Build Your Career with 5 Keys of Emotional Intelligence – Caroline Stokes with Dave Asprey : 855

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's episode is about EQ emotional intelligence. And our guest is Caroline Stokes, who creates emotionally intelligent companies. And she's done this as a certified EQ 2.0 practitioner and and CEO of a company here in Canada called Forward. And she wrote a book called Elephants Before Unicorns. Emotionally intelligent HR strategies to save your company. And she works as a leadership coach. The reason that I've asked her to come on today is because you most likely aren't running a company, although there are a lot of entrepreneurs who listen to the show. But you work in a company, and EQ is a skill that all of us are working on because we're in the middle of a time when we're in a state of chronic fear, at least watch the news which suppresses eq. So I'm doing this because I want you guys, whether it's about your home life or your work life, to know about EQ and know how to raise eq. Caroline, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm absolutely delighted to buy a hack some time with you.

You don't sound Canadian. Where are you from?

Well, I am Canadian. I have citizenship. I have paperwork to prove it, but I am English, but I've lived all around the world, so I've got weird accent.

I am also joining you as a Canadian citizen at some point, hopefully this year, early next year. My papers are in. I'm finally going to be a dual citizen instead of an American with a Canadian permanent residency.

Congratulations. It's a great feeling. Nothing beats it.

It sure is. Canadians are just nice. At least that's what I keep telling them. Is that a low EQ thing for me to say?

I think there's a certain amount of straightforward talking there, which. Nice. It's a nice thing to do. Yes.

Now, speaking of eq, can you define eq? Emotional intelligence seems a little bit mushy. In fact, it's been criticized as being a little bit mushy in hard science breasts. So what is it?

To me, it's our operating system, our emotional operating system. We know what happens if we get really angry. What happens when we get really angry and we make a decision on the spot? We often regret it a lot later. For example, that's impulse control. If we have anger issues and we make those decisions too quickly, we end up being in a difficult situation that can take a very long time to get out of. So even though emotions, because there's been decades and decades of. Of our careers and even before that, being so negative about emotions and people being told to leave their emotions at home and not to bring them into work and to do your job. We're not in factories, in factory mills, do wool factories or cotton factories, you know, from the 1920s or whenever they had those cotton factories anymore. You have to bring your emotions to work. You can actually use your emotions to your advantage. But as we know, during COVID where those emotions are pretty much at full tilt all the time since March. And it's been very, very hard for people to be able to. To deal with all of those emotions to the point where 49%. I read just this week, and I can't credit the source, but 49% of workers are wanting to quit their jobs. They're just. People are exhausted from having to deal with everything that they're having to deal with. Now we've got this whole blurring of the lines where we have our work for people who used to work offices are now working from home, and they're having to juggle the kids or they're having to juggle the husband or the wife, or they've got all of these challenges now, especially when an organization isn't able to do the nine to five routine. Because if you're an international company, you're wanting to have meetings at all time zones. So the pressure there, the stress levels are through the roof. And people are saying, hey, you need to be flexible about this. And it's all, well, yeah, I am flexible, but if everybody else isn't flexible with me at the same time, it's going to be really difficult. So it just means that everyone's nerves, afraid, they are exhausted, they're wanting to quit their jobs. They really are just burned out. And a lot of the pandemic burnout that we're experiencing right now is because we've had to be too flexible. If you think about schools, one minute, oh, yes, we're all going back next minute. Literally within days, they'll say, no, we're not. And, you know, then there's all of these concerns, and it's changing minute by minute still. Well, week by week. It was minute by minute back in March, as it went through to June. But now it's a situation whereby we're over it. We've got our second wave coming, and it's like, okay, time out, time out. I'm done, I quit. I'm going to do something else and maybe sell my house, downsize, do something else. Because it is just too much. And that's about stress tolerance, which is not airy fairy. If we think about what you were just saying, emotions are a bit soft and people think about soft skills. It's hard right now, and that it takes. It's emotionally exhausting. And sometimes we don't have time for other things because we just. We're just overwhelmed. Very, very hard.

It's interesting you said stress reduction. It made me think about measuring my heart rate variability and reminded me I had to recharge my OURA ring, which measures my heart rate variability all night long. So I can see how stressed my body is, even if I don't want to acknowledge that, which is one of the measures I use for my own resilience. And if people are stressed like you're talking about, it lowers the energy they have available to control their emotions. But here's a question for you. If I'm sitting in a board meeting and someone says something that makes me want to punch them, am I high eq? By the way, I'm a peaceful guy. I actually don't have any of that going on anymore. I didn't always used to be like, I am you. But if I have the power to restrain my impulse and smile and politely nod, even though in the back of my mind I'm still like, you're a bad man, or whatever stuff, and I'm kind of paraphrasing for my entire career, you know, nothing specific. But if that happens in my high eq, if I can just like, tell my, my inner voice to not become my outer voice, is that enough? Or is there a different level of EQ that's required?

There's lots. There's, there's, there's something like 15 components to it. So here, here, you just talked about impulse control. You did not hit that. Bravo.

Although I've never hit anyone in a meeting, in case people are like, dave's a violent guy. I'm not.

We're just using it as an, as an example, and that's absolutely great. But you would have made the decision not to hit him because from a problem solving perspective, you'd have gone, okay, if I hit him, I'll probably be fired. There'll be lots of repercussions there, and you would know not to do that. And chances are you would have had great reality testing there. Impulse control. So your decision making composite would have been spot on. Bravo. You would have also then probably thought about, okay, you managed your stress in that particular time. So instead of barking out at this person or throwing him a punch. I'm hoping that with your strong sense of self regard and knowing where you wanted to go in the world with regards to self actualization and with your own emotional self awareness. I love the way you just talked about resilience and how you're, you know, tracking yourself at night to know, you know, what, what, what you need to tweak. It's exactly the same thing with emotional self awareness. If you know that you're about to just, you know, have steam coming out of your ears, you're able to then use the powers of self expression. So you're looking at emotional expression, assertiveness and independence. So let's say you are independent of this person that is maybe saying something that is irrational or untrue or perhaps they're, I don't know, they're saying something that is just plain wrong. Let's just use that term you as a, let's say a strong minded person that is willfully aware of all of the things that are happening in the world, you're going to go and speak up with great emotional understanding and be able to say, okay John, you know what, I really appreciate what you said here, but here there's another angle that I think we should all really think about and that's going to be a much more influential way to be able to ensure that you're communicating, let's say in the meeting what is happening. And there I just touched on empathy for example, because that person may actually think that what they're saying is true. So instead of like punching him or doing whatever or putting him down, you're thinking about the greater good. So we're then looking at the interpersonal, we're looking at the social responsibility aspect. It's like, okay, well we have a goal to meet here. We've got to reach our know, month end figures or we've got to create this product to save the planet or we've got to save this, this person that's, you know, that we've got cut open on the surgeon's table, whatever it is, where, but whereby you're able to say, you know, I think we need to actually look at this in a different way. And that I would say is the, is the emotionally intelligent person there that is able to do that without, you know, pretending it hasn't happened and just ignoring it and then maybe going behind their back or you're the advocate instead of the bad guy or the person that didn't speak up for the environment of those people.

Let's talk about in an article you recently wrote and in your book you talk about five categories of emotional intelligence. I want you to list those for us so that we understand it and then let's get into what we can do, whether or not we're in leadership to be more high eq. But what are the five categories?

Okay, so I brief, I mentioned that actually in that entire scenario there, it's self perception, self expression, stress management, decision making and interpersonal skills. And that is the definition. It covers your well being. It's your social and emotional functioning and they just like your aura ring, which I think is so great that you brought that up because I can completely get what you're saying. If you have one of these, you're able to see, you're able to track, oh, I didn't do any movement today. Therefore I now know why I'm really grumpy and why I'm not going to sleep well tonight probably, you know, and all of these different things, we're so highly sophisticated now. We have, we have the ability to, to access all of these amazing pieces of technology from Silicon Valley and China. So we're able to do that.

But then I love how you threw China in there. Yeah, that's actually where it's all made.

They're doing some phenomenal things. So I'm expecting the next big change will be China where we're just going to be very surprised there, there's just going to be a dynamic switch and it will just hit us between the eyes. So stress management, self perception, self expression, decision making and interpersonal. So what I'd like to do, and if this is okay with you, I'd like to kind of, because I gave you an example of what if you were in a meeting and you were about to hit someone, that is maybe an example of what it might be like in an office environment, which is very rare.

Now that's the worst, like the worst extreme of not having EQ I can think of. But how would I know? Okay, there's five of these things. Maybe I suck at one of the five, but I don't know it because I mean, how would I know? How would anyone know?

Yeah, well, you can take a, take an assessment that that's a really good way to find out. But the thing is, and this is where I need to help everybody out, is that think about the worst person on the planet. Just for a second, just imagine the worst person on the planet. You know, it could be in a movie, could be in real life, even be a relative, could be A relative, you're going to say that person has. No, no. And that's not true. Everybody has emotional intelligence. You can throw anybody this assessment and they will do well in some areas and not do well in other areas. And the point is, is that supposing they have great self perception, so they have great self regard. They, you know, were always doing well at school, always achieving great things. And then self actualization, they know, they know their why. They are able to work with companies that are aligned with their why or, and, and then you've got emotional self awareness which know when things are going bad, you know when things are going well and you're able to verbalize that. So when you look at somebody, somebody with self perception, let's say during COVID times, it's a tough time. It's a tough, tough time. So you might look at that right now with somebody and their EQ will have probably dropped by about 10 points from pre Covid just because of the specific.

How many points in total does it go up to? 100, like IQ?

It's. No, not quite. It goes up to 130, 135, I can't remember. And it's super rare to find anybody that like, I haven't come across anybody that hits all of the bars at maximum warp speed or anything like that. You see a really interesting fluctuation and typically when people read it, they'll go, oh, I'm not sure I see that about myself. And they'll then show it to their partner and their partner said, oh yeah, this is, is completely you.

Those things are kind of designed to be hidden from our own awareness. Like those are all unconscious and subconscious behaviors. Right. And it's only if you have control mechanisms, which is I think one of those five. But the rest of the stuff, it should be invisible if your systems are working, right?

If your systems are working, ideally, you need to know that you've got those superpowers in some ways or people will have told you. For example, I was talking with somebody in the UK just the other day and she said, oh, I was interviewing and they said I'm a great servant leader. And she said I'd never heard of that before. And this is a woman in her mid-40s and it's like, yes, all of the things that you read from coaches, leadership coaches, all of the millions of books that are out there, it all talks pretty much about the same thing, which is servant leadership, how you are able to coach other people to do their best things. And that also means that you have to understand yourself as well, which is a lifelong thing to do. We know how hard that is and sometimes we don't like it. And it takes a long time to get out of those habits or a long time to be able to make those changes, as I'm sure, you know, going to the gym, you know, how long does it take to build up that muscle or losing that weight from Thanksgiving or Christmas, so on and so on. These things take time and you have to work on it as often as possible, which requires a lot of so much self reflection so that you're able to understand what's going on.

I've worked on this part in particular because I'm a former network engineer from Silicon valley who weighed 300 pounds and had Asperger's syndrome. So that makes you probably less strong on the EQ spectrum. And fortunately I hacked the biology and neurology of my brain so that I'm not wired the way I used to be. But there's some stuff that's probably easy for some people that I had to actually focus really deeply on internally and modify my behavior patterns and just my awareness and eventually change the neural pathways in my brain so that I'm. It's more automatic. It's been a little bit of work and involves starting a neuroscience company, but so I'm very interested in eq, but it's always been really hard for me to know, okay, am I doing it in this senior leadership meeting or whatever. And generally people say yes, but because I'm CEO, they're going to say yes anyway. Because people always tell you what you want to hear when you're the top dog. So how do people, whether you're the lead parent in a family or you're in a leadership role, even on a team or something, how do you know if you're actually doing it versus people are just telling you you're doing it to be polite?

Love that question. And person that covered it really well. And I cover her in my book. Her name is Kim Scott and I don't know if you've heard of her. She wrote a book called Radical Candor. And it's like number two worth number three in Amazon right now, which is not a surprise because clearly during COVID we need that. We need to really speak with candor. But the radical candor is not about just beating people up and saying you're lousy. It's about really coming at it from an attitude of care. And what I would encourage is, you know, as a CEO, you bring forth that radical candor to your organization, to the point where I think when she was at Google or Apple, she was in both of those companies. She. When she found out from Sheryl Sandberg. Yes, she was at Google, she found out from Sheryl Sandberg that she had this thing that she would be doing, which was she'd be going. And Sheryl Sandberg said to her, you're losing credibility because you're umming and ahhing and things like that. So she made a decision that she would bring her entire team to this change that she wanted to make and said, okay, I've just found out about this. I didn't realize that it was a thing. If I'm doing it, can you please flick a rubber band to me so I know that I'm doing it?

That'll work.

And it apparently worked. So it's one of those things where you need to bring everybody on board with you to create that sense. So that when the CEO has received data, first of all, the CEO has to declare, I want to make this change with myself. So that they can see that it's happening. So that when the CEO says, thanks so much for telling me that I just messed up, then, you know, let's say two days later, because the CEO forgot, because habits are hard to break, they then know that it is safe enough to be able to do that and that you've got this wonderful virtuous loop happening. So you kind of have to. It does start from the top. It's very rare that it can happen from the ground up or from below, up, upwards, because everyone's scared of the boss. Everyone's scared of the boss. It's just the annoying thing. They don't want to jeopardize their future or their current status. And so it has to be modeled from the very top and encouraged and coached and supported and reiterated and repeated and repeated and repeated until nobody even notices that there's any other way.

All right, so say you're managing a team and you notice that one member on your team has that problem with public speaking where they, um. And, uh, all the time, which does make people think you're dumb, even if you're super smart. And it's a poor habit. It's one I trained away from myself. I certainly used to have it. And now you don't want to be criticizing the person they're under enough stress from COVID and working from home and interruptions from kids and all the stuff that we're all dealing with. So how do you go about telling this person, if you're their boss, that you have a serious problem without making them, oh my God, you know, my boss thinks I'm a bad person. All this stuff that runs through people's heads, what's the trick?

Yeah, well, first of all, if this is the first time that the boss is ever having that conversation, I think that's that. There's the error right there. There needs to be regular check ins meetings whereby people are saying, okay, this is what I want to develop. This is how I want to be able to move forward. Can you give me some feedback on how I can move forward? So there needs to be that reciprocal open feedback loop happening. But let's just say that doesn't happen. So in this situation it is not happening. They're in Covid, you can see that the person is stressed out. They're, you know, juggling 10 children, the house is falling down, there's an earthquake, there's hurricanes and this person is umming and ahhing. For a major, major presentation. You then speak to the person and say, I know that you've got your 10 kids. It must be really hard. You've got to lead with empathy. I know how hard it is for you. You've got hurricanes coming in, you're battening down the hatches, you know, boarding up the windows. I know how hard it is for you. I just can I. And then you ask permission, you say, can I give you some advice on your presentation? And that's all you're doing, you're asking and you're then waiting quietly for the person, the recipient that you want to give that feedback to for them to say, yeah, sure, I'd love that. And then you say, okay, now I've noticed a few times that you've got this little bit of a habit where you're umming and arring and I know that when I do it. No, just like you just said, you said you had to train yourself out of it. Everyone ummed an art in their life and we all had to get that feedback. So it's just going to be a similar kind of things, like, you know, this is what happened with me. And then someone told me it's a bit like telling someone that they had spinach in their teeth. I'm just want to give you this guidance about umming and ahhing and what I the advice I want to give you is instead of umming and ahhing, just look into the distance peacefully and close your mouth for just that second and have a dramatic pause. Try that out a few times and off you go. So you kind of go in there with empathy. The person's having a tough, tough time during COVID You're then asking for permission to provide feedback. You're waiting for the person to say yes because they have to cognitively go through that loop of yeah, I do. It's not like you're going to a trainer, like the gym, and you're waiting for them to just pinpoint all of these things, you know, 100 miles an hour. You have to seek permission and you have to wait until that person accepts. And if they say, oh, I'm a little bit nervous about you saying, don't worry, I'm looking after you here. This is something that's going to help you in the long term. And then from that particular moment, you then give them the information. You might put a little story, anecdotal story there and give them the thing and then provide them with a little bit of a solution so that they can walk away with something.

Empathy, permission, getting a yes, and then.

Coaching, a little bit of a coaching, but with the front end of a story and just see how they go. And then when you see them do that presentation and they're not umming and ahhing, you can go, you can say right at the very end or, you know, email them or give them a call or a text message and say, hey, loved what you did there. Loved the dramatic pauses. It put tension into the situation. So you're encouraging them and you're helping them cement that new neuron from fear to encouragement and off they go.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And I can think of times when it's worked. I was thinking about doing something in my company and I want you to tell me if this is a high EQ likely to succeed strategy or a bad strategy. When I say my company, I actually have five companies and I'm not talking about bulletproof. I have a leadership team there. So I'm chairman and founder, and I'm not operating that. But in my other set of companies that run the blog and the podcast and the truedark glasses and neuroscience and all that. One of the cultural things I'm working on is not using weasel words. And these are words that let us get out of things like, oh, yeah, we need to do that. Doesn't mean you're going to do it and you actually don't need to do it. You're either going to do it or you're not going to do it. Those are the two realities. Or we should do that or I'm going to think about that. The words that kind of set something that could be actionable and set it aside. Now, I do this sometimes. My kids have trained most of it out of me because I trained it out of them. But I was thinking about saying, all right, guys, here's the deal. When any of us uses a weasel word, you're going to put a dollar in the employee cookie jar, the virtual one. But when I use it, I'm going to put $25.

Nice.

Now, I don't want it to be anything that's economically burdensome. I feel like most people, if it's a dollar or two that goes either to charity or towards some kind of good virtual experience for us, I'll. That's going to be within reason. So it's not harmful. But is that a good move or is that a bad move? Like, break it down from an EQ lens? What should I do differently or better?

I think that's a really. That is a really nice. Well, first of all, I love it. I think it's a really nice idea. Because as you identified, weasel words really don't get you anywhere. They're not definite. I think the only aspect I have about banning it is that you're not gonna like this. I'm just frontloading you here, which is that sometimes when people will say could, it then gives other people the opportunity. It's a bit like, well, could isn't.

A weasel word that would say like. Like it's an option. But we say should. Now you've got judgment on it. So I tell you, don't say we should. We could do it. And either we are or we aren't. Right? So could I would be okay with. So that one we don't have to take.

So it's the shoulds and the would.

The shoulds, the needs and the can't and the have tos. All of those are untrue. In business, there's nothing you have to do. You can go out of business if you don't do it right.

So I love the idea that you've identified the weasel words. What I would say, and I'm not going to break it down, I'm just going to jump to it and then I'm going to break it down, if that's okay with you, which is that putting a fine on it instead of them showing how their coulds and woulds, no woulds and shoulds and can'ts actually impact their ability to find solutions. So this is what I would suggest, is that the moment they say can't, would, should. They then have to announce it on email to everyone instead, which is, I said public humiliation. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is no, no, no. So I, I, I just said should. And here's my, here's my loop here. I said should when I realized that I have this past issue from thinking that we should do this. And now I have decided have a conversation with X, Y and Z to make that happen. If everybody is involved in that whole process, then it's instead of the money because that's it. It's like oh, I just did that. They're not actually learning from it and the other people aren't learning from it as well. So they can help each other along. Otherwise there's going to be a situation where there's going to be a bit of competitiveness, there's going to be a bit of irritation, frustration or they're not going to get it, but then everyone can coach each other to do it. So if we look at it from a self perception perspective, I'm now going to break it down. Are you ready?

Yep.

Okay. So from a self perception, if someone's self regard is pretty low on this already, they're going to be able to escape by just putting money in there. They're not going to care. But you're going to be able to turn it around where their self regard is going to increase. If you give them that learning experience and others coach them and say yeah, great job. And then from a self actualization perspective, they are learning, they are growing, they're becoming a better person for taking ownership on particular things. Emotional self awareness, this is actually critical because if they say it in the moment and then the other person catches them and then they have to say so then coach them on that at that moment. You just said can't. I now need to have a one minute coaching session with you and turn on.

You just said need right there. So you used one too.

So bad, so bad.

I'm just messing with you.

Thank you. So when you have that kind of conversation they are then able to elevate themselves into an action, into self reflection and action to identify what was blocking them. And then they can say I just had this great win. Or you could get the other person to say hey, I just had a chat with John and this was when he said can't and he just turned it into this. And everyone can then do that.

You build a win.

Yeah, yeah. So that's just on self perception which if you think about it, if we're not feeling good about ourselves and we're not feeling good about what we're doing and we're not growing from it and we're not able to check in. I mean, that's just like the most fundamental thing. And then I can go into self expression, which is emotional self expression. It means people will be able to find the solutions really, really quickly. They're not harboring, you know, some kind of gray, ugly, like annoyance that they just had to put, you know, a dollar in there in the cookie jar that's going to, you know, the children's hospital or something. So emotional expression, they're going to improve assertiveness. The assertiveness there is that they are going to catch each other, they're going to be listening even more for each other, which is going to be a fun game until they like, okay, this is actually going to make us more productive. And it will enable the people very quickly to adapt and improve their communications. And obviously from an action perspective and then from an independence perspective where you're able to do things without other people's opinions, you're self regulating yourself in your mind, which is, oh, I was just thinking in my mind, in my mind can't. And I'm just going to quickly change that loop for myself. So just on those two, I think it's hugely powerful. You just have to keep the game going for, for as long as it takes until you see people coming through with that, that level of thinking automatically. And that, that may take six days, six weeks, six months. No idea.

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Now. Your book has an interesting title that actually caught my attention when I was looking for the right guest interview around EQ Elephants Before Unicorns. Why did you call it that?

Well, I just remember when I had the idea for the book before I even wrote the book and I've already got the second title for my next next book already decided I've got to write it now. But I was always thinking these elephants in the room of every single organization and there's numerous just stuff all the elephants in one room. There are so many that aren't addressed and that essentially means it's impacting your ability to hire, retain and evolve those people. And those people will affect profoundly the organization and its success. And to me, throughout my career I was just seeing all of these elephants and I felt like I wanted to just say something but I didn't feel confident enough to be able to say anything about it because at that time I was very junior working at Sony and working at Virgin and I could see all of these different systems within the organizations that was just driving me nuts. I couldn't understand it. So I decided to create the book Elephants Before Unicorns. Emotionally intelligent HR Strategies to save your company. And it was, it was just obvious because whenever we would because we do executive search as well, when we do executive search, the organizations will ignore those elephants in, in their organization because they want, they want these really Shiny, super smart, highly unobtainable unicorns to join them, but they can't because they haven't reworked the systems within their organizations.

I got it. So these are the things everyone knows, at least everyone thinks everyone knows, that no one's willing to talk about.

Nobody wants to talk about it. Nope.

Having been the CEO enough times now, quite often, if I was aware of it, I'd probably do something about it. But then people feel like they just don't want to tell the senior leadership for the reasons we talked about earlier on the show. So it's a conundrum. And then what's a unicorn?

Unicorns are those people that are really going to adjust and grow the organization that you need it to grow into. And one of the things that I really like about, Excuse me, Kim Scott's book, again, is that she talks about rock stars or rock stars and what's the other one that she calls it, I Can't Believe I can't remember. And we had this lovely conversation a little while ago about it, which was about having those rock stars that are able to propel the people within the organization, to propel the company forward in a really dynamic way is great. But you've also got the people that aren't just rock stars. They're the people that make those things happen. And essentially those unicorns are rare. They're hard to find. You can't find people that have all of those amazing skills I mentioned earlier, servant leadership, for example, whilst also being really good at this specialized subject, whilst also being fantastic team player, whilst also being, you know, wonderful at basically everything. And when you do find them, you want to retain them. And people are only going to be retained if the environment will allow them to grow and thrive. The amount of people that I've heard from, usually not people that we've placed, but usually the people that come to me are the people that say, caroline, I've just started this company. It's terrible. I don't know what I was thinking coming to this company. The interviews are completely different to the reality and it doesn't happen so often now, but there's still that gap in the interview, which is basically like a beauty pageant. And then once they're being placed, the whole place is in disarray and they've been hired to do something that they don't either have the skills to do or they haven't been given the trust to be able to do it, because for many, many reasons. And then if they are there and they've managed to survive in the organization for a year or two, they're finding that they've hit the ceiling. There is nowhere for them to go. There is no leadership training internally, there's no succession plan, you know, none of that stuff to actually keep them there. Or maybe the challenge isn't there and there's some great technology that's being developed by some of the leading companies in Silicon Valley specifically to understand what those people are doing and how they're doing and identifying what through algorithms, you know, how they are, how their performance is impacting them, to know whether or not they're happy. And because I can always see through people's behaviors, and this is going to freak you out, but I can see through people's behaviors, whether or not they're ready to move on. I can just see, I see all of these little triggers. It's like I'm a little AI machine, being able to see what, what people are up to, because people are really predictable when they're not happy with their job, when they're not happy with, they're not challenged enough. They're. Maybe people have been hired above them that they're not happy with, or they don't have the skills to be able to move into that new role where the company is evolving and they're feeling under threat. You know, all of these different situations for employees, they don't even know the majority of the time what they're about to do next because they're scared, they're overstressed.

You also mentioned something that's very interesting to me. You said an elephant in the room is that you keep attracting fake unicorns. And we talked about what a unicorn is. You know, unicorn is someone who really can change the game, a super high performer that you really want to have in. And what is a fake unicorn and how are people attracting fake ones? I don't want to do that.

No, you don't. I like to kind of summarize the fake unicorn as being you. And I've seen various companies do this where they'll, they'll have these really high aspirations of their company. They'll think the company, their company is absolutely outstanding, that their future is outstanding, their future project, product range is outstanding, that they've got the best possible people here and they want someone to come in that is going to transform what they're doing. What, so they then interview people and they blindly hire the wrong people because they haven't brought the whole team to interview those people. And to get that, get, get all the feedback that's absolutely necessary. So you hire the fake unicorn who, you, whom you think is the best thing ever because you've looked at their title, their pedigree, what, what they did really well in the interview. Maybe they had an assessment or a test or some kind of case study that they had to present or whatever. And because they just ticked all of these boxes really beautifully, they're like, okay, this is the person for us. They arrive and they're not a culture fit or they're unable to influence because this person is so used to doing it in a particular way and they're just not able to gather the hearts and minds of everybody in the organization. Or they turn up on the first day and the CEO just says, ah, why do we hire this guy or this woman? This doesn't make sense. And then they realize too late and then, then they'll go into denial for a very long time. In the meantime, they've upset their entire organization or the people working around that person. And you know, they're having sleepless nights, they're going home, talking to their spouse, being really upset about, you know, this new person that's been hired. And then it takes HR about a year to have them exit. So that is part of the challenge. So my way around it, how I propose it in the book, is to have as many people in the stakeholder team join that interview process so everybody can discuss how that person is going to fit in. What is it they liked, what is it they don't like, what area do they need to develop in, what are the opportunities, what are the benefits, threats, so on and so on. And then from that particular perspective, they go through those different motions. Everybody gets together and they say, okay, what are we going to do here? But the other thing is to also understand how, how interested that party is as well as you and I know some people just want to get a job because they have to pay the bills. I've been that person for the first few years of my career. I just needed gainful employment until I was able to find the self actualization, my meaning and my goal. And I haven't looked back. But for a lot of people it may just be, gosh, they've got to get their mortgage, they, they've just got to pay their mortgage and they need a job really quickly or they're going to have, they're going to be rushing into a job because they think their company is about to close. And you've really got to have that trusting relationship with the, with the prospective new hire, very transparent parent conversations from the Very beginning. And that's where I'm going to jump along to a different road right now. But that's where the communications with the recruiter is absolutely crucial, because a recruiter just wants to tick those boxes. But if the recruiter is able to be truly integrated with the organization and is able to echo and mirror and discuss the challenges in a very authentic way, then the candidates are going to really feel like it's not an interview, like an interrogation. It's a meeting of minds for people to see how can we bring everything up together? How can this be a mission and a movement versus just a job? So you've got the whole person going into it.

It's interesting that the slipperiest fake unicorns. I know that I've hired one sociopath, which was not a good move, but sociopaths are good at hiding, so they're the ones who are the hardest to spot. And I've hired a bunch of people who probably weren't on the I just need a job. But the ones who really weren't able to see the reality around them because they were kind of living in their own fake world. But it's very hard as a hiring manager to. To spot the fake unicorns. And in fact, that's one of the areas of improvement that I have over the next, you know, however much longer my career is. But I think I've gotten much better just over the last couple of years. But I like it that you called that out, because anytime you're bringing someone onto your team, whether you're running a company or, you know, it's a much smaller thing you're doing at school or whatever else, all it takes is that one, you know, that one person who isn't what they say they are, and things go sideways real quickly, and that's never fun. So I was happy that you wrote about that, and thanks for sharing that knowledge. I know that your greatest strength is empathy, right? But I'm wondering, what's your greatest weakness?

What's my greatest weakness? Stress management is. Which is why I work, work, work, work, work. I am constantly stressed based on whenever I have got something done. It's not enough. A lot of people, I'm sure you know them, they'll say, I did it. I'm gonna go and get myself a cup of coffee. No, I've got to get onto the next thing. I've got that. That constant hamster wheel. So that's my fanaticism, right?

That's a tough one.

It's horrible, and it's horrible but I know that I have it and I'm working on it all the time.

Well, congratulations. The good news is that all of us are working on something all of the time, usually because if you're not working on something, then it's probably working against you just because you're not aware of it. And at least that's been my learning in my own path. Caroline, thank you for being a guest on Bulletproof Radio and sharing the difference between elephants and unicorns on this interview, and have a wonderful evening and thank you so much.

This has been a wonderful conversation.

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