Hi, I'm Joe Crosby and it's a pleasure to be with you for this video on emotional intelligence. We owe a great deal of our knowledge about the subject to this man, Dr. Daniel Goleman. He took decades of research and put it together into his best selling book, emotional intelligence. And he has been doing research and writing books ever since on the subject. Some of that research is right here. Emotional Intelligence accounts according to the research for 67% of high performance, almost twice as much as IQ or technical knowledge.

Now that may be a surprise to you. But I have met many people in organizations who had high IQ but were essential ineffective in putting their knowledge into use because people didn't like to deal with them. Those individuals often felt that the other people were to blame for the dilemma, perhaps or even better about it, and so difficult to approach and often combative in their conversations about what should be done in the organization. And so, if you have low EQ in terms of the impact you're having on other people emotionally and the way that emotion is driving your own behavior, it will get in the way of your effectiveness at work, and it will also interfere with your satisfaction in your personal life. Goldman's got research showing that people with high IQ, earn more and stay in organizations longer. There's just many people Variables related to this important skill set.

And it's truly a skill set. You can go from wherever your current EQ is, it can be measured, and you can increase it by focusing on the things that we're about to talk about the three core skills of emotional intelligence now this is my own adaptations of Goldman's work and the work of others. The first is the most important, it's your own self awareness. Everyone is born with a full range of emotion. When you were first in the world, if you felt sad, you felt it and you showed it if you were happy you felt it. You showed it if you were mad, you felt it.

You showed it. There was no filtering process between what was experienced emotionally and what was displayed through our interaction. With the environment we grew up in, we lose some of that capacity. Certainly we have to in order to become a social being that can relate to others. And in order to develop our cognitive capacities, we lose touch with some of that range of emotion and with some of that immediate congruence between feeling and and showing, and that's okay. A skill is to not show everything you feel.

The dilemma is if you're having emotions that you aren't even aware of, or if you struggle with certain emotions. So part of the task of emotional intelligence is to regain awareness of the full range. every emotion is wired into us for a reason. Shame. It's not my favorite emotion to feel. But shame.

The right amount of access to shame helps one Not do shameless things. If you have no shame, you'll take credit where it's really due to others. If you have no shame, you will do socially unacceptable behaviors. You will have a difficult time fitting in too much shame will turn into anger directed inward. It's debilitating. You'll have thoughts like why did I do that again?

Why am I so stupid? That's not helpful either that's overdoing it. The same is true of the whole range, there is a right amount. It's not an exact science, whatever that right amount is, but some anxiety is good. I feel anxious before I do each video or before I do any kind of work activity. I'm anxious and I want to perform as well as I can.

That's motivating that helps me focus on preparation So that's helpful. Too much anxiety as you no doubt know, will then break down the process will keep people from performing the way that they could. So if you don't have enough anxiety, if you just don't care, then that's not good for performance if you have too much anxiety, that's not good for performance, but some anxiety is healthy in motivating. Anger. If without anger, you won't be able to make decisions. You have to be able to say, No, we're going this direction.

I know some of you don't like it, maybe all of you don't like it. But this is the direction we have to go. If you can't access the hard feelings of anger, even if you use a different word for it, like seriousness. There's a whole range of emotion from really intense, I think of anger as being somewhere towards the top rages, maybe higher. But things like seriousness concern is at the low end of the range of anger. And it's healthy and important to be able to notice it in yourself and act on it.

If you're experiencing emotion, let's take anger again and you don't realize it's there. See, many people have trained themselves to not notice emotions if they don't like what's happened in their life, when they've experienced those emotions, or if they don't like the behavior of others when they've had those emotions. So over the years, we've been teaching ourselves and some of that lesson is to lose awareness. And if I'm unaware of something like defensiveness, then I will be acting on it defending without even realizing I'm doing it. Or I may just come write off and not have the conversations that I need to have to be effective, certainly at work, but also in home relationships. So if you avoid, or if you overindulge.

That's not good. There's a balance. And if you don't understand the relationship between emotion and your own behavior, then you will be acting without knowing, and there's going to be consequences. So the first core skill is awareness of your own emotion, and your own patterns of behavior based on emotion. The basic pattern with emotion when there's tension is either to be oppositional to debate everything or to be passive to avoid everything to keep Your mouth shut to hope that things will just get better somehow, if you don't speak up, no, sometimes that's wise, sometimes it's wise to be oppositional. But if you're stuck in the pattern, and you don't even recognize it, then again, that's going to work against you in life, work and at home.

Now, the second third, core capacities are only possible if you have awareness, the first capacity. So the second capacity is to manage your behavior. And again, like I've already said, If I know that I feel anxious, or let's say I'm worried about something at work, I'm worried about a work condition or I'm worried about whether we're making progress. Being aware of that then gives me the capacity to act on it possibly by letting people know, possibly by taking some other action. And if I'm unaware of it, then that's information that's important that's being cut off from Myself and from others. So again, awareness leads to the capacity to manage behavior to make choices about behavior, not just to be stuck in a habit of fight or flight.

The third capacity is to be able to tune into others empathy. If I am unaware of my own emotion, if I'm afraid of my own emotion, then I will have a hard time because I'm being driven by emotion. Ironically, my fear of it, I will have a hard time then being calm and tuning into others, understanding their emotional states. If I am reactive to emotion, if you get mad, I'll get mad, or maybe I'll feel defensive and just act on that. If someone else feels sad, and I have a difficult time with sadness with when I experienced sadness, then maybe I'll just try it yourself. them up, I'll have a hard time being calm and just being with them while they deal with their own emotional state.

So, to have empathy, you have to have self awareness and then you have to be willing to tune into others at work, if someone's mad at you about a work situation, if you get reactive, then you'll probably either fight or end up just parting ways and blaming the other. If you actually want to solve problems in problems, which include you, then you have to take a deep breath and make sure you understand what the other person is concerned about, even if their delivery is intense, or messy. So your capacity to empathize and tune into others. And then to show it you may have a lot of empathy for how People feel. But if they don't know it, then the odds are that you've at least got a gap about a barrier between what is possible, and what's going to happen. If they want you to be empathetic, want you to be listening, and they can't tell that you are because you're just quiet.

Or because you change the subject, whatever it might be, then that's a lost opportunity to connect. So it's not enough to feel empathy. It's important to show it through conversations through body language, to let other people know that you're actually getting their message. Even if you feel anxious, even if it's hard for you in the moment, to take a deep breath tune in, make sure that they get it that you're listening and that you're trying to understand it doesn't mean you have to agree In the end, it doesn't mean you're going to lose your own sense of self. But it does mean that there's the opportunity, the possibility of understanding the other. And you may find out also, if you just stay silent, you'll never know.

But if you check about how you think they're feeling, or what they're concerned about, you may find out that you just actually misunderstood that you didn't even know. And that'd be better to know than to walk away thinking you understood. So empathy is both tuning in to others aware to others emotions. It starts with your own awareness of your full range. That's also empathy, behavior, talking and showing that you're making the attempt to understand Okay, so those are the three core capacities awareness, managing your behavior, and empathy. I appreciate your time and attention and I look forward to our next conversation.