring our students don’t experience a learning gap as a result of school lockdown. In her speech, she glorified teachers delivering online classes during this period as frontline heroes of the educational sector and that history books will never forget everything they are doing to ensure continuous learning of the students. See excerpts below:
To tackle the issue of personal wellbeing during this challenging period of COVID-19, Mrs Edo-Ukpong advised all staff members to work more on their emotional intelligence and to develop emotional toughness. She emphasized the importance for self-motivation, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy and social skills.
Mrs Edo-Ukpong also talked about emotions being like muscles that can be built, but the person that wants to be strong emotionally needs to first recognize that he or she needs to improve his or her emotional intelligence. She rounded off her session by providing some tips for managing emotions when facing life challenges.
The virtual event was a huge success, as most of the employees were not only inspired by the session, they also felt renewed motivation.
