The Power of Emotional Intelligence with Greg Witz

Thank you for tuning in to the True Grit and Grace podcast. I'm Amberly Lago, and I'll be sharing inspirational stories of resilience and empowering ideas to elevate your business and your life, ignite your passion, and fuel your purpose. Hey, Amberly Lago here, and welcome back to the True Grit and Grace Podcast. I'm so excited that you're here, especially if you are looking to level up your life, your leadership skills, and your communication skills. Because I have my good friend here with us, Greg Witz. He's on the show today, and he's got insights and tips that will—it will change your life. I've been so excited to have you on, Greg. He's the—he's an author. He's a thought leader. He's the host of the Better. Human podcast and the CEO of WITS Education. His sole mission in life is to challenge all of us to be better. He's truly making humans better humans. From startups to the White House, bringing entrepreneurs and business leaders to the top of their game is his passion. Greg, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me. We were just wrapping before and saying I was excited to be here. You know, we had to reschedule this actually, but we're here now and it's going to be an awesome conversation. I'm excited. You were on my— I loved you on my podcast.

Oh, I loved being on your show. Your show is incredible. And huge shout out to our friend Beau who introduced us.

Beau is a gentleman and a scholar and a legend.

Yeah, he is. And I'm so grateful for you because you are truly, I mean, all over the place, from Costa Rica to Ontario to the United States. And so thank you for squeezing this in. And when I say you're just so amazing and so generous, I mean that, y'all. He spoke to my mastermind group and everyone loved you and we all learned so much. And I loved how you taught. You had the whiteboard out. You were Explaining things, and then you were just like, Amberly, anything I can do to help you? If you want some you know coaching tips or anything, I'm here for you. And I was like, oh, I would love to coach with you. He goes, no, no. You're like, no, let me just help you. You're my friend. And so thank you from the bottom of my heart for who you are, and it's your passion for helping others. And I want to talk to you a little bit about. emotional intelligence. And first of all, can you tell our audience exactly what that means? Because there might be some people that are like, what is that? I've never heard of emotional intelligence.

Or even worse, people have perceptions about sort of what emotional intelligence is, right? And in some cases could sort of dismiss it. So let's sort of start with the function or the fundamentals of emotional intelligence. And I like to break it down into 3 areas, right? So first is the area or the principle or the pillar of self-awareness. Which, you know, this is where I talk a lot about how people mess this up. Because self-awareness, people look at this as like a positive exercise. In fact, I was chatting with a buddy yesterday, and we were just chatting about things, and we got into the personality. And, you know, he started sort of touting out the colors assessment, like, I'm a green and a gold, and she's a purple, and this and this. And, you know, I said to him, I said, that's the problem in exactly what you just said, which is truly, we don't understand what any of that means. And at the end of the day, we approach self-awareness from like a surface level. It's a fun level.

Right.

Right? Look at my strengths, look at me. And that's not what self-awareness is. Self-awareness is—

And by the way, I don't even know what the color thing is. I've never done it.

So there's a color assessment, right? Which basically puts you into quadrants of what kind of color you are. And these are what are known as preference-based assessments. There's a bunch out there, you know, your animal, your color, your sort of your, your, your, your style. And what this is really acknowledging from, from an assessment standpoint is your preference. How do you prefer to deal with things, right? When I talk about self-awareness, it's really about— and we'll get into this today in the episode— which is really understanding the structure of your personality and where this all comes from, right? Why do you behave, respond, communicate, act, feel the way you do? What are these different sides of your personality? What do they drive from, right? And when we start to start with that, we can now start to affect change, right? Which now brings us to point 2, pillar 2 in emotional intelligence, which is self-management, right? The ability to regulate, the ability to control and manage that temperature of yours, right? So for the personalities that are out there that are more reactive and angry and aggressive and gritty and abrasive, right? How do you slow that down? And the opposite to the personalities which are a little more sort of avoidant and withdrawn and introverted and quiet and shy and don't really want to rock the boat, how do we sort of manage that? So self-management really gets into not just understanding where this behavior and emotion comes from, but then having the tools to process through it and then literally act or behave differently. And the third aspect of emotional intelligence is what is known as relational management. So how do I deal with you, like in our relationship, right? And in our communication, if I'm your leader, or if, you know, I'm your spouse, or if I'm your, your, your friend, how do I navigate your emotions and personality? And how do I actually affect— A-F-F-E-C-T— your reactions? In other words, can I help you regulate more? Right? So if I could really master those 3 things, then this is what is known as being emotionally intelligent.

This helps in every aspect of your life, whether you— and I think that if you are a leader, you most definitely have to have emotional intelligence. But I think this helps with every relationship, especially in a marriage. I mean, I think that we can— well, I think that I can change because there are some times when I can be kind of withdrawn, don't want to rock the boat, Actually twice yesterday. Once I was a little more withdrawn, didn't want to rock the boat. And then I was a little too tired, a little too hungry. I'd just flown in. I'd been a couple of days on 3 hours sleep, and I snapped at my husband, which is very rare. So it always freaks him out when I actually raise my voice because that's something I don't do. But what would you say? How do you, first of all, assess Especially if you're going into a call, like if you're interviewing someone for a position on your team or to come into your mastermind, how do you start to assess what kind of personality, what do they have emotional intelligence? What are some of the things that you do to assess that?

Right. So we actually have an assessment, but let's back up and use you as an example, right? So interesting. You've been traveling, you were speaking, you were running. It's like, it's very fatiguing and tiring. The travel is fatiguing. The delivery, the execution, the, the networking, like it's, it's a very extroverted exercise, right?

Mm-hmm.

Let's say one is more of an introverted personality, that whole exercise for the last few days is going to be draining, right? So you're holding it together during those moments. By definition, you're regulating through that. Doesn't mean the stress doesn't affect you, right? So there's a big correlational relationship between that stress, that fatigue, and that emotional sort of reaction. So as we now travel, the next sort of piece that you spoke a little bit about was what we call a trigger event, right? You get home, and there was this, there were 2 triggers, right? One got you to sort of back off, right, where we went in and maybe— and the worst thing about that, Amberly, is we don't actually withdraw to breathe or let it go. We withdraw to internalize. So that biting my tongue, that sort of, you know, backing off, and we'll rationalize it, right? We'll say, I'll deal with this later. It's not a big deal. Or, you know, let me let it go. Or, you know, I'm trying to work on not reacting. Which in some cases positive. But that just builds up. And what we talk a lot about is something called the backpack, right? Which is we just, we put this stuff in the backpack for later. You know, I very specifically talked to guys about this, which is guys, you know, inhale emotions, they internalize them through, I'm going to compartmentalize that. And that's probably the most unhealthy thing we can do as human beings. The third or the fourth aspect to all of this is, you know, what goes in must come out. So all of that stress and emotion that you were carrying for those few days has to be exhausted. Right? It's got a— there's a, there's a cool term which we have, which is called emotionally vomiting, right? You need to go and emotionally vomit.

How do you do that, though?

Well, you described it, which is there was a trigger event with your husband. And then all of a sudden, there was just this exhaustion through a reaction, through a fight, through an attack, through an abrasive abrasiveness, right? Which in that moment, you literally feel better. You're like, oh, just got that all off my chest, right? Or I've been carrying that on my shoulders. And then of course, there's regrets and remorse that comes afterwards because we didn't handle it more effectively, right? So we might acknowledge the reaction yesterday was a healthy exercise. Unfortunately, this is where we take it out on our spouses and our family because they are the safe space, psychologically safe, that I could act and behave and react and be raw and exhaust all of this. And there is no repercussion to it. There is no consequence. I can't do this with my clients. I can't do this with my boss. I can't do it with the neighbor, right? Sometimes I do it on the road when driving a car, right? When someone tries to merge in my lane, we all see what happens there, right? So, so back to all of this, where does this come from? And that's what you were talking about with self-awareness. And one of the models we use is something called transactional analysis. So very simply, and what I love about this model, is it gives us an instant understanding to our personality. We went through it with your mastermind. And I think that's where people loved it so much because all of a sudden it clicks. It's like, aha, that's where it comes from. So the model is our personality is made up of 3 bubbles, 3 sections, right? Call them balloons, call them bubbles, call them sections, whatever you wanna call them. But there are only 3 sections to our personality. And when we understand the structure of our personality, it answers everything. So the first section or the first bubble to our personality is something called the parental ego state, right? Now, the idea behind the name parent isn't to describe that you are actually a parent or a status. It's to describe behavior. If I said you're acting like my father or my mother, or that's very parental, or when you approach that individual, that was pretty sort of authoritative, what I'm describing is a behavior. And we all have this. And this section of our personality is learned behavior. We literally learn it through leaders and through parents and through the nurturance that we've had throughout our life, right? The opposite to that is something called the child. And this is where maybe everything goes wrong, right? So the child side to our personality is emotion, it's feeling. And there are only 3 ego states, 3 states of emotion. That's it. We could boil every single emotional situation down to one of these 3. Either we started in it or we ended in it, right? The first is what is known as the spontaneous child. This might be your happy emotion, your optimism, right? This is sometimes when, you know, we're looking off into the universe saying, I can do it. That is the imaginative, natural, spontaneous child to your personality. When we are socializing with friends or family or even in a business professional environment where there's the chatter and the gabbing and the sort of intimacy and the socializing, that is all spontaneous child. It's being friendly. It's being engaging. It's even being a little risk-taking. Let me step out there and meet people, right? The next is what we call the withdrawn child. And that's what you described yesterday. You said there was one time yesterday that I became the withdrawn child. I backed off, I bit my tongue, I wanted to withdraw. And this is what is known as your introverted side as well. Now, when we think about the withdrawn child, we can also now change that name, child and withdrawn. So we can actually change the name child to emotion. And we can now start to change the name withdrawn to things like avoidant emotion, internalized emotion, right? Withdrawn emotion, shy emotion. Right? So the name child isn't to describe your age, it's to describe the emotion that is being driven in the moment, right? And what's interesting about nurturance and how we're raised and grown up, we are taught to be the withdrawn child.

Oh, for sure. I mean, there are even sayings that I grew up with that— hide your crazy and be a lady. Like, you know, and like, things like that.

What? That fits very perfectly for you, right? Hi, yes. So you're a lady. But yeah, you know, the other thing is be quiet, be seen and not heard. Right? Yeah. And I grew up with a very authoritative father, which was like, you know, you, you, you speak when spoken to, you sit at the dinner table, right? Don't interrupt the adults. Oh, yeah. My wife the other day, I mean, our kids are like, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom. And I think like, that's what kids are like today. And it hit me, I'm like, we never did this when we were kids. There was never mom, mom, mom, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad. It was like, is it okay if I speak right now? Right?

That's exactly how I was raised.

For sure. And this also now becomes how we emotionally survive and cope in the future. So the fight or flight, it's a little more simple to think about the way we are emotionally handling and coping with situations, relationships, is through the withdrawn child, right? Oh, let me not say something. Let me, let me, let me, let me change. Let me, let me back off. Now, the opposite to this is our angry child. And our angry child is our fight. This is our reactionary child. In fact, when we have trigger events, right, there are only 2 child ego states that respond to that event. It is either the withdrawn child, which is known as the flight, which is, do I need to back off or avoid? Should I not say something in the meeting? Should I, should I hold my opinion? You know, today, the world of political discussion, right? Sex discussion, religion discussion, like, whoo, these are, these are, these are landmines, right? And, you know, I think where we cope and manage through this is, is by internalizing and withdrawing, right? Doesn't mean that we don't have that opinion, or we don't have that frustration. It just becomes How do I now express this without being canceled?

Canceled.

Or having some sort of consequence, right? Yeah. So the angry child is the— for all the athletes out there, right? One of the things that makes you a phenomenal athlete is your angry child. Because in the middle of the game, right, when the odds are against you, right, and the stress factor is high, and there is no rational thought in your brain, there is just the let me persevere and push, right? Amberly, you were also the definition of like, you know, having a strong angry child or being able to have true grit and grace and push and persevere and resilience, right? That has a lot to do with that fight in us. And I think it's a very important side of our personality. The challenge is we've, in some cases, never learned how to express it in an effective way and manage it. So it builds, builds, builds, builds, builds, builds. And then guess what, right? Trigger event number 2 happens yesterday for you, Amberly. it happens to be with your spouse. And guess what comes out? The roar and the fire of the angry child. And the way we describe the angry child side of your personality is it's like fire. Fire is amazing. It can provide light, it can create warmth, you can cook your food. You know, you could melt things to, to, to a malleable state to build something. Like, fire is incredible. But fire can also burn, and it can destroy, and it can, you know, create havoc. So those are the 3 states to your personality when it comes down to emotion. And one of the things we know about our brain is when we are met with stress, and we could also now define this as emotional stress and take that one step further, what we call the emotional threat. In other words, when we are stressed in fight or flight, right, we are, or when we are emotionally challenged or facing something, we are responding to that emotional stress the same way we would respond to a physical threat. The bear that's about to eat you, right? Where you have to climb a tree, right? Where you have to kill it, right? The way we don't have to deal with bears and lions and tigers and stuff today, but we have to deal with emotional threats.

Mm-hmm.

What if I'm canceled? What if I'm not received? What if I'm not liked? What if I'm rejected? Right? So All—

I feel like yesterday I was all of it. The spontaneous child, the withdrawn child, and the angry child. Like, so I feel a little crazy because I was all of those.

Oh, but that's great. And, you know, joke about the child. The child side to our personality is the first ego state that we show people. Think about that for a second. When you meet people, when we're when we're facing uncomfortable situations beyond our spouse and family, the majority of of us start to approach that with a smile, right? You know, a friendliness. Even when I got to come give you let's say I'm your leader and I got to talk to you about some performance or or problem, I usually do it with a smile like hey by the way, you know I think you're awesome, right? No, and this becomes ulterior type of communication. So on the on the problem in my ex. decides to try to avoid having that uncomfortable feeling, I end up creating it even further. So we function through the child ego state in our life, and that's not a bad thing. The joke about that as well is we get married through the child. We get divorced through the child. We surrender life's most important decisions to the child. But at the same token, it is also the side of our personality where sometimes we can't describe it. We're like, I just don't know what it is, but I just have a feeling and it works out.

Right.

But what anchors us all together is the final side of your personality, something called the adult, the rational, logical, intelligent side of your personality. The thing that we develop, which is through our frontal lobe, our ability to problem solve, to think, to process information from our environment, to act differently, to feel something, but then be able to communicate or manage the outcome of the relationship differently. You know, when we are kids, literally 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, right? When we're kids, our adult ego state is like a small little tiny, tiny, tiny deflated little balloon. And as we develop through life and like your frontal lobe, it takes 25 years to fully develop, the balloon inflates, inflates, inflates, inflates, inflates, inflates, right? And what we do as actual parents, biological or, you know, guardian parents, when we're raising these children is we're guiding them. Right? We're guiding them through parental behavior. We're guiding them directively, right? That's one side of our parent, which is what we call the critical parent, the dominant side, right? Where we're more forceful and directive and authoritative in our communication. And the opposite to that is we have something called the nurturing parent. This is how we guide our children or relationships through nurturance, through love, through compassion, through understanding. This, in a lot of cases, is the side of our personality that gets taxed the most. And if we might sort of break down your scenario, you've been a nurturing parent exhausting that behavior for several days in the exercise of coaching and speaking and delivering, right? Because it is a selfless exercise. You are there to serve. So Amberly is exhausting this nurturance. She's coaching.

And then from the moment I get home, it's expected, you know, and I love being the nurturing. I love being nurturing, but With, with my daughter and her needs and my husband, and he wants to be nurtured, and even the dog, you know, and so I'm just like, I'm just depleted for sure.

Your cup is empty, right? To recharge. However, we adopt roles in life, right? So husband and your dog and your, your, your daughter don't go, oh, hold on a sec, is now not the time to act and behave the way I've always acted and behaved with mom and with spouse, right? And pet mom, right? Because my— the normal behavior I get from this is, is nurturance.

Mm-hmm.

Now, would have— wouldn't have been great if we're self-aware enough to say, hold on a second, mom, right, needs to be the withdrawn child right now and go and just, right, recharge and reflect and fill back up. And let's us be nurturing parents for her. So your husband starts going, hey, babe, what can I do in the support and help or is aware enough not to be like, hey, where's the peanut butter? Right? And you're like, oh my God. Oh my God. What do you mean? Yeah. Or your daughter says, has some request, or the dog says, pet me. Right? But what if they were all aware to say, hey, we need to be the nurturing parent in this particular aspect? And what's cool about understanding this concept of ego states, right? Because we got the 6 ego states to our personality, is it now gives me an ability to answer a few things. Number 1, who am I? Right? So what is the makeup of my personality? What do my bubbles, my balloons sit at? Am I— do I have big nurturing parent bubbles? Right? And just because I have a big nurturing parent or a big critical parent bubble or balloons in my personality doesn't mean that it is always big. Right? Deflates a little bit, right, through the excess use of things, right? So I gotta refill those up a little bit as well. So who am I? And then why do I behave the way I do? Where does this all come from? Right? Why do I act and feel? What are these triggers? Where do these triggers come from? And then more importantly, what is the ability for me to now process and manage? So the self-awareness goes, aha, I am angry child right now. I am going to eat my husband. Right?

Right.

That fire comes out, right? So hold on a second right now. What's not operating is my adult ego state. My husband is a little bit of an absence of self-awareness right now. It doesn't recognize that his spontaneous or his withdrawn child needs right now. And the daughter, right, and the pets, and all this stuff. They don't recognize this, what's going on, but I do. And now I now manage the situation differently. Sweetheart, love you. I've been on, on gigs for 3 days. I've exhausted everything. Please don't ask me anything, right? Peanut butter yourself. Sweetheart, love you. Can you give mom Just a little bit of time. I need to go decompress before I even can remotely get my brain thinking right now. And dog, you can come lie with me because, you know, if as long as you lie there and I'm petting you and we're chilling out, that's gonna be great. And if we could behave like that on the road, if we could behave like that as leaders, if we could behave like that as spouses and neighbors and friends and parents, we just might be more effective, not just in communicating, but role modeling and coaching and mentoring and helping other people adopt these behaviors. Because the greatest way we learn is through mimicking and watching other people, mimicking their behavior, right, through watching them. That's how I learned, right?

Mm-hmm.

In all ways. So your personality, this ego state model says that while we have these 3 main ego states, they're broken down into subcategories, we've got different behaviors. And as we start to explore this even further, we now start to see the relationship between them. What is my pattern for dealing with emotional threats? Right? How do I, or what does it require me to be that nurturing parent or that critical parent? Right? How do I plan and manage and debrief and process through some of these emotional challenging situations? So emotional management, you know, I think once again, in the world of personal development and personal growth, the frustration with how people digest this stuff is from a surface level. Oh, I did a course in emotional intelligence. We did this color assessment. I'm a green, right? There's a responsibility for the thing of this on the other side, which is Keeping on learning, right? This is, this is like the whole exercise of it takes a lifetime to become emotionally intelligent. So we better get onto it now because the more I start practicing this and the more I start exercising this, and it's the same type of exercise as you would demonstrate from a physical standpoint. This is a mental exercise and an emotional exercise. The more I do that, the better I'm gonna get.

Oh my gosh. I, I'm I'm taking notes as you're talking, and I've already taken notes when you were speaking in the mastermind, and I'm still taking notes. And I want to go back to one thing you said. You said it takes 25 years to develop your decision-making.

Yeah. So it doesn't mean that you don't make decisions along the way. But let's look at your brain. Your brain. You have 2 brains. So we have 2 brains, right? For this conversation, we got 2 brains. We've got our oldest brain, our reptilian brain, the survival brain, right? The lizard brain, the fight or flight brain. This is literally known as your amygdala. Your amygdala has one function, and that is self-preservation, right? So this part of the brain, which is our original brain when we were all sort of Neanderthals back in the day, growing and building and developing, right? We've gone from pure self-preservation, right? Because that's what it does. And by the way, it's It's the same brain from a millennia ago, right? It hasn't changed. That's why we react on the road the way we do when people are driving cars, which I think is the most comical exercise ever when you see 2 people fighting on the road or one person trying to merge in the other lane and one person's blocking them or people on the horns. You're driving a car. It's probably one of the most rational, objective exercises you should be doing and functioning, right? But we drive that car through emotion, right? And today's brain is our newest brain, right? Our intelligent brain, right? My world, we call it the computer brain or the adult brain. And this brain has a few functions. It allows us to problem solve. It allows us to operate with decisions, right? Or make decisions. Allows us to process information from our environment, right? Allows us to think. And while this brain, and what's so funny about it is the size of this brain, right? Or our brain is much bigger than the amygdala, the amygdala is still way more powerful than our newest brain, right? So that frontal lobe, to get fully developed, takes 25 years, right?

Wow.

So think about this, right? Think about the decisions you made in life when you were a teenager, right? Think about the decisions you made in your life. And these are all the things that we shouldn't have done in life type of stuff, right? And the decisions that you make today. And think about how, for the audience, think about how sometimes you look back and you think, oh my goodness, I can't believe I did that. I said that, right? I made that decision. I took that risk, right? You know?

Yeah. I mean, I was just thinking, you know, I had my first child when I was 23. And it was a completely different way of doing things then than when I was 36 and had my second child. And so when you said 25, I was like, wow, I wasn't even like, fully— my brain wasn't even fully developed. And I had a kid.

You were still, still developing that full adult right now. We might, we might argue that having a child promoted and kickstarted you or like, you know, catapulted you to becoming more, you know, mature and rational because that's the other side of our personality, the adult and the frontal lobe. This is our ability to think and process and make decisions, right? So there's a maturity that comes with this. So back to all of this, you know, that's the joke when we see the 25-year-old or the 27-year-old in corporate environments and the leader's going, man, I can't believe I have to tell this person to show up 10 minutes early. I can't believe that, you know, this person thinks and behaves this way. And I always make a joke. I'm like, well, you got a, you got a zero, a zero-year-old adult, or you got a 2-year-old adult. So you got a 3-year-old adult. Your job as a leader is to help that individual mature and develop consistently and continually.

Yeah. And it's when you, like, for instance, when you're dealing with someone who is an angry child, like you can see it, they are an angry child just the way. And I think I'm very sensitive to that just in someone's tone. The way someone speaks. In fact, um, my friend overheard the way someone was talking to me the other day and they said, wait a minute, they work for you and they talk to you that way? Like, what? That's crazy. Because I had my phone on speaker and I was like, yeah, but you know, that's just the way that they talk. They're a really good per— I started making, you know, excuses.

Well, you start nurturing them and mothering them and rescuing them and being like, oh, it's okay. Don't worry about it. That's their right.

Keep going. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I did. I'm like, that's just the way they talk. That's their tone. They're a really good person. That's just the way they come across. And I'm actually really good at, usually pretty good at managing things. And, and my husband, same way. He's like the angry child and the way he talks. And that was why we got in an argument yesterday. You know, it was just like, he was, I asked one question and Whoa! He just got so angry, which triggered me to get the angry child to come out. How, when you know someone is like that angry child and you're sensitive to tone and stuff, what is the best way to kind of manage that type of personality?

So there's so this is not a one size fits all answer, but this is this is the the transaction we want to start to think about. So one of the things we teach in my company and the coaching and the programs is a very simple rule or acronym called Pratt. P-R-A-T. And what that stands for is people respond as treated. And the challenge with us as communicators, whether it's a spousal interaction or whether it is a leader to a team member interaction or team member to leader, manager, boss, which we'll come back to, the most common transaction that we end up on is something called parent-child. I'm a parental personality. I speak to you like a child. You respond, react as the child back to the parent. Right? So we're sitting at the dinner table and I look down there and I say, why the F is the salt all the way down at the other end of the table? You don't look at me and be like, you know, that is an excellent question, Greg. Let's go ahead and think. First, I would like to consider how many grains of salt do we actually have in this jar, right? There's a good chance that, that you or whoever else is sitting at the end of the table is gonna say one of 3 things. First, the withdrawn. I'm sorry, I didn't set the table. Right? The second is the angry child, which is "F you." I didn't set the table. Go get your own effing salt, right? Or maybe the spontaneous child, right? Which now deflects and makes some sort of joke, like "Oh, look who's getting so uptight when they don't have their salt. Better get them the salt," right? Yeah. Child types of responses. But guess what? What we respond and communicate to? We communicate to their parents. Now the ultimate way to communicate effectively is adult to adult. So to answer your question, you said, "What do I do?" Or how do we deal with the angry child? So let's say we walk in the in in the room, and maybe yesterday your delivery right was parental. Maybe it wasn't critical parent. Maybe it was nurturing parent, right? And your communication to your husband spoke to him like a child, angry child, right? Now there's a couple things we can do here. First, recognize this: the number one ego state to help deflate that angry child. Is a nurturing parent. The problem is, is we over-index on the nurturing parents in those moments instead of now managing it with a little bit of acknowledgement. Because like a customer service situation, when we are frustrated and pissed off, and the other person on the other end of the line says, "I understand you, I see you, and I will help you," we instantly calm down. Think about when one's trying to to when when someone merges into your lane. And in quotations, they cut you off, right? I know you guys are in Texas, so that doesn't really happen. But you know, up in Canada, right? Everyone's very comfortable giving each other the finger.

Oh, gosh. Well, LA, you know, I was there 31 years, and I just was there recently. And I just get onto the freeway, just landed, got my rental car, get onto the freeway, and somebody flipped me off. And I was like, oh, welcome back to LA.

Right, right. You're like, welcome home, right? So let's say someone cuts you off and you start to get all angry, right? And they stick their hand up and they give a little wave. Oh, hello. In this weird psychology, you go, thank God, right?

Yeah.

I was ready to hit the person on the road, but something happened in my brain right now. I was moved out of this survival child sort of position. I was acknowledged, right? Someone said please and thank you with the hand. The funny thing about that, no words were exchanged, but there was an entire interaction that just happened in there. And we calm. So what the nurturing parent does is when we acknowledge that angry child, so let's say you walk in, the angry child is there, and you say, all right, listen, babe, I got you. I hear you. Right? What that immediately starts to do is deflate. Now, I want to be very clear about what I'm saying. When we are dealing with toxic behavior, excessive anger, what we do not want to do is go try to pet the bear. This isn't about you like a little tummy tickle, right? Because at that point, it's a completely different type of situation. But in communication, when someone is an angry child, why the way I describe it is they are on fire. They're burning. They need help. They're frying out. They're. The one ego state that is not engaging in that moment of stress or emotion is the adult. And the one way we can get people to the adult, right, regardless of the ego state that we're dealing with, is through the uses of questions. Okay. Now, we want to be careful about these questions. We're not asking questions to do Jedi mind tricks and play games with people, right? But what we're starting to do is when I ask you a question, your brain has to flip on. Right? And start to process that question. In fact, we'll do this exercise with the audience and yourself. The exercise is don't think of the answer, right? So for the audience, the only thing you can't do is stick your fingers in your ear and go na na na na na because you gotta listen to the questions, right? But the exercise is don't let your brain think of the questions. And I'll just rapid fire a bunch. What's your favorite color? How many kids do you have? Are you right-handed or left-handed? What kind of car do you drive? Right? What did you do on the weekend? What's your type of— what's your favorite food? Do you like ice cream? Right? What type of toothpaste do you use? Now, these are just random stupid questions. Right? But I'm assuming the audience. Right? And if we actually slowed things down, right, we could actually think of all of those answers. And even maybe here with you, Amberly, you were still thinking, okay, what, right? And then you're thinking, oh, Crest. I have one kid. Right? The brain starts processing. So how we can communicate back to relational management, the emotional intelligence piece. Right. How I communicate has a tremendous amount to do with how you feel. And if I'm aware of this and I communicate to you as an adult, right? And I'm not saying I need to treat you maturely, but I need to speak to you like a, like an effective communicator, right? We just might have a way better interaction. Now back to your husband. Your husband, maybe we ended up in the traditional Walked in the house, saw the reaction of the angry child. Your critical parent came out, said, don't speak to me like that. I brought you in and I'll take you out. Right?

Yeah. That's exact kind of like how I reacted. Like, don't you talk to me that way.

But I will come over there and I will give you what my granddaddy used to give me. Right? Used to give me what for. Right? So there's this heavy critical parent, and that's the most common transaction. Now, your husband probably doesn't now. Well, he does one of a couple things. He becomes more of an angry child, right? And then you become more of a critical parent, and then both of you end up walking away, or he backs off in that moment. He goes, oh shit, right? Mama bear just got home and mama bear's claws are out right now. And she, she, she is looking to tear a strip out of someone right now. Back off. Right?

Mm-hmm.

What do we have? What's that commonality there? It is a parent-to-child interaction.

Right? So it's just like breaking these things down and understanding them really is going to help your communication with your spouse, with your kids, with your whole team. Correct.

Now let's go back to— let's go back to your team interaction because you said something there. You said in this interaction, if we break it down, it wasn't you that started the interaction. You picked up the Hello, Amberly here. And it is a team member, an angry child. And they are reacting frustrated, abrasive in their communication. They might not be crazy threatening and violent angry, but they're just, they're, they're, they're, there's fire coming out, right?

Yeah.

Now, we're put in a little bit of a predicament here as human beings, because we as leaders are operating in parental roles. So they're, they're frying out right now. And what is my brain telling me to do? Well, what I've always done, just be the nurturing parent or be the critical parent. If it was me, if it was my team member that called me up, the thing I would have said is, listen, all right, you continue speaking like this, I swear to God, it's going to be the last conversation you and I have. Critical parent. That's threatening. And what do I do? I put that person right back into withdrawn child. And that's problematic, right? Because nothing is resolved. So this individual now walks away. with resentment and frustration. And again, this all happened like this because as communicators, we communicate unconsciously. So they come out as the angry child. So you don't do that. So what do we do, Amberly, is you become the nurturing parent. Oh, well, tell me what's going on. And I'm so sorry this is happening. And let me see what I can do. And all we've done in that moment is we've now taught this person that when they communicate through the angry child, They will be rescued, saved, nurtured, and loved. Now, the challenge with this individual, if they were emotionally intelligent, we would say, okay, well, you're an angry child right now. One of the things I teach in communication is the first question we want to help ourselves get to the adult right now. How do I not show up on the phone with Amberly as the angry child? Okay, well, let me first ask myself a question. What is my objective of this phone call? Calling Amberly right now. There's a situation. What is the objective I'm looking for? What's the outcome? I'm not looking for Amberly to make me feel better. That's my little child brain going, but that's not what the adult's thinking. There's some sort of request, there's some sort of outcome, there's some sort of decision, there's some sort of implementation. What is that objective? Okay. One of the things I need, or the objective is X. Okay. Who am I right now? That's the next question we teach people. What ego state is driving the car right now? Angry child. If I show up in this interaction as an angry child, what's going to happen to Amberly? Well, one of two things. She's going to be a parental ego state, but there's a good chance she's also going to operate from that child ego state. Okay, I need Amberly being the adult, so I need to be the adult because that's the rule of PRATT. People respond as treated. Now, the one way I'm going to get there is back to the use of questions.

Right?

So I'm going to pick up the phone and say, hey, Amberly, look, I got a little bit of a situation. Can I go over it with you and explain what's happening? Sure. What's going on here? Well, this is the situation. Blah blah blah blah blah. Can I tell you what I'm really looking for? What I think I need? This is what I need. Okay. Blah blah blah blah blah. And we go from a 15-minute emotional vomit and dumping, right? Because this individual feels safe to do so, and good on your relationship with them. But the next step in the coaching, the next step in the relationship is now managing that interaction more effectively. And at an unconscious level, this individual starts to show up doing this in the future. Right? All begins with, what do I want? Number 2, who am I? Number 3, who are they? Who am I and who are they are the ego states. And ask, don't tell. What are the questions I need to use to get to my objective?

Ask, don't tell. Correct. Oh, God, that's so good. Now, if everybody could just learn to communicate like this, and I mean, I'm— I want to work on my skills of communication too. Sometimes I am guilty of just assuming that people should know what I want or read my mind. And, well, how do they not know that? Of course, this is what I would need. You mean I actually have to tell this person? Can't they see? You know, it's, it's, it's tough sometimes.

I think that's why it's so powerful where, like, the work we do with corporates and all companies is they all go through this program. So everyone develops a language. So ideally, what happens in the future is your team member calls up and says, look, I'm an angry child right now. Can I just like exhaust it? And you go, sure, go for it. Now, what you've done in that moment is you're not approaching it from the nurturing parent where you're, where you're over-nurturing. You're operating as the adult. This person needs to exhaust. They need a sounding board. Dump. All right, cool. All right. Now Amberly says to the team member, hey, Let's talk about what the objective is here, right? What's the adult objective here? So when we're using this language, it starts to become more effective. Now, the one other thing that we could do if we're using you as a case study, right? And, you know, you instantly— this person jumps on the phone with you and you identify it. You're like, okay, there it is. There's the angry child, right? They don't have to go through this type of training, but you get it. All right, cool. I'm not gonna automatically, reactionally, unconsciously move into my nurturing parent role. Let me slow that down for a second. So now Amberly starts asking questions. Hey, team member, can you give me some more context? Can you give me a little bit of what you think your ideas are? How do you think we should start to move forward? Right? Have we looked at X, Y, and Z? And what we're slowly doing is we're helping that angry child deflate. And as that angry child is deflating, the balloon of the adult is inflating. Right? So now all of a sudden, this individual, this team member now starts to communicate differently as well. And this is the art and the effectiveness of communicating or effectively communicating. And as you said, if we all did this, wow, how powerful would we all be as individuals and humans? But it's one of the most important skills that we never learn. What we end up doing is we end up mimicking bad communication habits Right, through our role models. Oh, yeah, for sure. And later on in adulthood, we end up communicating exactly the way we were communicated to. And what I always want to help people understand is things like emotional intelligence and communication skills and, you know, all these intrapersonal skills are actually learnable. There's processes for them. There's tools. What I just broke down in a communication piece for you, those 4 areas. That's part of a much larger formula in learning. So there are tools out there that we can do, and it's like yoga or breathwork or journaling or mental health. It's an exercise or going to the gym. This isn't you learn it once, and that's the biggest problem in the world today. People will do the course or they'll read the book or they'll listen to the podcast and they'll stop there. I go, you know what? I've listened to this podcast, or I did a course. I rarely hear people say things like, this is something I learned and I practice every day. I hear people—

Yeah, I think it's so, it's so important. It's the same with, you know, like resilience. It's something that you continually work on. It's not that, okay, I'm resilient now, I can just get through anything. Nope, you got to strengthen And just like I love that you said you don't, you know, you don't go to the gym, you don't listen to one podcast, read one book. It's like you've got to continue to work on those things and work on your mindset. And I love that you talk about mindset a lot. I got, I got a lot of haters that came after me when I was on the doctor's TV because they took a segment of the interview and they. Took like a 10-minute segment and shortened it to about 2, 3 minutes. And so it looks like, you know, I was talking about how I get through pain and challenges with my mindset. And people came after me like, you can't get through pain with your mindset. And I'm like, it's no, it's not just with my mindset, but I believe it starts with your mindset. How important do you think It is your mindset with getting through challenges or adversity or pain.

You know, I'll paraphrase what you just said because I totally agree. It's step one. Yeah, right. Doesn't mean there aren't other steps in there, right? But it is number one. It is my objective. You know, we do this as presenters, we do this as speakers, we do this as entrepreneurs where we're facing challenge and stuff. Stuff. We are ones that focus on what we want, where we're going, right? What's the outcome, right? What am I focusing on? What's my North Star? What's my, my, my, what's the end of the, what's the light at the end of the tunnel, right? It doesn't mean that we don't now look down and say, okay, what's the adversity and the challenge in front of me? And what are the steps that I need to move forward? But it is always about presenters and speakers do this very well. If you get on stage and you think, oh shit, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, my anxiety levels. You're gonna be one of the worst speakers in the world, right? But if you get on stage and you're like, okay, I have a message. I'm gonna rock this audience. I'm gonna kill this presentation, right? We are gonna knock this one out the park, right? Today I'm gonna tell this story, right? In this presentation, I'm gonna get this message across. When you do that, you get on stage and you kill it, right?

You did an Instagram post. I love— y'all have to check out his Instagram because you give the most valuable lessons in these videos. Like, I totally stalk your Instagram page, by the way. But you were sharing this in one of your posts about, like, really what you focus on matters.

Everything, right? Look, you know, I've gotten into a habit back to mindset is I have this little sort of mantra that I'll say internally, which is everything happens for a reason. So it could be a financial challenge in the business, lost the contract. Everything happens for a reason, right? Man, we killed it in this presentation and we really sort of did well. Everything happens for a reason. It's both sides, right?

Yeah.

My path. This is my journey. And, you know, coming back to your comments about resilience, what I say to people a lot is resilience is an outcome. It's, it's, it's an accumulation of you going through this stuff, which you become resilient. You don't do resilience in step 1 and then go take the action. It's like motivation. No one's motivated. No one's motivated to go to the gym or work, or no one's motivated to write the book. No one's motivated, right? But we start doing it and then we get momentum and then motivation then comes, right?

Mm-hmm.

I think people are always looking for these quick sort of easy answers, which is, what do I do to become motivated? What do I do to become resilient? Right? What do I do to become more of a leader? Right? And it's this instant, like, give me the formula and the skill. And it's, it's not about that. Back to what you're talking about before, which is, let's, let's just keep learning. Right?

And I think it's about being— people ask me all the time, like, how do you stay motivated? I'm like, I don't, I just stay consistent. Right? Right. Yeah. Just consistent and persistent. And I, and also, by the way, I, that is how I got this podcast to top 1% on Apple. I didn't even know that. Somebody, my friend Erica Lippy, took a screenshot and sent it to me. It, it was just that I was consistent, did the same episode, released a new episode every week over time. And those Those little things add up until you get to be top 1%. And so I think it's so important to say that, yeah, we're not always motivated, but we're consistent. And I love that what you shared about resilience is, yeah, we go through situations, hard times, painful things, but we learn and we become more resilient. I wanted to ask you if you could share, because I know that you have, and you were so kind to just give this to our mastermind people, you have a way that people can really become self-aware and learn what their personality is. Can you share that with our listeners so they can take that test?

Yeah, so the model we use, once again, is called ego states. And we have an assessment, we have the full 360, which is like, you know, you get peers and raters to come in and assess, it's a much, much more extensive assessment. And, you know, it's not preference-based. And in other words, what we have people, people come back year after year and redo the assessment. And it's scary how their personality is the same, right? Like, the personality doesn't change a lot. But what changes is people's— how people receive us. So that's, that's the data that we look for, which is, have your rater scores changed? Are we behaving, communicating, and acting differently? But for the audience, we've got this awesome one. It's called the Personality Blueprint. 12 questions. It's free. It's on my website, which is witseducation.com. And it'll give you an instant reading and result and report, right? Which is, here's where you sit within each ego state, and here's what it means, and here's the behaviors and the emotions that are attached to it. And, you know, it's a great, great tool to get a quick x-ray or snapshot at what is going on and how you're communicating and managing and functioning, right? And of course, there's programs and coaching, all that stuff afterwards. But if people are just interested in learning a little more about ego states, Um, go check out the, uh, Personality Blueprints assessment.

Thank you. That's— and I'll have that link in the show notes, but it's witzeducation.com. And I really highly suggest you go and take that assessment. And I think it's so amazing. You were like coaching at the White House for like 8 years. Was it 8 years?

A little longer, 10. So we went— oh, wow.

Wow.

The Bush administration, through Obama's administration, and into Trump's administration, and did all the executive coaching and leadership training there for those years. And it was interesting. It was very interesting. You know what's so interesting about that environment, which is how you have career staff that serve the presidency year after year after year after year, yet your bosses keep changing.

Oh, yeah.

The objectives and stuff like that. So talk about, you know, an environment where your ability to operate and adapt and to communicate well and to build relationships and to operate at the highest level, right? To be responsive in a reactive environment, right? Because everything is very quick there. Really boiled down to people's interpersonal skills, their emotional intelligence, and their communication and their leadership. So we did some amazing work there. It's a big feather in our cap and something I'm very proud of.

Oh, wow. That's incredible. So if someone wants to coach with you, is the best thing to do to go to your website or—

Yeah, look, I'm easy to find. You know, come check me out on Instagram. It's Greg Witz, W-I-T-Z. Whatever your social platform is, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook. Instagram is where I'm sort of most on, even though we distribute content throughout all the platforms. My website, witzeducation.com, easy to get in touch with me. My email, super easy. It's greg, greg@witzeducation.com. Once again, it's W-I-T-Z. DM me, message me, right? Reach out on the website. Happy to even just have a conversation and share some thoughts and opinion and guidance. And if the work I do and my company does will serve you well, we'll set you up. If not, I'm an encyclopedia of personal development. I've been in this for 30 years. So Got a lot of recommendations and referrals for you as well.

Oh, you are incredible. Thank you so much. Yes, I'll definitely reach out because, oh, I think it would be awesome to have you. Like, I would love to have my whole team do like a whole workshop and have you come in so we can be better communicators with each other. So—

Oh, Amberly, totally do that for you. Give me 90 minutes. Let's set you and your team up and we'll run an ego state session. Happy to just do it for you, teach you and the team the full sort of side of ego states, and then, and then have them go through the template as well. So, you know, afterwards we'll chat. But man, anytime you want to do that, I would be honored and happy to do so.

Oh, thank you. And I want my husband to do it too.

Oh, that's dangerous. You don't want to, you don't want to, you don't want to show him all the Jedi mind tricks because then he might use them against you as well.

Oh, that's true. That's That's true. Oh no, no.

Hopefully, hopefully he uses him. He's a Jedi and not, not, not the dark. What were they? The Sith, right?

Well, thank you so much. And you guys check him out. Greg Witz, you are amazing. Y'all, thank you for tuning in to the show. And and you know what? Take a screenshot whether you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening on Apple, what or Spotify, whatever your favorite. Platform is, and just tag us on Instagram. When I see that, I always share in my story too. So Amberly Lago Motivation, and then your Instagram is G Witz, right? G M Witz. G G M Witz. Okay. Mark.

But if you just if you searched Greg Witz, it's it's kind of yeah see headshot of me with purple background. It's hard to miss.

Yeah, it's hard to miss. I should have worn my making better making humans better humans cap too. We could have matched.

Good. Next time.

Next time. Next time. Yes, I would love to have you back on the show. I could just talk to you all day. I learned so much every single time that I get to talk with you. So thank you. And thank y'all for tuning in. And we'll see you next week.