EQ Part 2

Welcome back, and this is part two of two for emotional intelligence, or EQ. Starting to get into a little bit more, last video we talked about the significance and gave an overview of emotional intelligence. Here, we’re going to get into some practical tools to start increasing EQ. So let’s show the model again, and I’m going to quickly run through a few ways you can start to work on each of these boxes. Right, so let’s talk about this awareness piece first. First, all right, so we’ll talk about how to increase self-awareness and then how to increase empathy, or the ability to recognize emotions in others.

So bring it back here. Self-awareness, right? So this is the ability to kind of cultivate the ability to recognize or observe what’s going on internally. I sometimes explain this as this, right? So if you were to just close your eyes for a second as you listen to this video, and whatever you do, do not think about a blue car. Okay, some of you may have failed that assignment, that’s okay. I’ll explain in a second. Right, keep your eyes closed and just say your name to yourself. Don’t actually say it aloud, but just say it in your mind two or three times. All right, you can open your eyes.

So what probably happened there is you saw the image of a blue car, yeah? And what else probably happened is that you heard your name to yourself, almost like a little voice in there. So what I sometimes say then is, well, what’s going on there? Is someone else in there with you, or what’s going on? Well, so it’s not just that we think our thoughts, but we are the ones who observe our thoughts, or we kind of see our thoughts, see those images coming in. Same thing, we might think our name to ourselves, but we also hear it. So awareness is really getting in touch with this seat of conscious awareness that sees these images, feels these feelings, hears the mental chatter. And when we’re in touch with that witness or that observer, we create a little bit of separation, a little bit of distance, right, to understand that our thoughts are not reality, our feelings are just feelings, they’re not some absolute force. And once we can cultivate that, we start to see things a little bit more clearly, right? You can have the ability to sort of say, oh, I see this emotion coming up, or, oh, you know what? I am feeling a little off today, I wonder what’s going on there.

And so that applies to both self-awareness and your awareness of others, right? If you cultivate that ability to just be mindful and have that witnessing or observing tendency or capacity, then you’re going to be much more aware. So a simple practice you can use for that, I call it the hello meditation. I did this with someone I coached about a couple of years ago. They had anger issues, and they told me how they kind of would just have this buildup of stress and tension, and then they would just explode. And I said, here’s something you can try, right? Whenever you feel that anger, just simply say, hello anger. And he called me up one day, he’s like, Jackson, you wouldn’t believe this. I came home after a long day, I was stressed out, I stubbed my toe on the coffee table, and I just heard myself say, hello pain. It’s like, what’s happening? It’s like, it’s working.

So that is a simple practice you can do. Whether you have a formal practice where you’re just going to sit down for 5 minutes and do a meditation on this, and sort of just say, hello planning, hello worrying, hello thinking, hello frustration, whatever. Or you make it more informal, you might just be walking around, you might be in a conversation, and someone says something to you, and you say, oh, hello anger. And here’s a tip, don’t say it out loud. Can you imagine, you’re talking to someone and they say, like, hello annoyance, like what did you say? So don’t say it out loud, just say it in here. And when you do that, you’re increasing your awareness to recognize your own emotions and your awareness of others.

Okay, so let’s get into the regulation piece, right, of both yourself and others. And I’ll talk about self-regulation first. I say the key thing to remember here is this idea of antidotes, right? When you have a poison, what do you do? You apply an antidote, it’s kind of the opposite. Well, the mind and body cannot, in the same moment in time, experience polar opposite emotions. Sure, you might have a love-hate relationship towards someone or something, but in that one moment, right, you can’t be feeling intense anger, right, ready to attack, but also just like totally chill, right? It’s just not how it works.

So what an antidote is, is saying a mental or physical thing you do, so when you experience an intense negative emotion, right, you apply that antidote to knock it out or block it out. So mental first, let’s explain that. Well, the mind cannot have two totally opposite mental states at the same time. I mean, even a simple example, if I ask you to think about the Statue of Liberty and what you’re going to have for breakfast tomorrow, right, you can’t do it. You might bounce back and forth between whatever, eggs and bacon, Statue of Liberty, but at the same moment, you can’t have those two opposite things.

So a mental antidote is when you have a negative emotion, you’re just generating a different emotion or thinking about something else. So a simple example of that, if you’re feeling really worried or anxious about something, is I’m going to list out 10 things I’m thankful for. Or I’m feeling really angry, I’m going to visualize a time when I was young that I was having a really good goofy time with my friends, right? So again, you’re just applying an antidote there to just push that negative emotional mental state out of your mind.

Physical antidote, similar concept. This is the idea that the body and mind are a two-way street. So we tend to think that our emotional state affects how we express ourselves physically, but what we find is that how we express ourselves physically also can reverse engineer how we feel mentally, right? If I just simply stand in a powerful posture or get a little bit of motion, some excitement going, it actually changes my brain chemistry and my neurochemistry. There’s a great video called Power Posing. If you haven’t seen this, a TED Talk where she talks about even standing in a way that’s very confident for several minutes decreases cortisol, that’s the stress hormone, increases testosterone, which is kind of the confidence hormone. So same thing, if you need to apply a physical antidote, it’s just physically acting out a more positive emotion than the one you’re feeling now.

Okay, so that’s self-regulation. Then talking about managing others. So a quick story on this, I was at a party, and I was talking to this dude who worked in a steel mill. And I was like, hey, what’s that like? And he’s like, well, basically this thing comes down the assembly line, I screw a piece of metal on it, I put it on a new line. I was like, okay, interesting, what else? And he’s like, well, you know, basically that’s it, things come down the line, I screw on a piece of metal, put it on a new line. And I said, oh, okay, well, say more, tell me about a day in your life. And he’s like, well, you know, sometimes it comes down the line and it’s kind of off, so I just move it a little bit, and then I screw a piece of metal on, and then I put it on the other line. And I was like, wow.

So he went on like that for like 20 minutes. And at the end of the night, he comes over to my group of friends, and my girlfriend was there, and he goes, Jackson is such a great conversationalist. And my girlfriend looks and says, no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong, that’s Jackson. She points at me. Well, her and I are no longer together, but the point of that story is that he says, no, no, no, that’s Jackson, right? He was super great, super interesting to talk to, really just got me, and we got along great. I’m like, I said like three sentences the whole conversation.

So what happened is, to be interesting, be interested. There’s a ton I could tell you about how to skillfully deal with people, right, and how to kind of vibe with them emotionally. But the number one thing is to just be genuinely interested in them, right? Focus on talking in terms of their interests, what matters to them. Even if it’s something practical that you need to get out of the conversation, right? If you need to manage someone and get them to go do a series of tasks or projects, you can talk about it in terms of what’s on the table for them. Like, hey, this is going to help you get promoted, or, you know, maybe this will help you to learn a skill that you can apply somewhere else, whatever. Talk in terms of their interests.

And on a related note, the only way to win an argument is to avoid it. So as you go into conflict management and that piece of this, try to go into things with the attitude of, we tend to default to, I’m right, you’re wrong. Flip that on its head, think, maybe I’m wrong and maybe they’re right. And that’s just going to help you change the orientation of the conversation to be much more effective.

So this is one of the longer videos in this resource library, and I’ll just recap briefly what we talked about. So this is emotional intelligence. This is about increasing your awareness of self and others. And the simplest way to practice that is through mindfulness meditation, particularly what we can call the hello meditation, where you’re learning to create a little bit of separation or distance and just view thoughts, feelings, voices, etc., sort of as a witness or an observer. That’s going to increase that awareness piece.

Then on the management piece, I taught you antidotes. You can apply mental antidotes, change what you focus on and generate a new state of mind, or express a different emotion in your body posture, right, to change how you feel. And then same, so when you’re dealing with others, this piece of social management is trying to talk in terms of their interests, become genuinely interested in them. And when you’re dealing with conflict, frame it as not an argument, but rather as figuring out maybe you’re wrong, they’re right, and collaboratively getting to whatever you need to get to.

So here is your assignment. First, get into small groups and talk about what is a physical or mental antidote that you could see yourself applying. So maybe you think through some of the common things that come up for you. Mine is like this kind of productivity anxiety, like, oh, I got to get more done, more done, more done, I get really tense. So maybe my antidote is to take a stretch and take five deep breaths, whatever, make it yours. So that’s what we’re going to talk about, first pick a mental or physical antidote and talk through how you might apply it.

And then the second one is to talk in terms of this social management piece. I want you to think about maybe a conflict you have going on or a difficult relationship you have. And thinking about what I said about seeing from their perspective, talking in terms of their interest, avoiding it feeling like a conflict, and trying to partner to get to a solution together. How might you do that, right? Talk through that for a little bit. Okay, so there’s your assignment, and you’re starting to actually practice here increasing emotional intelligence.