Chad Silverstein explains why leaders need to stay calm and self-aware instead of reacting to every wave around them. A thermostat sets the temperature rather than a thermometer that just reads it. Catch your triggers before they catch you.
Chapters
Motions are so crazy. I always love the example. I know I've said it before, about when you have crazy stuff going on. You want to be, like, underneath, in the water, in the ocean, while the waves are crashing above you. You're cool and calm. It doesn't matter if it's cool and calm up there or if there's a tsunami. You're the same and you're even keel. You'll be able to kind of just maintain, absorb whatever it is that you're being hit with. It could be an employee, it could be a client, it could be something family, it could be. Who knows, it could be anything. And we all have them. And I think being able to, like, have some of that emotional intelligence and to be able to process in real time, hard stuff, show emotion through good stuff, and, you know, let yourself be moved and don't try to suppress the fact that you have strong emotions. I think people tend to, you know, use the comment, you know, I got a lot going on, but I leave, I leave it at the door. I don't bring it to work. And I'm thinking, really, it's just the funniest comment. It's so dumb to say that, like, you have something going on in your life, it's really hard, and then you're going to get to your desk and you're able just to, like, stop thinking about it. Like, then it must not be that meaningful. You know, we're human beings and emotion, emotions move us. They're not designed to suppress. But you have to just be aware. And that's why I think emotional intelligence is one of the biggest essentials in the playbook, because you have to have the awareness of what you have going on and where you are in your life so that you can, you know, tread water carefully. And if that means stay the path and keep yourself focused, fine. If that means you need to take a day off and take a day off. But you have to, you have to have some awareness of that and to be able to have your own thermometer, to know what triggers you to have preloaded responses. But to know when you've crossed into that level of, like, chaos, anger, you got to be able to catch it and pull yourself back. Hopefully you have people that will do that and not embarrass you. But sometimes you got to be called out on that. But it's much better for the leader to work on themselves and to kind of see it before it happens so that they can control it. And that's, that's a powerful skill. And not one that most people are really good, good at just having. You have to build it.
