A short spoken piece (YouTube video/transcript) by Chad Silverstein about emotional intelligence as one of the 12 Essentials for personal excellence. It emphasizes caring and empathy, self-awareness of emotional triggers, pausing before reacting (sleep on it), seeking feedback and partners to surface blind spots, and practicing emotion management in leadership and culture-building.
Chapters
Emotional intelligence is one of the core essentials in our 12 Essentials for Personal excellence at Built to Lead. It's a hard thing to learn how to get really good at being more emotionally intelligent. But there are things that you can do. And I think this day in the book kind of gives you a little bit of the nuggets that you can kind of take and run with if you want. And I think, number four, I agree, it's the number one key thing is to care. To care deeply about the people that you're working with and to have a level of empathy for the other people around you and not necessarily feeling the pain to the extent that you feel it, like they feel it when they're experiencing pain. But there is something to be said about being able to try to put yourself in other people's shoes so that you can emotionally be there for them. A lot of people think that it's not their role. They shouldn't have to be that way at work. And, you know, I think a lot of that has to do with timing. And I think if you want to build an incredible culture and have people who have trust and you have people who are dependent upon each other for their performance, then you should care and you should care about things that maybe, you know, most people will look and turn their nose on, but, you know, at the end of the day, day, having that awareness and number one, and knowing what triggers you, you know, there is something to be said about being able to feel your emotions. You can feel it, but you have to pay attention. You have to know that when someone, you know, kind of does something that kind of hits your justice thread, right? Someone says something, you pick up on some sabotage, someone talk behind your back, you catch wind of something, and people love to gossip. And so you catch wind. And your reaction to that, you immediately, if you pay attention, your body just change. And unfortunately, when people make decisions, when this happens, they're doing it based on emotions. And when you make decisions based on being on high because you're pissed off or because you're angry, it's almost never going to go as good as you would want it to when you look back at it. So there is definitely something to be said about not reacting in the moment, taking time to practice your breathing, and being able to sleep on it and wait until the next day to respond. One of the most powerful things that I've ever done, and it saved me so much pain, was whenever I got really, really upset about whatever it is that I found out about, and I took the time to sleep on it, when I spoke to someone else about it. And they helped me see it from a different perspective. I cannot tell you how many times my mindset just flipped because the way I was thinking about it was so based on me being upset. My emotions were carrying this thought. And I. And I think it's important to have people around you that can help you see things that you can't see. These are what we call our blind spots. And part of being really, really solid as a leader is having a level of emotional intelligence that doesn't just solely based everything based on how you react to everything. It's being able to partner. And this is why we say together we transform. It's partnering with other people that care about you enough to help you through emotional times. When you're pissed off, when someone screws you over, when you got passed up for a promotion, when a client fired you for the wrong reason, whatever the case is, you know, being able to control your emotions, see things from a different perspective, calmly react, respond, and sometimes do nothing. There's real power in being able to like master the skill. And it's definitely a skill that has to be learned and practiced. So reread this day, day 101 and judge where you're at. How do you show up? And if you don't know how you show up, ask people for feedback. Ask people to give you a little bit of feedback that is going to make you better when things are tough, how they see you respond and when you're stressed. Well, what do they see from you? How do they read your body language? You know, chances are there's a, there's a good chance you, you're not aware of it. And sometimes you need a builder or a teammate or a loved one to be able to remind you.
