E002: Emotional Intelligence

hi everyone. This is James, and this is Jane, and welcome back to the world of work podcast. This is episode two here. We're going to be chatting about our new topic per day, emotional intelligence. So how are you getting on, Jane, I'm good. Can you Can everyone believe we're actually back? Exciting, right? Whatever chances, right? I know. So yeah, I'm good. I'm looking forward to this topic. It's one that's quite close to my heart, because I think, I think emotional intelligence quite often, doesn't get talked about enough, and gets treated like it's a a topic to learn, rather than something we should all be working to develop all the time. Yeah, and it's really important in the workplace, isn't it? I mean, we started with organizational development last week because we think it's a key factor of sort of changing workplaces, but emotional intelligence is really a core skill to have in the workplace. So it seemed like a good one to move on to. Yeah, I think it always it was. Astonishes me that people don't a recognizes something to be worked at, whether you're naturally more comfortable in that space or not, you still have to work at it and still have to put the effort in to understand other people. And I also think people just woefully underestimate how much it can help you be really good at your job. Yeah, it's so important, particularly in a sort of knowledge economy, jobs where you working with others and collaborating and, you know, needing to maintain relationships or work with customers, it's just and actually any job where you're managing large numbers of staff. So I've some of the best people who've put tools of emotional intelligence to work and have really exhibited great skills. Exhibited great skills around it. Have been managers of large numbers of people in things like call centers,

manufacturing environments where they their ability to understand what's going on in people's lives and to predict how people behave really makes a difference in their productivity. Yeah. So what are we going to do today? We're going to do same kind of approach that we do every time. We have a podcast, all two right? Every time. So we're going to kick off by running through some definitions, talk a little bit about some of the core bits there. Then we'll do a bit of a research round up, where we'll play back some of the things we've learned while we've been researching the subject. We'll share our list of a week with you, where we share some top points in relation to emotional intelligence. Then we'll share a couple stories from the coalface, or maybe from the keypads, a better way to do it, where we talk about our experience of emotional intelligence in the workplace. Then we'll kind of share a few final thoughts and wrap up and check out. Well, that all sounds pretty good to

me. Cool. So should we kick off with some definitions, defining definitions, if you will. I love a double meaning. So this week, we have taken the approach of trying to identify some definitions around all the key terms, or some of the real central terms around emotional intelligence, what you need to know. And we have also got a definition that we're quite looking forward to share, which is not from the source I thought we'd be coming from, if I'm honest. So I'm just going to run through a few of these and feel free to shout out when you think that there's something particularly relevant. So starting with the real basics, emotions. What is emotions? And I'm pretty confident that all of us have, at some point worked with someone who we question whether they actually knew what emotions were. I've worked with some people who have questioned whether they had emotions just that they're burying them. Maybe it's all about just having to unearth them a little bit. So

dictionary definition for emotions is about is a feeling like happiness, love, fear, anger, hatred, which can be caused by the situation that you're in or with people you were with, which is a pretty generic terminology, but ultimately

it's feeling, yes, indefinable beyond that, which I think is is quite important to understand, although I'm sure the neuroscientists would tell us that there's a very specific example. Let's find out, and then we've got intelligence, which is the ability to think reason or understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct. So for me, in this context, that's about how you take what you feel, what other people might be feeling, how you work out what they might be feeling, and about how you use that in a situation

more deliberately, rather than automatically responding to the emotions that are going on. Yeah, I think that point around being conscious about what you do is an important pointer. Yeah, I think we could, and I think it's.

An effort, isn't it? It's hard work. It's exhausting, and it's hard work to constantly be aware of that. Interestingly, James has thrown in empathy as one of the things that we should share the definition of. And I think I kind of initially went, Oh, I'm not sure, but actually, I think it's really important to understand this. So the definition of empathy, or one of the definitions, the most popular ones, is the ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own.

So James, tell me, why do you think this needs to be core? And then maybe I'll share why I why it struck me. Yeah, I think empathy needs to be core. Because I think being able to, you know, to put yourself in somebody else's shoes is a really key way to understand the impact that your behaviors has on other people. And it's a really core skill to have if you're going to collaborate with people, you need to know the current state that people are in, and you need to know sort of the directions that they're moving in with their emotions, so that you can,

some extent, help them be in a good place and be aware of the impact that you have on them, so that you all, you know, kind of easily succeed a little bit more together, I guess. Yeah, always it's funny, isn't it? So I've worked with marketing and sales teams who have spent their entire lives trying to put themselves in the shoes of their customers, yeah, right. And they spend huge budgets internally trying to get the rest of the team to understand that it needs to be customer centric. You need to understand to understand whether the customers and yet, when people appear to have high levels of empathy within the workforce for each other, somehow that doesn't get recognized in the same level of potential input or impact onto the organization, which always amazes me. Yeah, because I would, you know, if I was building a customer service team, I'd probably put a fair number of people scoring with high levels of empathy straight away, because surely it's, it's a no brainer for that. Yeah, it is. It's key. Okay, so moving on through the definitions.

I gave you a probably a little taste of that this might be coming up, which is neuroscience. This is where we get a bit more scientific. So neuroscience is a study of the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology of the nervous system.

But what you and I probably know is it's about understanding biologically what inside us, what's going on when we are experiencing emotion, feeling things like that, and that's really relevant. It's just your brain, really, isn't it? But, yeah, brain and a bit, but connect to the brain that are all to do with thinking, really, I think, I think, there we go, there you go. I think, therefore I am, and that's, that's a whole nother story. So leading on from that psychology, which is the scientific study of the human mind and the reasons for people's behavior, and I think a huge amount of the research that you've done, and also a lot of the common tools that we use in the workplace to try and build, uh, emotional intelligence, to try and build empathy, team building calm, and have their roots in psycho psychology, psychological study, uh, organizational psychology, etc. So important to know that that's a factor and and then moving on to bring that all together. One of the definitions that we've picked out around emotional intelligence, there's some pretty straightforward ones. So one of the most straightforward ones is the emotional intelligences you use to refer to people's interpersonal communication skills. I'm not sure that's actually what it is. I think that's too simplistic. I mean, I mean, I think it's good that we have that one up there so that you can see what some of the big dictionaries say about this type of stuff. But for me, that's just a bit too simple. And things like communication skills, I think it's a bit more than that. Personally, yeah, I don't for me, you can have really great interpersonal communicational skills, and you may not necessarily be that high in empathy or in emotional intelligence, which is two slight different things, but both equally relevant. I also similarly have seen people with very high in emotional intelligence who still don't have great interpersonal skills. They are not inextricably correlated. I don't think totally so. James, you found a definition from a somewhat unlikely source that had I not known where it was from, I'm not sure I would have liked it as much.

Definition first, okay, then tell us where it's from. So the definition that I like the most of them, of emotional intelligence is actually as follows. Emotional intelligence is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior and manage or adjust emotions to adapt to environment or achieve one's goals. So that feels comprehensive to me, and that's um that thanks to the collective wisdom that is Wikipedia, I can't believe that's where that's come from, because it's also my of all the definitions I saw, it's definitely my favorite. It's good, isn't it? It's holistic. It talks about a lot of the factors there. And so for me, I think that that really quite sums up what emotional intelligence is. And I think it's a definition we can use. I think I think officially Wikipedia might be beginning.

To move up in my list of sources when I start looking at things now, yeah, based on that. Okay, so that's some of the definitions that are relevant in this space. Hope that was useful, and I hope you will now will look at Wikipedia slightly differently, see it as a little bit more credible than perhaps previously, although I suspect deep down, it's probably been so stolen from somewhere else, I'm sure it is. It's still copy and paste. Sorry, not sorry, not stolen crowdsource. Yeah, exactly built upon. So it's this time of the podcast that now we know what we're talking about and looks a little bit some of the terms. We look to our dear friend James for his research Roundup. That's right, that's what you've been reading to this week, James. Yeah, that's the new little name, research Roundup. I've been reading a bunch of different things. Of different things. I went back and reread a core book on this, which is actually emotional intelligence by Dan Coleman, and I read several different articles on the internet and looked through a range of things. I went down the odd mine, oh, sorry, odd rabbit hole as well, and got a bit lost and stuff, but, but it's been good. So I'll run you through what what I've learned over the course of the last week. So as I said earlier, the key person that people tend to think of when they think of emotional intelligence is someone called Dan Goleman. And he wrote, in 1996 a book called Emotional Intelligence. Since then, he's gone on and written other books like working with emotional intelligence, and he really brought this idea of, you know, a different type of intelligence around how we communicate with each other and manage our emotions into the mainstream, and kind of brought it into the corporate world. Truth is, he built on work by existing psychologists, particularly somebody called Peter Salovey, who, in

turn built on somebody called Howard Gardner, which you who you might have heard of in relation to his different types of intelligence.

There's work that he's done on different categories of intelligence. So, so that's a bit of a background in terms of what I learned about emotions. There's a starting point for this. I learned that, you know, everyone has emotions, and they, as we said earlier, are things that are sort of feelings and sort of semi automatic responses that you have to situations, and they tend to be the result of something like a new piece of stimulus, and they also actually tend to have a bit of a physical association with them. So an example of an emotion is something like anger or fear. Now, when we when we experience an emotion, we tend to have a set of sort of chemical or hormone changes in our body that that lead to physical changes. So for example, what happens when we get angry is actually the way that our body processes for blood shifts, for blood towards things like our hands and our extremities, so that we're more equipped to hold weapons and fight. So there's actual sweaty palms. Sweaty palm, yeah, exactly. There's something that actually comes out of it. And likewise, when you have fear, what happens is your body moves blood to large muscle masses in your body. So you know, your legs are full of blood and ready to run and stuff like that. So that's, that's what emotions do, and they're really helpful. And even some of the softer ones, things like grief, like, you know, grief tends to suppress people's activity, and a part of the reason for that is an emotional drive to get people to wait until they've got past a difficult situation before they move on. So you kind of get brought down to earth through things like grief. So where do emotions come from? Well, this is where we do a mini bit of neuroscience.

Okay, I'm ready. Are you ready? Let's see if I can do it right. I'm not a neuroscience expert, but I like it, and this is where I got into that sort of rabbit warren of thinking. So for our purposes, for brain basically as three bits that we're going to think about, it's got a sensory system, which is out there, things like your ears and your eyes. You get information, and you bring it into your brain, and it kind of goes into the back of your brain. So you bring in information all the time. Then you've got two other bits that have a core bit that we're interested

in for, I guess, for one that people tend to think of when they think of a brain is, you know, part of your forebrain, and the key bit there is called the neocortex. And the neocortex is one of the more recently evolved parts of a brain. Not many animals have it, big, primate mainly,

and the neocortex is the part of our brain where we do what we consider to be thinking. We do planning, we do analysis, we interpret options, we make rational decisions, we prioritize. All that kind of stuff is what happens in the neocortex. And there's one other bit of a brain which is relevant for what we're talking about here, which is called the limbic system. And the limbic system's got a few bits that you might have heard of, particularly the amygdala. And the limbic system is kind of in the middle of your brain. And really what the limbic system does is it looks after emotions, memory and, to some extent, behavior, right? So those are the bits of a brain. Now the way that emotions actually work is that you'll get a sensory input, so you'll hear something, you'll see something, and all those signals will go to the back of your brain. From there, they'll go to.

You a piece of your limbic system called the thalamus. And the thalamus takes all those bits of information and splits them up, and it says, OK, well, we need to figure out what we do with this new bit of information. So it sends half of those signals, or maybe the same thing twice. It sends information to the neocortex and says, give me a rational view on what's going on here and make some good decisions. And at the same time, it sends some information to your amygdala and says, Hmm, have this information. Let me know if there's anything emotional that we need to do in relation to this. And what the amygdala does when it gets that information is it says, Okay, here's a set of new stimulus. Let's compare these sensory inputs and what we what we know of them to our memory banks and say, Okay, well, when we've been in a situation like this before, what has the future outcome been of that you know? Is this an indicator of something coming in the future that we should be aware of? Is it a nice thing? In which case we should respond in a certain way? Is this a precursor to something that, in the past has been really dangerous? In which case, you know what? We need to take a different set of responses as a body. So fundamentally, that's, that's what the brain does. It gets the signals in, splits them up, sends them to rational bit and sends them to an emotional bit. Your emotional bit compares them to your prior memories and decides how you're going to feel about it. And that feeling is based on what you expect the future to hold as a result of it. See now I have, I have an image of the amygdala now in my head as a librarian. So you go to the library desk with a card and say, Here you go. Go find it for me. Yeah. And then she comes screaming back from the hall, going, No, you don't want to look at those, yeah? Totally scary books, yeah? Or, Wow, those are great books. Why don't you cuddle up and we'll have a little chat Exactly. But that's exactly what it is. It's this sort of assessment system. I'm going to remember that for Evan, yeah, and it's so linked to your memory. I mean, that's memory. I mean, that's really a core part of it. So that's kind of where your emotions come from. And really they tend to be, you know, your amygdala sort of defines what type of emotion you want to have, and then it's sort of managed through the release of hormones and other bits of brain chemistry. So I guess the question that comes out of this, to some extent, is, can you have an emotional and a rational response at the same time? And the answer is that actually, you know, your your thalamus send those messages to your neocortex and to your amygdala, and provided that there's nothing really exciting going on there, then you can be rational and a bit emotional at the same time. You know, you'll have a bit of an emotional response, but your rational brain kind of says, Yeah, that's cool. We'll crack on. We'll get some and that makes sense, right? Day to day, there's quite often things that you you conform to, you know, you might have a knee jerk response to, but you also might have a more considered opinion, yeah, yeah. Or you might think, Oh, that's a bit good. Oh, I'll have a little smile, but I'll still be totally rational about it. Yeah. So when, when things aren't, you know, huge, you can totally do that. The problem comes though, that when when you receive this information, and the thalamus pumps it out to the neocortex and to the amygdala, if the amygdala decides that what it sees is dangerous, if it sees a threat, if it says, we've been in this situation before, and you know what, some really bad stuff happened, what the amygdala will do is it'll actually take over. And the language that's used for this is amygdala hijack. And the type of outcome that comes out here is you get this fight flight response that people talk about. And part of the reason this happens is that the amygdala is actually faster than the neocortex, so you'll get your stimulus, it'll go to the neocortex and the amygdala, but the amygdala deals with it first, which makes whole sense. Because if it's trying to assess whether you know a dinosaur is coming, I appreciate coming over, coming over the hills towards you. You want to get out there fast. You don't have time to be making rational choices. Yeah, it's programming your body totally. And it's an older from evolutionary terms, part of the brain, okay? So it's more linked to your automatic system. It's a bit earlier in the evolution of your brain, which grows from a stem outwards, right? So, so if the amygdala sees that, it kind of shuts everything down, and it gets rid of your emotional thought, I'm sorry, it gets rid of your rational thought. So, so what this really means is, if you receive a stimulus that that you identify as dangerous, it's really hard to be rational. Okay, you know, you get sort of emotional flooding, and all your hormones come out, your adrenaline starts running. You send your blood to your hands to get ready to fight. You send your blood. You're not receiving additional information, and you're not making decisions, right? You're on autopilot, as your body is saying to yourself, we are getting out of here. We're stopping everything. We're not going to digest anything anymore. We don't have spare blood for the brain to make things happen. We just got to get our run into shoes on and get out of here. So it's really hard to be rational and emotional at the same time. And

I guess one of the questions on the back of that is, How helpful is the flight or fight system and way of thinking in a modern workplace? And really it's not, from what I can tell, you know, I mean, it's not rational, and in case, you know, or in some instances, it's beneficial maybe to shout at people, but really it's not, you know, most of your automatic, emotional tech responses aren't productive in the workplace. You want to be rational. You want to be able to think things through. You want to be able to plan for the future, and you want to take actions and make decisions based on that.

Rationality of the neocortex, but if you get yourself triggered by something, if you get this amygdala type emotional response, then you're not going to be rational, and you'll get yourself into a bit of trouble. And something else that's really relevant here is that you know, when you get flooded by something, and you get your adrenaline up, your body's gearing you up to run. And if you go out and you run, then you clear some of those chemicals out of your body, and that kind of passes, and you're resettled, and you're brought back to your sort of emotional, emotional base, and you're ready for the next thing. But if you don't take that type of response, those those hormones, kind of stay right. So you stay in that situation where you're kind of wound up, and that's not productive for you or for those around you. So it flight or fight or flight is not really helpful in the modern workplace. No, it's, you know, it's really interesting, because I spent some 10 years for my career in event management in sport, yeah, and we spend as event professionals, we spent a ridiculous amount of time, time time training ourselves not to have that response, yeah, because when you've got the safety of X 1000 people on site, you really need to think about, you know, if someone presents a real life challenge, you know, whether that's everything from sort of slightly lower down the grade, someone's knocked over a waste bin through to there's a missing child, there's an issue with the the water supply, whatever it is you you literally cannot, and it's happened to you before, and you know what might have happened? You have to suppress every emotion, because there's a process, and there's a there's a process that has been well designed to support you through that. And I think what really always makes me interested is that in event management, we have spent so much time designing those processes to stop us from getting hijacked by our emotions. And if you can do the same thing in a more office based workplace, or in a workplace that's potentially got less immediate dangers, but still can get hijacked, I think that's a really powerful thing, and that's just about creating really good processes for people that they feel like they can hang on to, either their mental processes that they use, or they are physical processes to manage that emotion and to like, I'd like to say, either let it out yeah, or to sit on it for a defined period of time to allow you to make rational decisions and then let it Yeah. And part of, part of the thing around processes is you're actually making your decision in advance. So if you've got a sort of good decision tree and a good set of processes, even if you're hijacked, you say, I can ignore all of my emotions because I know what to do in that situation. Yeah,

which is helpful. So, so what does emotional intelligence comment all of this? Well, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand for the emotions that your body's generating as it interprets for different sensory bits of information that it gets and as it goes up and down, and it's heightened sort of tension and response to what it perceives as threats or opportunities.

And the more emotionally intelligent you are, the more you have an awareness of how you feel about different situations, and the more you're able to manage your response to these different signals out there. And in terms of a workplace, it's pretty important, right? So as I said earlier, stuff triggers you all the time. And in the workplace, the type of thing that could trigger you could be maybe identifying that you've made a mistake. So you've submitted a document that you thought was good, and you think, oh, no, I just realized I made a big mess in there. And you might have a threat to your status or your pride, and that could be perceived as something that your body says as a threat, or you could have somebody shout at you, or there could be a big change. And all these things are out there that affect you and can trigger some of these responses

and to work effectively and remain rational, you need to sort of navigate your way through that and keep that rational neocortex bit of your mind up and running.

So there we go. That makes so it makes total sense to me, because for me, there seems to be

that, and in my experience, too, that having a sense of emotions, having an understanding of emotions, really allows two separate but very important benefits. One is about how it benefits me as a person, so by having emotional intelligence, I am better able to

function. And one is about how I can work with others totally. So both of those things, which are equally important in terms of being good at my job, matter, but I only works if I actually am both self aware and if I have an ability to read other people. And I think that's where some of the definitions fall down we looked at, which is, you know, it's really important to be self aware, but navel gazing alone, as my mother would call it, I would like to think it's a little bit more important than that, but doesn't work unless you also have an awareness of how other people and that's where that empathy, empathetic area, comes back in. I think it's really important, yeah, because just as you get triggered, your actions are.

Are liable to trigger other people as well. So you can even cut out some of this stuff at the root cause by behaving in such a way that you don't and I think there's a really, there's a real risk around some of this stuff, which I know we're going to get onto. But one of the things just want to flag when you talk about why it's important, it really matters. There are people that I know who are very clear in how they feel and what that means for them and how they can manage that, but I'm not necessarily so good at understanding how someone else may feel differently in the same situation. Yeah, and that creates huge friction, yeah. So people act and try and manage a process or a situation in the way they want it managed. And of course, it's rarely how someone else wants it managed, and I've seen that, particularly in restructures and huge organizational change where leaders will tend to be potentially of one may have much more similar emotional responses, and they just completely misunderstand how people are going to feel in the moment of learning about new information, additional changes to the organization and stuff. Yeah, that goes back a bit to some of the personality type stuff out there. You know, that's a bit of an effort to try and capture how maybe different groups of people feel and respond to different things. Yeah, I think, I think there's something really interesting about how emotional intelligence and personalities work together. Because I think, I don't think there's necessarily a direct link, but I do think there is,

there is an understanding that certain personality types, when they are caught up in doing the things that they do, may find that they take their eye off their what may be normally quite good emotional intelligence, yeah. And I think there's,

you know, part of emotional intelligence in itself, is being aware, as you said, that different people respond in different ways. So those personality type tools are a bit of an aid to that, in terms of development emotional intelligence as well. I mean, I know we've got, we've got another podcast, actually, that's later on in the series about some of those tools. So we get onto that. But you're right, it absolutely for those people, it's a great place to start for those people who maybe aren't as confident in their reading of emotions, is to start by looking to the organization use personality tests to understand what people have and use that as a common language. Just before we go on, I wanted to touch on one sort of digression thing, which I thought of when I was going through this one I've done about eight research corner,

and that is, you know, Danny Kahneman is Thinking Fast and Slow. And, you know, that's really a view of two different brain types, and thinking fast and thinking slow. And one's a more sort of gut based automatic response to thing, using the things, using heuristics. And another is a more rational and calculating type of thing, and they take different amounts of energy. And to me, it really feels like,

you know, system one and system two, from the Thinking Fast and Slow type world, kind of relates a lot to the neocortex, rational aspect of things, and a little bit more emotional response. I think it really does. And I think the other one, if you're gonna, if you're gonna give them a shout out, I feel that it's only right that my and I think it's on the shelf actually, or have I lent it out to someone? I'm going to give a shout out to Steve Peters, who wrote the Chimp Paradox, yeah, which relates very closely to what you've talked about as well, where he drew, he simplifies and draws

a picture of a computer and a human and a chimp in your brain. And it's a lovely metaphor for being able to identify those moments where you're getting hijacked and understanding. And there's also, the other thing that I would strongly recommend is there's a there's a blog called Stop, wait, but why. And, okay, it's predominantly about bloke story. He did a TED talk, and it's, I can't remember his name, but it's called Wait, but why? And he does a brilliant set of cartoon animation, animations of what happens when you get hijacked. And it's, it's a joyful picture of you doing a piece of work, and then something happens, and then suddenly your brains hijacked, and someone's driving the car off road. You can relate to it so much, right? I mean, you can totally, well, I can totally relate to it, because I have massive problems managing things like that anyway. So yeah, but I would so those are all great, great places to look at if you want to carry on your own personal research. I would definitely encourage you to the Thinking, Fast, thinking slow.

Steve Peters and white, black, white. Those are all really good places to start when you're trying to figure out how you're going to move some of this stuff forward for yourself. Yeah. Yourself. Yeah, so speaking about sort of moving stuff forward, do you want to jump into the list of a week? Oh, well. Thank you very much. So we mentioned, and we've kind of just hopefully segue relatively helpfully. We talked about

why emotional intelligence matters, and we mentioned that, you know, it has both an impact on you as an individual, but also it's hugely important for the way that you work with others, and that that links quite neatly into a piece of work that came out of a research roundup and some of the back reading, which is around the five domains of emotional intelligence. And I think you mentioned earlier that it. Is a piece of work, saliva producer that was built on some extra research and actually has its roots in Goldman anyway.

So there are five domains of emotional intelligence. Two relate to yourself, the individual, two relate to others. And then there's one wider piece. So I'm going to start with the two that relate to self, I think, is probably the best place to start. And in each case there, the first is about knowing your own emotions, so that concept of self awareness, and as I mentioned earlier, that alone, is not emotional intelligence, although it's a really good start. And it's not always easy, right? I mean, it's not emotional intelligence, but it's not easy. It's not easy. And hats off to everyone who gets it because and works at it because it's a constant battle to be honest with yourself.

And so there's some of the things that we we talked about when we were looking at this were understanding your base emotional state. So what's normal for you, knowing some of the types of things that lead you to feel new emotions. I quite often talk about hot buttons with some of the people I work with in coaching. I talk about the things that happen that twist your belly, is the way I describe it. So they give you a little jerk in your tummy that doesn't feel in any way brain LED.

And it's they give you a very sort of quick emotional reaction, which relates quite heavily to the stuff you've been talking about before.

Knowing yourself and knowing your own emotions is also about knowing the physical and mental signs of those emotions. Yeah. So

one of the great questions we used to ask when we were interviewing volunteers was how describe what you're like when you're stressed? Yeah, what does it look like and what does it sound like? And it was amazing people. It would amazing the things that people tell you, you know, some really obvious things, like being quiet or being loud, or butterflies, butterflies withdrawn, but some of them were just brilliant. I like to sing. Do you okay? Yeah, I like to sing, and that's how, you know, I'm a bit stressed. And it's my way of blocking out the noise. And I was like, Okay, I like that. Yeah, it's good self awareness. Well, then maybe we won't put you in the scoring, yeah, in the job. So knowing those physical signs, because it's really important a to help you spot them, but also for other people, because you'll begin to be able to share them with other people, monitoring yourself, which is my weakest point, I know what triggers, and sometimes I forget to look out for it, and then I am somewhat surprised when I see Why Am I handsome? Really? When did that happen? When did that happen? Yeah, about the time I got some really bad

news. So that whole monitoring of self is and that's an ongoing thing. You don't get born with that. That is a day in, day out, choice, practice recognizing new feelings as it occurs, and then understanding how your behavior is prone to change when you experience different emotions. And I think this is particularly important when you have big stimulus. So when things like they are announcing, restructure at work, or where teams get given big projects, or public speaking, I think is a great one. When you're being asked to be to present your team's work in front of a group, you are feeling so many different emotions and trying to unpick what those are and how they might impact you when you're and project forward, what am I going to feel like in that room? How am I going to manage that? Is a huge, huge thing. So from that knowing, I've just segued into the managing

of your own emotions, so thinking about again, still focusing on yourself the bit around self regulation. So we talked about knowing and monitoring and recognizing

so knowing what they look like, monitoring them when they happen, and then being ready to spot them as they happen, all helpful. The really challenging bit then comes with managing them. So it's all well and good to be able to know them, but unless you can actually do something and act in a way that's going to help you, it's not going to get you very far. So when we talk about managing your own emotions or self regulation. We're thinking about

building on knowing the emotions that you're feeling, so really, actually taking the time when you're feeling them to think about what that feels like. What is it really? Is it changing? Is it having a negative impact on your work? Okay? Are you aware that you're actually feeling under pressure today? And what does that look like in practical terms? So it's building on that knowledge, but also having strategies to try out so that you can start to test them, and you can treat yourself like a little psychological experiment, which is what I've always done. It's like, okay, I know this is how I feel. I'm just gonna try some stuff and I'm gonna see if it helps. And sometimes it helps. And sometimes it will, sometimes it won't, but the most important thing is about being deliberate about that. It's not about just seeing what happens. It's about saying, Okay, today, if I feel stressed, I'm going to remove myself in the office for 10 minutes and take a walk. And then it's about reflecting on did that help or not? And.

Is that something that you could do, and does that work? So I've got some examples. And you know, the public speaking is a is a great one that really sits me, and I think a lot of us bits about managing yourself in a moment where you've got a particular emotional response. And when I'm when I know I'm going to speak to a large group of people, I do get those sort of stress responses, and my palms sweat, and I can feel my voice going a little bit rubbishy, and all that kind of stuff. So kind of stuff. And I've got different things that I do that help me manage it in that moment. And it sounds really silly, but one thing that I love to do, if I'm speaking to a group of people, is I actually like to sort of sneak around the room a little bit early and explore the space. And I find exploring the space before I speak is a really helpful thing. I know I'm stressed, so I do the space thing. Another thing I really like in that situation is I try and speak to everybody who comes through the door wherever I am, right? And it looks like I'm being like a genial host, but in reality, I'm managing my own anxiety by trying to break down barriers early on. So that sort of managing your specific emotional pieces is good. I think there's another bit which is around, sort of, what, what can you do to sort of build up your reserves and to be better at, you know, having a sort of a good well of emotional strength to draw on when you're entering those situations. And something that, for me, crosses over between the two, is

when I'm preparing to do large presentations, what I actually found myself doing sometimes is I'll practice, and when I start to feel myself getting the anxiety that I get in a real one it sounds I almost kind of try and embrace it, and I try and work myself up even more so I'm feeling as anxious as I can in my practice, and then force myself through that. And that makes me know that however bad that sort of adrenal response I get is I've been through it and it's okay. Well, that's an interesting and new technique. No, I might try that one right. Wind yourself up massively, and, you know, you shake it so. So for me, there's two things I know about. So one of the other things around managing is about knowing what's normal for you and what your level of normal is and knowing how to get back to normal, yeah. So for me, when I used to event do event management, two really key things around managing myself. When I am sleep deprived, I function really, really well in extreme periods of stress, but I'm not a particularly friendly person, okay, the fact and my resilience is incredibly low. Okay, so what? What might not. I will still be able to function. It's why I did event management for so many years. I will still be able to make great decisions, but I will need to go and have a little cry afterwards for something that really isn't that big a deal. Yeah, big cost to it. I need to have a massive amount of sleep afterwards, because what happens is, as I as I get, as we work longer and longer hours, I can feel myself becoming less and less robust, and that's a massive problem. And then the other thing

that I will share with you around managing my own emotions is that I am I have a really, really bad habit of when I am upset,

my norm, my automatic response is to share that. So it's just who I am. It's awful. And I actually have to manage that, because when you're a manager or a leader, you cannot let people know how concerned you are about something. If it's not at that point, it's just not okay. And I've always had a very open team, but I learned very quickly when I got into managing teams that I had to sit on some of that and I had to find another way. And you talked about, you know, running, running, or physically running, to get rid of those emotions. Yeah, I used to have a friend who didn't work in my industry. She was working in HR, she lived in another country, and if it was really bad, I would phone her and I'd be like, can I unload for 10 minutes? Because I can't unload in a space in the industry, and I'm just it's not fair to do it to anyone else. Yeah, those coping strategies are really important. Yeah? And it takes, and it's funny how you realize you put them in the place quite often without realizing it. So for me, those are the first two domains we've talked about, knowing your own emotions and then managing your own emotions. I'm now going to hand over to James. He's going to talk about other people. Yeah, so number three in the list of domains is recognizing emotions in others, and then number four is going to be handling handling relationships with others. So it's really the sort of flip side of the self piece that we talked about. So recognizing emotions and others really is a core part of emotional intelligence. You know, to manage a relationship, you need to know how other people are feeling, and really you need to be able to empathize with them. That's where that word came up earlier. You need to really be able to put yourself in those shoes so that you can appreciate what it's like to be them at that moment.

And there's several different things you can do to help with this. One is to start to understand what sort of normal emotional state is for the people around you and those that work with you fairly closely. So as you spend time with people, you kind of know what the normal mood is, and that's a great starting point for developing that understanding of where people are. And then another thing that's good to do is to start to focus on recognizing.

Uh, aspects of communication. So one of the things that I really liked that I read a while ago is something called the 738, 55, rule. Yay. We love rules. And what this rule said is that actually, when people communicate around how they feel about things, actually only 7% of a communication is words. I never really believe, like, what's that 7% who comes up with that? Right? But the point still stands. But when people say something, a lot of a meaning isn't in the words that they say. So this model says that 7% is around the words that they use. 38% is around the tone that people use, and 55% is around the body language that people use. And yet, we do customer service predominantly through call centers, yeah. How much does that blow my mind? It's a bit crazy. We're losing out on 55% of our opportunity to connect with our audience, yeah. And, you know, people can say, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, you know? And, like, the same words can mean so many different things, and that's without even looking at my body language, you know, for for some of these, I could have had my arms closed and be slumped down. You know, I could be communicating in all these different ways. So starting to read those signs is an important skill in recognizing emotions and others. And another thing in this space is starting to think about not just how

how people present their emotions through communication, but also how other people's behaviors change in different emotional circumstances. So as you get to know your team, you'll start to understand, like your example earlier, how people behave under stress, and you'll start to learn, oh, Jane's singing, I guess it means that she's under a load of stress, or she's snappy and tired. I guess that means she's under stress, or whatever it happens to be. But you'll start to learn how other people present under stress.

So as you start to focus on non verbal means of communication, as you start to understand what normal looks like, as you start to become aware of how people's behavior changes and results of different emotions, then you can start to build out and think about how you handle relationships. So this jumps us on to domain number four, which is handling handling relationships, or sometimes maybe known as other regulation, as opposed to self regulation. And this really built out on you never knowledge you've gained about other people. So you can by understanding the state that people are in, and understanding what their current states are in and how they change under different pressures, you can start to behave in ways that is perhaps more congenial for them. You can kind of understand their emotional needs and wants and behave in ways that align to those So, for example, if I get a reading that you know you are tired and grumpy and you don't want me to waffle on for ages. Maybe I'll change my behavior and just cut to the chase, or maybe I'll ask if you're all right, or maybe I'll just, you know, be a bit more direct, or whatever it happens to be, I'll change what I do based on my reading of the emotional state that you're in, and by predicting and understanding your emotional needs, I interact with you in a way that's that's more congruent with how you want things to be, and that makes you feel a little bit better, and we rub along a little bit better, and then before you know it, we're a high flying, successful delivering team, right? Yeah, I do. I always wonder how much people have ascribed thoughtfulness as a trait in people, when actually it's it's probably, or it's quite possibly, about someone's emotional intelligence. I think quite often, the people that I know that are thoughtful, it's, it's not so much that they've particularly gotten gifts or anything like that. It's that they've made accommodation for someone's emotional state and tried to consider their needs. And I think that's, it's always nice to be thoughtful, right? It is, yeah, and you know it it's good, and it helps other people, and it builds for mutual bonds of relationships that are helpful. And I think particularly if you're in your own normal state or base state, there's no reason why you shouldn't it's why wouldn't you extend someone the courtesy of considering how they might feel about seems a no brainer to me. Yeah, so that's

three and four. So that's three and four. So recognizing emotions and others is three. Number four is handling relationships with others. And that leaves us with the last one, which I'm going to be really brief about. This is motivating, and motivating yourself is really the way it's phrased. But of course, motivating others is important as well, and motivation is really part of emotional intelligence, and for me, it almost sits under some of your self regulation and self management piece, which is why we're not going to talk about it too much. I just want to check out a couple of things that help with motivation as well. So one is that setting goals can be motivating. You can set yourself larger goals, but it's good to set yourself goals that are specific and aspirational yet also achievable. That sense of progress is something that's really important. Owning things is important, and celebrating successes is important. But I don't want to talk too much about motivation here, because I actually think there's a lot of theory out there around self and group motivation. So I'd like to do an actual separate channel. I think I think we might be coming back to that one, because I think it.

A it's very much topic of the day, yeah, but also, there is some really good technique, skills theory that would be worth wading our way through. I think there's a research round up in that, yeah, I'm sure there is. So that's our list of the day. That's for five domains of emotional intelligence, knowing your own emotions, managing your own emotions, recognizing emotions in others, handling relationships and then motivating yourself and others. I like that list. That's a good list.

So we're coming towards the back end. Yeah, we normally, at this point share a couple of stories, experiences, yeah, what would you like to share? James, what's happened to you in your career and lifetime around that's been

relevant to this topic of emotional intelligence. I think, like everyone who's worked for a while, I've seen examples of great emotional intelligence, but help people manage others and get over the change curve and increase productivity and drive a lot of self happiness. But I've also seen examples of dreadful emotional intelligence, and that's, that's where I'm going to focus, because somehow that's a little bit more fun. Oh, we all love a car crash story. Yep. Well, I'll start by saying, you guys know I'm an accountant, right? So I've worked a lot with accountants and actuaries and other people famed for their emotional intelligence. I just want to check out, though that's totally not fair. A lot of these people that are really good at things like that, I know they're just really good at numbers, too. Yeah, mega skilled.

So the story I want to chat about is around poor emotional intelligence and maybe a little bit about, you know, reading emotions in others and things like that. And a colleague of mine, who remains nameless,

said to their boss that they needed to take a little bit of time out of work to take one of their children to the doctors, right? And they said, This is a bit of a conversation.

And then, you know, they have a day and they did that. And then this person phoned in and took another day off, because, you know, they didn't explain what it was, but, but they took extra time off. Okay, so we're seeing a pattern. We're seeing a bit of a pattern. Something's happened and something not explained. And when that person came back in, into the office, one of the first things they did is they went up to their boss and said, I'm sorry, um, could I? Can I chat to you for a minute? Right? And to me, that raises all kinds of things. Now their boss's response was, No, sorry, I'm busy, right? So for me, that demonstrates a total failure of ability to read what's going on.

So that's a microcosm, right there. And then following on from this, when they finally managed to get together in a room, the person informed the boss, rather emotionally, that when they went to the doctors, they found out that the situation was much worse than expected,

and their child actually had a really serious disease, right? So they had that conversation emotionally geared themselves up to say that

massive deal. It's a massive deal. Delivered that, and a person said, I'm really sorry, but I've got another meeting. Can we speak later? And proceeded to leave, right? So in terms of demonstrating a complete lack of emotional intelligence, both those instances to me summarize some of it, just my heart goes down to that person, and of course, it damages relationships and undermines trust and all that well and and from a night, quite aside from the person, the fact that I'm just sitting there thinking, God, that poor person, yeah, there is also a very serious organizational issue, which is, I cannot imagine that person

ever cutting their organization slack ever again when they're in a difficult situation. And this is, this is one of the challenges that, you know, organizations are just groups of people, but managers and leaders take on that organization's response. So when they respond in that way, the the person who's working for that organization, well, that's the organization's response. Yeah, it's not and so every time you're invited into a conversation that has high levels of emotion involved and involves really important issues. You have to recognize it's much bigger than just where your meetings got to be the next day. Totally

on the heart warming side. I would like to give you an example, and I know it's always feels a little bit like

I work in the nonprofit sector predominantly, and that's not true, trust me, we'll get onto plenty of things that we don't do right, but one of the things that we are lucky is that we've got quite a few leaders who are particularly skilled and adept in dealing with emotion, and are quite emotionally intelligent and articulate. And the story I want to give you is around one of my old bosses, who is very passionate about work life balance, and who is very passionate about

understanding where his individual staff are coming from. So he doesn't just want to understand the big.

Victory, wants to understand the story behind everyone, and he can, because he's got a smaller organization. There's sort of about 150 people or something like that in the organization. But he is one of the things I really like about this situation is that it absolutely lives by the organization's values, but it completely fails on all of our processes. And as a process person, I'm the kind of process person who loves processes until there's a need to ignore the process. And so they we had a girl working with us. She was not on a full time contract, but she'd been in the organization for over six months

in a temporary role, and she's part of the team, and she was in a permanent team, and it was because we hadn't recruited primarily because she was doing a really good job, and it just didn't seem necessary. Anyway, she went to hospital. And it turned out, I know it's always, it's always about big life stuff, right? And she wasn't well, and, okay, it wasn't terminal at all, but it wasn't good. And everyone else in the organization's on private healthcare, sure, yeah. And

the CEO got wind of the fact that she wasn't very well, and asked her to come and see him, and asked a bit more of detail, what, you know, what was the recommended treatment, the how long she can have to wait? Made a phone call about two hours later, and phone insurance company said, put her on our insurance. I don't care. I'm not interested in what the policy is. I'm not interested in who's going to have a go at me. We can do something for someone who is giving their time. It's good for us, it's good for the team, it's good for everybody, and she gets back to work quicker. But also it's just the right thing to do, right? And I think what was really in itself, that's just a nice thing, what was really crucial was he understood how other people in the organization felt about her, yeah, and about what they believed, what they believed are the organization's responsibility was, and that she because she was treated in the same way as everyone else, it was felt that she should be treated in the same way as everyone else, irrespective what the contractual agreement was. And so he had a recognition, yes, it was the right thing to do, but also the impact would have on the team if he didn't do it. Yeah, but he predicted that before anyone had even suggested it. So no one on leadership team had even thought that was an option, because we were all thinking within the confines of our process. Just rip up the process and we do it our way. And and I just thought it was lovely, and it was brilliant. And I just remember thinking, I've come to a really brilliant organization, and they're prepared to do that. And cynically, it feels good to be there, right? It helps with your engagement. Absolutely, that team, net promoter, that team felt loved, they felt she felt very grateful, and ended up staying a very long time and ended up taking a permanent job. The whole thing was just a really positive experience, and it didn't cost that much, and it was very straightforward. And, you know, it's funny, all these barriers you put, Oh, what the board gonna say? Can we do that? And what precedence is setting? Blah, blah, blah, and then someone just goes, no, enough. Let's just do who's gonna have a go at us? This is not something someone's gonna sue us over. Yeah? So, yeah. So that was my lovely moment seeing someone really flex their muscles. Yeah, great reading of situation and emotional response.

So any, any tips that you have some thoughts or tips to people about emotional intelligence, so hard, yeah, right. We've talked about some lots of things. For me, I guess the thing I would ask people is use every opportunity you have to try and learn a little bit more about the people that you're working with, whether they're people you're going to work with again, or whether you use them as little subjects. So I talked earlier about using myself as a psychology experiment. Yeah, treat everyone like that, try and understand a little bit about how they might be feeling, and try and practice it becoming a regular thing. So if you're going into a meeting, try and think about what each of those people might have reason to have an emotional response to. So is there a threat to their job? Is there something that might trigger something? Where are the triggers for other people? And then try and see, you know, like, watch what they do. How do they behave? What does it look like? It's done. And and practicing that, I think, is a really good, really valuable thing, yeah, so is that like sort of practicing empathy? Would you say China? Well, I mean, it's, yeah, a little bit fake it till you make it, but a little bit, I think it's also about being in the moment and observing. Okay, very much. We go into meetings and we're all, we're all absolutely terrible at this. We go in, we haven't prepared quite as much as we want. We've looked at the agenda. We know what we want to get out of it, but that's about what we've done. And instead, why don't we use those times, especially in the agenda points that maybe we're not going to be involved in so much, to really read the situation and be in that moment, and think about how our colleagues might be feeling when information is shared that doesn't necessarily impact you, but might impact them. And for me,

very quickly, once you start looking for it, you'll see it. And once you start seeing it, most people want to act on it. Most people, when they see someone under positive or negative emotion, want to respond to it anyway. So that's the easier bit. Yeah. Cool. What about you do?

Mine's actually kind of similar. No, no, it's all good. Mine, though, is about, it's, again, a practice thing. But instead of practicing observing others and thinking about what's out there, for me, it's, it's practicing talking about your own emotions and coming out of a, you know, the world of finance and places like that, it's, it's, it's not all that common that you'll meet a lot of people who talk about how they feel. But trying to, trying to do that is important. You know, if you can talk a little bit about your emotions, if you can talk a little bit about other people's emotions, and if you can genuinely care about it and show that you care, then that, you know, then practicing that is helpful.

I think that if you can practice when times are pretty good and there's not much disruption, then it makes it easier to have conversations when times are tough. So I'd say, you know, ask people how they're feeling, care about it, talk about your own emotions from time to time, and build up, I guess, sort of some common language about emotions, and build up the sort of relationships with others so that you can talk about emotions. That's a really great one. And on that,

Matt Haig, the writer, has recently written a children's book called The Truth pixie. Okay, it's a children's book, but everyone, everyone should read, okay? And it's some of the more challenging life situations that happen in very simplistic, very lovely language, cool. And, if nothing else, if you wanted to start a conversation your workplace, buy the book, read it, leave it lying around, and see if someone else wants to have a conversation about them, because that's a really good place to start. Cool. Great. Okay, so I think that's our top tips. I guess it's just time to check out and say goodbye until that time already. Okay, so we've,

we've looked at a little bit about definitions and some of the definitions of terminology that's relevant to this area. You've presented as always a brilliant and very fulsome research round up.

We had our list of the week, the five domains of emotional intelligence. We talked about knowing and managing your own emotions, knowing recognizing emotions in others as well as manage them. And then we also mentioned a little bit about motivation, which is the fifth we've shared some some fairly contrasting stories from our own experience and given you our personal tips as well. So that's pretty much everything we've covered today. I think that's it is that? I think that's everything. So what a lovely, what a lovely, warm subject to be talking about next time we might be moving on to something a little bit more practical, yeah, but probably also has its roots in people's emotional reactions, I would imagine. But until then,

it's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from me. See you later. Guys, thanks everyone.