The Emotional Maths® Method · Zena Collins

Stop Wasting Time With AI.

You don't have an AI problem. You have a thinking problem AI keeps exposing. Stop Wasting Time With AI shows you how emotional intelligence — a measurable ability, not a mood — transforms what you get from every AI tool you touch.

Get the Book Assess Your EI with Zena
see→ understand→ make→ manage→ sustain= time back SUMMS™ — the Emotional Maths® arc from AI-curious to AI-productive, built on the science of emotional intelligence
The Promise

The tools aren't the bottleneck. Your attention is.

Most people are stuck in the same loop: type a request, get a mediocre answer, try again, give up, call AI overrated. The missing skill is noticing what you actually want, connecting how you feel about the outcome to how you think about the request, and testing the result against your real intent. That's emotional intelligence, applied. That's Emotional Maths®.

Read

The book that turns AI frustration into a repeatable practice.

The Book →

Measure

Take the MSCEIT®2 and debrief your results with Zena Collins, Certified Master Trainer in the MSCEIT®2.

Assess Your EI →

Practice

Kits, learning circles, and the SCRIPT™ methodology for teams.

Learn →

Invite

Bring Zena to your stage, school, or organization.

Speaking →
From the Book · The Maze

What type of AI user are you?

Learning AI isn't a ladder. It's a maze — and there are four ways people get stuck in it. Meet the four types, then find yours in 7 questions.

The FirestarterFIRESTARTER The GrounderGROUNDER The OceanOCEAN Fresh AirFRESH AIR
Take the AI Type Survey

7 questions. 60 seconds. Be honest — the pattern is invisible from the inside.

About the Author

Zena Collins

Zena Collins is Co-Founder of Grand Strategy Consulting, a human-centered AI and emotional intelligence consultancy. She spent 14 years at EY, is a producer of award-winning independent film and theater productions, and is a Certified Master Trainer in the MSCEIT®2 — the ability-based emotional intelligence assessment — through MHS in partnership with Dr. David R. Caruso.

She wrote this book because she watched smart people waste months on AI that a week of better thinking would have fixed.

Zena Collins, author of Stop Wasting Time With AI, photographed on a city street wearing blue and green

Why "Emotional Maths"?

Because emotional intelligence is measurable, learnable, and improvable — like maths. Not a personality trait. Not a vibe. An ability you can score, practice, and put to work.

Think better before you prompt again.

One practical Emotional Maths® exercise in your inbox each week. No hype, no tool-of-the-week churn.

Paperback · Kindle · Audiobook

STOP WASTING TIME WITH AI.

A Practical, Emotionally Intelligent Method for Using AI Well

This is not another book about which AI tool to use. Tools change monthly. This is a book about the one variable that doesn't: you — your attention, your intent, and your ability to notice what you're feeling and put it to work in how you think.

  • The Emotional Maths® method — a step-by-step way to bring emotional intelligence into every AI interaction.
  • SUMMS™ — See, Understand, Make, Manage, Sustain: the arc from AI-curious to AI-productive.
  • SCRIPT™ — the six-step prompt methodology that starts with intent and ends with testing — the two steps most frameworks skip.
  • Learning AI in community — because the fastest AI learners aren't learning alone.
Buy on Amazon Audiobook — coming soon

Ordering 10+ copies for your team, book club, or classroom? Ask about bulk orders →

Book cover: Stop Wasting Time With AI — A Practical, Emotionally Intelligent Method for Using AI Well, by Zena Collins
Who It's For

Professionals

Who suspect they're underusing AI and are tired of guessing.

Leaders

Responsible for AI adoption that isn't happening.

Educators

Who want students to think with AI, not outsource thinking to it.

Read the book, then measure your starting point. Assess Your EI →
The MSCEIT®2 with Zena Collins

You can't manage what you've never measured.

Emotional intelligence isn't a vibe — it's a measurable ability. The MSCEIT®2 measures how well you actually perceive emotions, connect them to thinking, understand them, and manage them. Then Zena helps you do something with the answer.

Book a 20-minute fit call
What the MSCEIT®2 Is

An ability test, not a questionnaire

Unlike self-report questionnaires that measure how emotionally intelligent you believe you are, the MSCEIT®2 presents real emotional problems and scores your actual performance across four branches — perceiving emotions, connecting emotions to thinking, understanding emotions, and managing emotions. It was developed by leading researchers in the field and is published by MHS.

This four-branch science is the foundation SUMMS™ — the method in the book — is built on. Your assessment tells you where you're starting from; SUMMS™ tells you what to do next.

What you're buying: a debrief and development experience. Your assessment is administered under Zena's certification, and the heart of the engagement is a structured session where she interprets your profile with you and builds a development plan — including how your EI profile shapes the way you work with AI.

Your results belong to you

Individual MSCEIT®2 results are confidential to the participant. In team engagements, we report group patterns only; no one's individual scores are shared without their explicit written consent. Assessment data is never used for hiring, firing, or performance evaluation.

Three Ways to Work Together

Individual Debrief

MSCEIT®2 administration + 90-minute one-to-one debrief + written development plan + AI working-style translation.

Enquire →

Team Debrief

Assessments for up to 12 people + team pattern workshop + individual confidential reports. Team sessions discuss patterns, never named individual scores.

Enquire →

Leadership Cohort

Multi-session program combining MSCEIT®2 debriefs with Emotional Maths® practice for leadership teams driving AI adoption.

Enquire →
Practice Tools

Reading changes what you know.
Practice changes what you do.

Digital Download

Emotional Maths® AI Practice Kit

The book's method as a working toolkit: structured exercises, reflection prompts, and worked examples you can run solo or with a partner.

Get the kit →
Digital Download

AI Learning Circle Facilitator Resources

Everything needed to run a peer learning circle — session plans, facilitation guides, and discussion frameworks. Because the fastest AI learners learn in community.

Get the resources →
Team License

SCRIPT™ for Teams

The six-step prompt methodology packaged as branded guides, training decks, and a ready-to-install AI skill file. Licensed per team, with optional live training.

Enquire →
Why SCRIPT™ Is Different

It begins with intent and ends with testing

Plenty of prompt frameworks tell you to add context and assign a role. SCRIPT™ — Situation, Clear Intent, Role, Instructions, Parameters, Test — is distinctive for what it adds at both ends: declaring why you want the output, not just what, and evaluating the result against that intent. A complete, teachable practice, not a one-shot template.

Running this for a whole organization? For Teams →
Keynotes · Workshops · Briefings

The AI talk your audience will actually use on Monday.

Zena Collins brings a rare combination to the stage: 14 years inside one of the world's largest professional services firms, a producer's instinct for holding a room, and the science of emotional intelligence as a Certified Master Trainer in the MSCEIT®2. Practical, warm, and free of AI doom or hype.

Check Zena's availability Download the one-sheet (PDF)
Signature Topics

Stop Wasting Time With AI

The keynote of the book: why your emotional intelligence — not your tool stack — determines your AI results, with a live Emotional Maths® exercise the audience runs in real time.

From AI Resistance to AI Readiness

For leaders: why adoption stalls, what people are actually feeling when they resist, and how to lead the change with SUMMS™ — See, Understand, Make, Manage, Sustain.

Learning AI in Community

For L&D and education audiences: the peer-learning architecture that outperforms solo tutorials, and how to build learning circles that stick.

Formats: Keynotes (45–60 min) · Interactive workshops (half/full day) · Executive briefings · Virtual sessions. Zena has delivered virtual AI sessions for organizations up to Fortune 100 scale.
Booking Enquiry

Tell us about your event

For Schools & Universities

Students are already using AI.
The question is whether they're thinking.

Banning AI teaches avoidance. Ignoring it teaches shortcuts. The third path is teaching students to bring their full thinking — including their emotional intelligence — to how they use these tools: noticing their intent before they prompt, testing outputs against that intent, and learning together rather than alone.

AI Learning Circles

A facilitated peer-learning program for students or staff, built on the book's community-learning model, with full facilitator resources so your own educators can sustain it.

Educator Workshops

Practical sessions giving teaching staff a shared method — Emotional Maths® and SCRIPT™ — instead of a patchwork of personal policies.

Class Sets of the Book

Bulk pricing for departments, cohorts, and staff reading groups.

Start with a pilot — measured honestly

Start with one department or one cohort. We run a defined pilot with clear before-and-after reflection from participants, then decide together whether and how to expand. We won't promise academic outcomes we haven't measured — we'll measure them with you.

Talk to us about a pilot
For Organizations

Your AI rollout doesn't need more licenses.
It needs more adoption.

Organizations don't struggle with AI because the tools are hard. They struggle because adoption is a human change — and human change runs on emotion. Grand Strategy Consulting, the firm behind this book, turns AI spend into AI results.

Book a discovery call
Three Ways In

Start with measurement

Team MSCEIT®2 debriefs establish where your people actually are before you change how they work.

Assess Your EI →

Start with skills

SCRIPT™ for Teams licensing and training gives your whole organization one shared prompting practice.

Learn →

Start with strategy

Grand Strategy's consulting engagements, from foundation to full operations — offers and pricing at grandstrategy.llc.

grandstrategy.llc →
Stop Wasting Time With AI · Zena Collins ·
stopwastingtimewithai.com
Characters courtesy of feel-wise.com
Privacy & Responsible AI

Your trust is the whole business.
Here's how we protect it.

Emotional intelligence starts with respecting what people share with you. This statement explains, in plain language, what this site collects, what we do with it, and the commitments we make about using AI responsibly. Effective July 8, 2026.

What This Site Collects

Only what you choose to send us

This website sets no cookies, runs no advertising trackers, and uses no analytics that profile you. If you simply read and leave, we learn nothing about you personally.

If you submit the speaking enquiry form or join the email list, the details you type — your name, organization, email address, and message — are delivered to us by a form-relay service (FormSubmit) and arrive in our inbox at hello@grandstrategy.llc. Like most websites, our hosting provider (GitHub Pages) and font provider (Google Fonts) may record standard technical logs such as IP addresses when the page loads; we never see or use those logs.

What We Do With It

We reply. That's it.

What you send us is used to respond to you and, if we work together, to serve you well. We do not sell, rent, or trade your information. We do not add you to a mailing list you didn't ask to join. If you ask us to delete what we hold about you, we will, and we'll confirm when it's done — email hello@grandstrategy.llc any time to ask what we have, correct it, or remove it.

Assessment Confidentiality

Your MSCEIT®2 results are yours

Emotional intelligence assessment results are among the most personal data we handle, and they are treated that way. MSCEIT®2 assessments are administered through the secure, authenticated systems of the test publisher (MHS) — never through this website. Individual results are shared only with the individual in a confidential debrief. In team sessions we discuss patterns, never named individual scores. Assessment data is never used for marketing and never entered into public AI tools.

Responsible AI Commitment

We practice what the book teaches

We use AI tools in our own work — that's the point of the business — and we hold that use to the standard we teach. AI assists with drafting and research; a human reviews, decides, and sends. Nothing leaves this practice on autopilot. Client-confidential material and assessment results are never placed into public AI tools. And no decision about a person — a client, a participant, a student — is ever delegated to an AI system.

Schools & young people: our work with schools is designed for educators. This website does not knowingly collect information from children, and our school programs never require student personal data to flow through us.

Questions about any of this — or anything we could do better? hello@grandstrategy.llc. A person reads it, and a person answers.