How Emotional Intelligence is Your Game Changer for Success!

Hello and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio, where you can discuss, debate, and get advice on how to discover and shed the bitches of fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negative mindsets so you can realize your dreams and life purpose and create and accelerate the riches you want in life. Join us here live every Tuesday at noon Eastern and dialogue with us at 818-572-2910. You can also chat with us at blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitch or share your stories on our website at sheddingthebitch.com. Whatever the bitch is that's holding you back from living your life to the fullest, it's not worth giving up the riches in life that you deserve. So call in now and let Bernadette Boas know what's holding you back.

818-572-2910. Good day, good day, good day everyone. How are you on this Tuesday? Second February, or second Tuesday of February. Valentine's is right around the corner, so let me just wish all of you love and happiness, and because we certainly love you. So I hope you have a joyful, loving, maybe candy sweet-filled Valentine's celebration. If you haven't spoken to someone that you love, pick up the phone, give them a ring, shoot them a text, a nice little video of yourself, whatever the case might be. I'll certainly be doing that all day on Valentine's, and as well thinking about my mother. She— her birthday was Valentine's, and she's passed in 2013, but I'll be doing shoutouts to her as well. So I hope you all have a love-filled celebration. But I hope each of your days are full of love and happiness and joy, and somewhat regarding the conversation we're going to have today in regards to emotional intelligence. But we'll get to that in just a minute. I'm really excited. Next week, one of our popular guests, Katherine Carrigan, is back. Now I think she is a 10-time bestselling author. I— she started coming onto the show, I think, when she was a 7-time bestselling author. And, uh, I have her on at least once a year, if not twice, and each time she has a new book. Uh, so I'm very excited for her. It's called Reading the Soul. And we, you know, we've kind of been talking a lot about not necessarily reading this all, but reading your own emotions, reading your own self, your attitudes, your behaviors, your thoughts. In all of our conversations that have centered around everything from the power of habits, how to quiet the mind, even when it came to time management hacks, which really was focused on attention and priority. So I think we're going to have a fabulous conversation with Catherine next week. We will be recording it, obviously from a radio perspective, but also video recording it. So she'll be in studio and we'll get that out on our Shedding the Bits YouTube channel. So that's next week, noon Eastern time. Stay tuned. And if you have any questions, look her up. She is an intuitive healer, so she really does an awesome job of really tapping in, just from even having a conversation with you, even in a conversation over the phone with you, and she can sense— her intuition picks up on what might be causing that angst, that frustration, that bitch, as we call them here. So if you do want to speak to her directly, be sure to join us at noon Eastern Time next Tuesday live, and you'll be able to get a chance to speak to Katherine yourself. Some of our previous shows, last week we had our Ask Bernadette episode, which is on the first Tuesday of every month. It's your opportunity to ask questions, bring up a challenge that you're having, tell us a story, and if you need any tips, advice, sometimes tough love, that's what I'm here for. You can post them at any time on Facebook or Twitter or our Shedding the Bitch page. On both of those. You also will send them to me, majority of them, via LinkedIn. Also, you can certainly email me directly at BernadetteBoas@sheddingthebitch.com. I will respond to you immediately, or at least within an 8-hour cycle. At the same time, what we like to do is then bring them into the program on that first Tuesday of every month so we can dive into them even deeper. And you have an opportunity to join us, and you can call anytime into the studio, 1-818-572-2910, to speak to me directly. Now, last week's episode of Ask Bernadette addressed a few things. It addressed finding qualified candidates, so basically employees, and then how to keep them. So it's a typical HR or hiring manager, business owner, type of challenge and struggle and frustration that they have is finding those qualified candidates and then keeping them. So we talked about that. We talked about knowing if he is the one or she, but if you are in a relationship, maybe it's new, maybe it's been, you know, ongoing for a while, but yet you're just not feeling it. And it was funny, after this program one of my friends had over— had listened in on it. And so we spent the day at a rugby game the other day. A lot of fun. Go Rugby ATL! A lot of fun. And anyway, so we got into that whole conversation about relationships and how long do you stay, how long do you, you know, kind of keep with it if you're just not feeling it. If you're just not feeling it. Sometimes it takes time. And then I had mentioned this just a minute ago, but then one of our listeners had a question about how to quiet the mind. So those were some great questions. We provided some tips and advice, and that's our Ask Bernadette episode. We then had a— what appears to be a very popular episode and discussion around the power of habits. And how habits lend to your success, the power of habits. And then we also had one, like I had mentioned, time management hacks that really focused on also attention and priority. You can go and download any of those shows, take them with you, on blogtalkradio.com, sheddingthebitch.com, and then of course Apple Podcasts and any number of streaming services. You can find the Shedding the Bitch program. And we would love for you to do that, and we would also love for you to comment and give us feedback, whether that be on our Shedding the Bits Facebook or Twitter pages, as well you can send them directly to me, BernadetteBoas@sheddingthebits.com. But today we are talking emotional intelligence. Do you know what it is? Do you understand it? Because a lot of people do not, so I wouldn't blame you if you were hesitant to want to acknowledge that you don't understand it. And you're not really quite sure how it fits, whether that's in your everyday, whether that's with your team at work, and how does that relate to your goals and successes. A common, common, common misunderstanding of what emotional intelligence is, and/or a lack of understanding. So don't hesitate kind of reaching out. You can call in, 1-818-572-2910.

Did you have a question?

Or you can even chat with us. Go to blogtalkradio.com, find the show Shading the Bitch Radio, scroll down into this specific episode, and there's a chat room that you can also chat with us if you should have a question. Or maybe you missed Ask Bernadette and you have a question, so don't hesitate to, to prod us. Deborah's out there of Parker House Virtual Services and I, we both keep an eye on our chat room and our switchboard. All right, so we ground you each week in the topic of conversation that we're having. So today, basically on emotional intelligence, this is your rich question, and it's actually a good foundational question for everyone. What is it you want to know? Or yes, what is it you want to know about emotional intelligence? And you can add into that, what do you already know? And we're going to get into all of it so you do have a good understanding of not only what it is, but what are some of the lingos around it, what are some of the frameworks around it, and then how can you be using it in your— in your business, in your career, and even in your life. All right. Now, if you want to tweet or post with us, You can use hashtags or what we call rich tags, emotional intelligence, transformation, or #shedthebitch. Any of those hashtags, we'll keep an eye out for and get back, you know, relate with you and chat with you in regards to that. All right, we're going to take a quick break. I am feeling a little in my throat, so I'm going to grab some water very quickly. And when we get back, we're going to dive into this because there's a lot to cover in our our time together. So we'll be right back.

Shedding the Bits Radio is available for download anytime on Apple Podcasts, sheddingthebits.com, and lawtalkradio.com. Be sure to subscribe to the program for all of the updates and announcements of our guests and show topics. I want to thank our sponsors, North Georgia Tax Solutions, who offers a broad range of range of tax services for small to corporate size clients. Go to NGTaxSolutions.com to learn more. And Parker House Virtual Services, who provides virtual assistance and social media support for small to medium size businesses, including mine. Email Deborah at deborahparker.va@gmail.com. Would you like to reach our audience as a sponsor or advertiser? Email us at mediarelations@sheddingthebitch.com. Now let's get back to the show.

All right, welcome back everyone. We are talking emotional intelligence today, your rich question being, do you know it? Do you understand it? What is it you want to know about it? So let's start with the basics. I'm going back to even just the Wikipedia definition to kind of ground us. So they define it as the capability of individuals to recognize— keyword there— 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 and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one's goals. Now, of course, Shredding the Bitch is all around going inward. It's all around your self-awareness of just basically how you're talking to yourself, how you're talking to other people, you know, what your thoughts are, what your beliefs are, what your emotions are, and the impact that they have on not only everyone around you or everything around you, but all— more importantly, to yourself. And so EI, as they kind of coin it, emotional intelligence, EI really is that focus on emotions. It's a focus on, you know, how empathetic are you toward other people, and then that way, once you are, but it comes with a lot of self-awareness. Once you are, then that creates connection, that creates engagement. And I have to throw into this conversation, this topic became, it's always been very relevant and important to me, but it's really kind of picking up steam, not only trend in the business world, but in my practice over the last, I would say, 30 to 45 days, I've had numerous conversations with HR leaders. It's part of my reach out to them, but also their reach out to me. And when I basically, you know, ask them what are the challenges that you're having, what are the opportunities you're seeing for your people, it all comes down to connection. It all comes down to engagement. It all comes down to inclusion. Now, one of them even just this morning had mentioned that some of the feedback that they've received from their employees as to how to, you know, more so— excuse me— more so get that connection. That one of their crazy ideas, because the management asked, give us your ideas, and they're like, oh, can we have a beer keg? Can we have like an opportunity to socialize with one another? And so she went on to explain that, you know, that they were working on doing that. And I said, you realize they might have said a beer keg. What they were really saying is connection, is engagement, is an opportunity for you know, individuals to then form a group, to form a community, and to, you know, connect and relate to one another. So EI, emotional intelligence, you might hear it as EL, emotional leadership, or certainly we're going to talk about emotional quotient, EQ, and then emotional intelligence quotient, EIQ. And the world of acronyms today, the smaller the better, so most likely you hear EI and EQ. But let me give you some background in regards to where this all came from. So the term first appeared in the Communication of Emotional Meaning paper back in 1964. So it's been around for quite a while. But then there was a very popular book published in 1995 called Emotional Intelligence. It was written by author and science journalist Daniel Goleman, and because there is a lot of science behind it, and we're certainly not going there, but when you really think about what we as humans are, and people will say, well, we're all energy, we're all made up of atoms and molecules, that's all fun and good, but I like to get down to the fact that we're just all human, and humans are made up of emotions. We're made up of even more— our bitches. We're made up of our qualities and our traits and our values. We're made up of so many things that influence how either effective we are with one another or how detrimental or how much of a struggle we have when it comes to engaging with others, building relationships, pursuing what it is that we want. Influencing and leading, whether it's individual, you know, an individual or a team of people. It all comes down to— and that's all what Shedding the Bits is about— it all comes down to what is going on inside our, you know, inside our head, in our mind, in our heart, between our ears. And we have to tap into that first and because all of that has then gets projected out into the world, whether you want to believe it or not. That's what we're here to always talk about. Now, if you want to get pragmatic about it, if you want to kind of say, okay, that's all woo-woo and all fluffy, and but, you know, I just want to really understand, maybe even from a business perspective, the impact of this— well, according to the World Economic Forum, emotional intelligence ranked in the top 10 most in-demand skills necessary to thrive in 2020. So, going back to it was discovered in 1964, or at least it was coined, then this popular book, Emotional Intelligence, was published in 1995, and 25 years later, 10, yep, 25 years later, it's now considered one of the top 10 in-demand skills necessary to thrive. Now why? Well, we have this conversation a lot here in the community. The fact that we are not robots, even though, you know, especially if you come from a corporate world, many of the leaders and then it trickles down, just, you know, viewed employees as workhorses, as entities to get things done. They never were comfortable and they never thought it was relevant to tap into whether or not someone got up on the wrong side of the bed, had a really, you know, horrible situation going on at home, or maybe they had a wonderful situation going on at home, that, you know, maybe they got in a car accident on the way to work. So forth and so on. And therefore, they really needed to, you know, it's evolved to where managers and leaders, and actually another conversation I was having is every individual, every employee needs to be able to tap into their EI to really understand kind of where and how their own emotions impact everything that goes on around them. And I see it as not just wanting an employee, a manager, or a leader overseeing, managing, and delegating people. You know, companies want leaders who use their personal experiences, who tap into their triumphs and their failures. They tap into their highs and lows. They tap into their mistakes and their best practices. They tap into— their successes and failures in order to then relate and connect with their team members. And again, empathy is key here. You know, you have to walk in someone else's shoes in order to really understand how to then inspire them, motivate them, lift them up, develop them, advance them, so forth and so on. Now another interesting fact is, according to Geno's International, a leader— leading provider of EI assessments and development programs, they look at it as emotional intelligence is a set of skills that help us better perceive, understand, and manage emotions in ourselves and in others. Collectively, they help us make intelligent responses to and use of emotions. And these skills are as important as your intellect in determining success in work and in life. As important as your intellect. Something very much to keep in mind because, again, we're not robots, right? You know, that has been the history and the legacy of how things— how people operated in the workplace. Just make sure we get We hit those KPIs, we're doing the work, we're achieving our goals, and, you know, it's taken years for then and now leaders to recognize that no, it's not just the intellect and it's not just the amount of production that our individuals and teams create. It also has to do with their emotional quotient, as we'll talk about in a minute. This study also went on to say your capacity to understand your emotions, to be aware of them and how they impact the way you behave and relate to others, will improve your people skills and help you to ultimately be more satisfied and success— successful. Now we talk a lot about that here because it's just common sense. If you are looking inward, if you're really, you know, kind of wanting to learn about you and becoming self-aware of what makes you happy, what doesn't make you happy, what do you want, what don't I want, what drives you, what diminishes you, all of that information helps you become a more confident, a more energetic, a more determined, a more happy individual, and therefore that's just going to then translate into being a better employee, a better peer, a better friend, a better lover, a better parent, a better member of the community, so forth and so on. So now I want you to consider something else if you need to get grounded in this and look at it pragmatically. According to the World Economic Forum, that publication I was mentioning earlier, The other top skills, apart from emotional intelligence, that are required in 2020 to thrive and be successful, and I would say 2020 and beyond, they include complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, judgment and decision-making, service orientation, negotiation, and cognitive flexibility. Now if you kind of look at that total list, and it's 10 skills once you add emotional intelligence in there, if you really look over this list, which I will be, I'll make sure I put it out on our Shit in the Bitch blog page. You'll see that all of them, everything from service orientation to complex problem solving, all of them require your understanding the motivations, goals, or desires of others. Now, why and how? Well, you need to understand the motivations, goals, or desires of others if you want to, you know, create things. For other people, products and services. We'll talk about that in a minute. If you want to help solve problems that involve other people, if you want to obviously manage people, coordinate with others, have good judgment in decision-making, negotiation is key, key, key, key. Negotiation as far as, you know, working with someone else, you need to understand their motivations, goals, or desires. You also need to understand your own You need to go in and not only understand the other person, but you have to start with yourself and understand your own values, qualities, traits, biases, emotions, motivations, and goals. So all of these skills that they're saying are in the top, you know, the top 10 skills for, for being successful in business, all of them also require you really having a good foundation of self-awareness. And truth, as I speak about. And then, of course, you know, you need to relate and connect business decisions, problems, and solutions to the people and their desires, their goals, their, you know, their reasons for pursuing or working with you or for you. Now, we can get a little bit more pragmatic. When it comes to business, when you simply think about your— every business is in the business of creating products and services. You create products and services based on what you know to be your customer's pain points, what you know to be their wants and needs, what you know to be their likes and dislikes. Their joys and pain, the problems they're having, the obstacles they're trying to overcome, whatever the case might be. So business, without knowing it, has tapped into emotional intelligence for decades when it comes to servicing their client and creating products and services that customers and clients want. Now, I remember when I even started in technology consulting back in my late 20s, so we're going back a while. They actually, as much as they wanted to build something that someone else needed, they didn't necessarily put their feet into their desired customer's shoes and think about what's really driving them. Business, you know, decades ago, were focused more on what do we as a business and experts feel and believe that based on trend and forecast our consumers are going to want. Well, very quickly, you know, as I got engaged with this company, and I come at things from a very business/emotional perspective, and I started questioning saying, well, wait a minute. We're not considering what their needs are, what their pains are, what their wants and likes are. You know, we need to do that to really then ensure that we are building, creating, and delivering something that is going to be of great value, which can translate into a high price point. And so even I saw 25, 30 years ago, that transition from being more, I'm going to tell you what you want, to being more of, I need to understand what it is you need, and then I want to deliver on that. So, you probably easily relate to that when it comes to the business environment, you know, and the amount of money and investment companies make into uncovering them, focus groups, surveys, whatever the case might be, to kind of calculating and assessing and quantifying them, and then to actually create the product and service, test it, prove it out, and then deliver it. Now, all of that investment— or not all of it, but a great deal of investment that has always been kind of focused on the external, meaning the products and services to support the customer/client. Now companies are saying, well, wait a minute, we also need to bring that into really understanding our own people so we can ensure that we are not only attracting them, but we are retaining them, and then we are developing and growing and advancing them. One of the other conversations I had with an HR leader was all centered around Her biggest challenge is, especially in the technology area that she's in, is to retain her employees because there's a lot of competition. There's higher compensation, higher salaries available to people out there, and especially in her geographic area. So she spends every day trying to get creative innovative around what is needed in order for her to keep the people that she has and then attract new ones. So we had a, you know, a very creative, open-minded conversation about ideas that she could be leveraging in order to do that. One of those things that I mentioned to her, and I even mentioned that we were having this discussion today, is I said, you know, where does EI fit into all this? And for any leaders or managers listening, consider this: your employees want to know that you care about them. They want to connect with you. They want to relate with you. They want to be included. They want to be involved. They want to be able to contribute. And in order to do that, they say to themselves, you know, how do I get them to understand me and understand what motivates me and what inspires me and what drives me? And also, what are my turn-offs and what diminishes me? So adding an element of EI in the workplace is critical if you want to not only attract new hires into the business, but if you want to retain them. Now, more importantly, forget about even attracting and retaining. Think about it as what do you get when there are a bunch of robots running around your company? And some of those robots, without tapping in and caring, quite honestly, caring about how they come off, how they behave, how they dictate, how they fail to delegate, fail to lead, how they fail to tap into who their employees are and what drives them, what do you land up with? In most cases, you're landing up with toxic environments. You're landing up with bully bosses. Burned-out employees or actually disengaged employees that really don't care. They just want that paycheck. And the minute they have an opportunity for something new and something different, they then, you know, result in high turnover, poor acquisition, and low morale. So one of the conversations, again, that we had this morning was, you know, a lot of times employees do kind of go from one place to another place thinking that the grass is greener on the other side because there was a salary, you know, sweet hung out in front of them, and then they realized that no, they actually had it better where they were. But getting people back is so much harder, if not impossible, than to, you know, do what you need to do to actually keep employees. And if you are an employee, one of the out-of-the-box ideas that I had, not only for her, but I've used it with my clients over the last several years, is as opposed to focusing on making sure that the leadership team understands emotional intelligence and understands how to incorporate it and how to leverage it to motivate and inspire and move their teams. Well, stop, turn it on its head. Actually get your employees at the base educated, engaged, and kind of supporting an emotional intelligence foundation, and they will kind of push it upwards requiring that, if not demanding that, of their managers, leaders, and, you know, functional heads. So the tradition standard is trickle it down, and I found that companies have had great success if they are open-minded and if they get past the woo-woo and if they really are serious about wanting to be empathetic leaders, compassionate leaders, servant leaders with their teams and organizations. I've had them kind of focus it from the foundation, the ground up, and it's worked. It's worked for them. I did disclose to her this morning there was one company I worked with, they were just so big, it was like trying to turn the Titanic in a very small area. And so, you know, I understand that they continue to work towards that. So one, so Some will struggle, some will get it, and all I look for is attempting it, taking action on it. All right, when we get back, we're going to take a brief break. When we get back, we're going to talk about emotional quotient, or EQ, and how that relates to all of this. We'll be right back.

Shedding the Bitch Radio is available for download anytime on Apple Podcasts, sheddingthebits.com and blogtalkradio.com. Be sure to subscribe to the program for all of the updates and announcements of our guests and show topics. I want to thank our sponsors, North Georgia Tax Solutions, who offers a broad range of tax services for small to corporate size clients. Go to ngtaxsolutions.com to learn more. And Parker House Virtual Services, who provides virtual assistance and social media support for small to medium-sized businesses, including mine. Email deborah@deborahparker.va@gmail.com. Would you like to reach our audience as a sponsor or advertiser? Email us at mediarelations@sheddingthebitch.com. Now let's get back to the show.

All right, welcome back everyone. We are talking emotional intelligence. What do you want to know about it? What don't you understand about it? We're trying to help you kind of see the value, not only of it for your team or your business, but also yourself. And when I say business, I mean if you work for a a company and/or if you are the owner and the CEO of your own company. But it's emotional intelligence goes right into your relationships at home, right into your relationships with your friends, into your relationships with your partners, spouses, and community members. So really being able to kind of tap in and go even deeper in your own self-awareness to really pay attention to how you respond to emotions is key and is a huge success factor when it comes to building really great relationships and really being able to influence and motivate and inspire other people. Now, since we are talking business as well as your life, business loves measurements, loves KPIs, key performance indicators. And of course, you can't introduce a strategy or an imperative, as many of them will call it, as emotional intelligence without being able to say, okay, so how are we going to measure if we're being successful with this? And anything that has to do somewhat with the mind, you know, people tend to say, oh my gosh, it's it's impossible to measure that. It's impossible to measure the intangibles. And actually it's not. So the KPI, or how individuals and companies measure the effectiveness of emotional intelligence, is referred to as EQ, emotional quotient. And according to Forbes Coaches Council, they look at it at EQ, that is, of having 4 distinct characteristics. That they can measure. So whether they're looking at this from a team's perspective, an individual's perspective, or even an individual being an employee and an individual being a manager or leader. And I guess I should at some point, and I will make a note of it right here quite honestly, is you'll often hear me differentiate manager and leader, and I want— I'm going to explain why in a minute. I just caught that. So the 4 distinct characteristics of E2 is measuring self-awareness. So how aware is one, you know, in regards to how they respond to situations, how they respond to their emotions, how they respond to conflict, how they respond to challenge, how they respond to compliments, which ladies especially in the work environment, you know, it's— we also, we often will look at ourselves as if we shouldn't kind of pat ourselves on the back or we shouldn't accept compliments openly. We should be more humble. So emotional intelligence is really about how self-aware are you in regards to how you respond to all those different types of of situations. Then self-management is the other characteristic. Self-management is, okay, so how do you apply what you've learned about yourself back into your interactions and connections and engagements with other individuals? It's great to be self-aware. When I, you know, left corporate and started digging into, you know, why did I just get fired and, you know, why— did kind of my people turn on me, and I realized it was because I was such a nasty bitchy person. I had to kind of say to myself, okay, so, you know, this is what I'm becoming self-aware of, you know, that I was being curt and demeaning and aggressive. And forget about the fact that I was a perfectionist and some other things. But once I learned that and I decided, you know, what did I want and what did I not want within myself, the key to all that knowledge is then how do you apply that knowledge back into your life, into your relationships, into your work. So self-management is another characteristic of how people measure EQ. Now if you're thinking, okay, so we have self-awareness and self-management, which is the management of that awareness, how do you measure that? Well, just think performance reviews. Think of, you know, what is the feedback that you receive? What is the, you know, assessment scale rating that is often made in regards to your performance? Now it's not whether or not you've met your goals or you achieved your quantifiable KPIs. There's elements of that, but you also are asked about, you know, your leadership style, or you're asked about your performance, or your teaming, or your collaboration, communication on a scale of 1 to 5, that type of thing. So EQ just takes it to different levels in regards to, okay, assessing that, applying the output from that, And then how successful or how much of a struggle did one have in applying those learnings into their performance and behavior? All right, so we'll move on. The third characteristic that Forbes Coaches Council kind of incorporates into EQ, emotional quotient, is social awareness—how we perceive others' feelings in the context of their environment. So I mentioned, you know, at the top of this conversation that oftentimes in the past, and still it exists today, trust me, and I'm guilty of it at times when I'm all self-consumed with what's going on in my world, in my universe. Social awareness really kind of taps into how empathetic, how aware are you to other people's situation. So that person that, you know, you might be throwing out demands, commands to at work, and, and they're looking at you, you know, with either frustration, anger, maybe, uh, maybe sadness, or they're, you know, they've gone introverted on you, uh, as opposed to ignoring that. How good at you at tapping into You know, the fact that they might be having a really bad day or they might be having a great day. And those are often overlooked as well. It's like, "We don't care if you're happy or not. Move on." And yet, we need to kind of step back and really leverage all of that information that's coming at us from another person to really be able to inspire and motivate and move them, influence them. And guide and support them in what it is that you want from them. So social awareness, how you perceive others' feelings in the context of their environment. And then of course social management. Again, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, social management. How do you apply, now that you've realized that Joe might be dealing with a really bad family situation, Or Sally might be going through a divorce, or maybe, you know, she's getting married and/or having a baby. And how well are you at, once you understand that and you have that knowledge, apply that to how then you manage and support and lead them. So self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, social management. And again, it's just tapping in to really understanding another person, taking time, taking interest, and being present with that other person or group of people in order to inspire, motivate, and influence them forward. Okay, so if you were to think, now that we've discussed what emotional intelligence is and how it's measured, emotional quotient, You know, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most tapped in and 1 have no clue, this is the first time I'm ever hearing about it or hearing of it, how would you measure yourself? And again, that piece of knowledge right there opens up the doors as far as what you now can use to either learn let alone apply. But first, you have to, you know, you'll want to learn and educate yourself all the way to the point of, okay, am I applying it and am I utilizing it strategically as a tool and as a benefit really to myself and other people around me? All right, so what I want to discuss now is kind of what can you do specifically in order to leverage EI in your life and at home. And actually, we're going to take a break very quickly, and when we come back, we'll get into this discussion about what you can do to leverage emotional intelligence. We'll be right back.

Shedding the Bitch Radio is available for download anytime on Apple Podcasts, SheddingTheBits.com and LawTalkRadio.com. Be sure to subscribe to the program for all of the updates and announcements of our guests and show topics. I want to thank our sponsors, North Georgia Tax Solutions, who offers a broad range of tax services for small to corporate size clients. Go to NGTaxSolutions.com to learn more. And Parker House Virtual Services, who provides virtual assistance and social media support for small to medium-sized businesses, including mine. Email deborah@deborahparker.va@gmail.com. Would you like to reach our audience as a sponsor or advertiser? Email us at mediarelations@sheddingthebitch.com. Now let's get back to the show.

Welcome back everyone. We are talking emotional intelligence, emotional quotient, and now we want to get into how can you apply these and go about whether you're on the, you know, you're at a scale of 1 or you're at a scale of 10 of really understanding and applying EI in your life or in the workplace. So based on where you were, we asked right before before we went on to break, how you would rate yourself in your understanding and application of emotional intelligence. Are you a 1 where you have no clue, or maybe you're more toward the 10 where you understand it and you apply it? So we're going to cover the gamut. You begin with researching, studying, and getting training on it. If it's something that you really want to understand for yourself, even before your team, then simply go and you can even go look for that book, you know, that was published back in 1995. And let me find it for you. It's simply called Emotional Intelligence. It's by Daniel Goleman, G-O-L-E-M-A-N. And that could be a great place to start, but there could be, you know, a more relevant more to-date books and viewpoints out there. And it could be in a book. It could be a blog post. It could be an article. It could be a video, whatever the case might be. Just get yourself educated and really understanding what it is and how it would benefit you first. And then you could work into, okay, now how do I use this with other people? And that could be with your team. What you also want to do, and which is the foundation of everything here in the Shedden DeBitch community, is learn about yourself first. Really understand not only what EI is, but, you know, who am I, and, you know, what do I want and what do I not want. But I want to give you different questions because we definitely have a lot of conversations about you becoming more self-aware and tapping into who you truly are. So the different questions, they're, you know, kind of part of the entire assessment, I'll call it, of your being. But you could be asking yourself, what motivates and inspires you? If you want to be empathetic and compassionate, if you want to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, Well, the way to do that is to first realize that if you understood what inspires and motivates you, you can then become empathetic to the fact that you want to understand that for someone else as well. Because they obviously have motivations and goals and dreams, and yet they also have things that they don't want in their life and things that, you know, cause them cause them havoc or challenge. So what motivates and inspires you? What provokes you to want to take on new challenges? So why that question is, I find to be very relevant, is other people, if you really are, if you are a manager or a leader of some sort in your place of business, The number one way to keep your people happy, to keep your people hired, or not even hired, retained, is to ensure that they're being challenged, is to be sure they're being included and they're contributing and they feel ownership to what it is that is being worked on. So what provokes you to want to take on new challenges? What diminishes or drains you? I mentioned that. What diminishes or drains you? Now it's not to have the same answer as somebody else, but it's just to kind of gain that empathetic soul to say, if these are things that trigger me— good, bad, or indifferent— then obviously if I want to connect and relate to other people in order to inspire, motivate, and influence them, then I need to be able to understand what diminishes or drains them. What do you need other people to understand about you. So it's a two-way street, right? You first, you know, are sitting there learning about yourself, and you're probably, even before you recognize that you're wanting to learn about yourself, you still might be frustrated at work, bored, overwhelmed, just kind of over it. And it could be because of the fact that the other person or persons that you're working with or who's managing you, really, they don't understand you. They don't know who you are. So first try to understand what you need from those other people. And I could get tactical about saying that, you know, then when it comes to performance reviews or just conversations at any time of the year with your team and your managers, you should be having a conversation about how you need to be motivated, inspired, engaged, included, and what doesn't work in regards to motivating you. And then ultimately, especially as it relates to EI, ultimately if you really want to understand EI and how it can work for you and for others, is to understand how you do respond to emotions. We talked about that earlier as a key driver. To the emotional quotient measurement is really tapping in and being self-aware, knowing how you apply that self-awareness, knowing how, how aware you are to how others react and respond to their emotions in their environments, and then how to manage that, how to apply it. So you first also need to understand how you respond to emotions. This is an area I had no desire to understand and to learn and to become aware of, because once I did, it became really ugly for me. When I really sat down and, and kind of said to myself, okay, what motivates and inspires me? What drains me? You know, what do I need from other people? And then, and then ultimately, how do I respond to emotions? And I I think about this question daily. You know, when I get all excited, overly excited, or I get really pissed off, you know, I have to kind of like become very self-aware in the now and say to myself, how am I responding to this emotion that's coming up? You know, it's based on thought, it's based on feelings. How am I responding to it, and is it effective? Is it going to get me what I want? Not selfishly, but, you know, is it going to be a benefit not only to other people but to myself? So understanding that is key for you. And then, you know, consider your own response when someone, you know, kind of gets you and they are on the same page as you, or they dismiss you. Maybe they avoid or ignore you. Maybe they do fail to connect or relate to you. If you get overlooked at work, if you get passed up, if you don't get what you want— maybe you made a big case for something and you, you know, you sat there in front of someone or a group of people and, you know, crickets. How did that make you feel? Because now, after you have all this understanding about yourself and you're tapped into your own emotional intelligence/quotient— excuse me— then you can say, okay, how can I use all this information? Remember, you have to be able to apply it. Self-awareness management and social management is now I need to apply what I've just learned about myself toward other people. Walk in their shoes, become empathetic to what it is that they're feeling and what they're dealing with and what environment you know, impact is having on them when they show up at work or when they're in the middle of a crisis or when they're achieving something. If you can tap into their emotions and their responses and their desires, then you can ultimately connect and relate— relate to them. Now, a lot of this can be applied at work or at home. In, you know, at home in your life. There's really no difference between those two situations. It just becomes a little bit more tactical, I guess, when you go to work and apply it in the workplace. You know, you want it to kind of decide that yes, this is an imperative, this is a tool that I can use in order to support my team, in order to engage and interact with others more effectively, in order to be a better leader. In order to be more socially aware and self-aware. It can lead into you then saying, okay, I want to take all of this and I want to create or identify tools and strategies that I can be using with my teams, with my leaders, with my peers, with my employees on a day-in, day-out basis. But it's going to take practice. You know, tapping in and really becoming self-aware and knowing how your emotions, you know, are controlled and managed, you know, it doesn't just happen and then everything is beautiful. It takes practice. It takes day-in, day-out focus on it. Not to where you're overwhelmed or you're in your own head, but you just want to always kind of step back and say, as you're engaging with other people or wanting to engage with other people, it doesn't mean it's It doesn't matter if you're across the table at a dinner or you're on a stage presenting to a group of people. You still want connection. You still need to kind of pull them in and really understand what is it that they need from you in order for them— for them, you to be able to deliver it. Now, very practically, you can certainly, if you're a manager or a leader, you can use your performance reviews Use lunch and learns, use town hall meetings, use emails, newsletters, surveys, contests, all kinds of things to create that connection, to elevate that understanding between yourself and others. Pragmatically, very simply, and practically at work. You know, and in your own life, you can take all of that and say, okay, so how do I need to use this with my, loved ones, with my friends, with my community members. Again, it's just simply being able to tap into the other person's environment and what they might be dealing with. Now I had mentioned, and I want to do it very quickly before time runs out, I had mentioned that I wanted to give you my definition of manager and leader, and it comes down to this. There are a lot of managers out there, people, whether it's one person or 100 people that they oversee, they manage, they delegate, they dictate, whatever the case might be. There's a big difference between them and leaders, leaders who really lead with EI. They lead with influence. They lead with a servant mentality. They lead effectively to where they inspire, motivate, and influence others to follow them. And I see them drastically different than just people who have a title and/or an organization structure of, you know, individuals that they happen to have reporting to them. Anybody's goal would be to then, you know, go from being a manager to a true leader. And I don't care if you're managing 1 person or 1,000 people. There's a great difference between those 2. So I wanted to be sure to get that in. So I hope, and I would love to hear your experiences in learning and applying EI into your world at work or at home. And I'll look forward to having you right back here next Tuesday at noon Eastern time for a great discussion on reading your soul with Katherine Kerrigan. Have a great, prosperous week, everybody. See ya, talk to you next week.

Thank you for listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. Join Bernadette every Tuesday Tuesday at noon Eastern as she helps you shift your bitches to riches. And the dialogue is always going on at sheddingthebitch.com. See you next week.