Increase Your EQ for Self Development and Sales with Devin Williams

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But the episode today we're actually going.

To talk about how to make EQ a hard skill, something that can be taught, learned and executed against that actually provides real world results. This is not fluff. This is not an idea of something. This is truly something that can impact your life at work, at home and in your relationships. And that is why I'm so excited to have Devin Williams with me today. He's the VP of Sales at Datarobot. He's been building sales teams for the past decade, but leading the right way with emotional intelligence. Because I think we forget in sales we and our prospects are emotional first. And Devin's going to dive in today and teach us how we can do this and leverage It. Devin, my man, welcome to the show.

Appreciate you, Katie. I'm really passionate about this topic, especially as professionals, but sales professionals, there's so much power and emotional intelligence, and I know we're going to dig in. So, man, just thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Hell, yeah. And I love it. When I reached out to you, I said, all right, well, what topic? Right. What do you want to do if you had to pick one topic? And I don't even think it was more than 30 seconds of a delay in the LinkedIn messages like EQ. And so let's start with this very specifically. When you say eq, what do you mean? Let's define this out the gate so that people know what we're talking about here.

Sure. And that's a great place to start. So eq, otherwise known as emotional quotient or emotional intelligence. Right. So you see, EQ or ei, there's a lot of different definitions of emotional intelligence, but really what emotional intelligence is all about is the ability to understand and rationalize our emotions specifically so that we can improve our physical responses to those emotions. Right. And so there's a lot of different ways that organizations have broken this down. But summarizing the majority agreement on how we break down eq, it falls into two main categories, self and social. And under self, you have self awareness. What am I feeling? Am I mad? Am I sad? Am I happy? Why am I feeling that way? So that's the self awareness. Then is the self management. So on that, am I going to let that enable me or drive me to go say something that I'm going to regret in five minutes, or can I manage that emotion to take a more rational reaction to that emotion? That's the self. Then there's social. And it follows the exact same vein. Social awareness, whether that's one to one or one to many, think about a time where maybe you were talking to an individual, you said something, and you immediately read on their face that what you said upset them. That's being socially aware to your surroundings or presenting to a lot of people, and you say something and you see the audience lean in. That's social awareness. And then the relationship management or the social management is because I'm able to pick up on other people's emotions, I can react accordingly. And I know we're going to talk about it, but you can start to already understand where growing your abilities in those four areas can start to really impact your personal and professional life. Right. It is not hard to grasp at those straws.

No, I Love this. And I love the two buckets because I. Let us split us up here a little bit and let us start on the self, right? This self eq, which again, we are never taught how to do, right? Like we are all born with emotions, right? We are all born with the capacity to feel. And yet no one ever teaches us how to control these things, right? Like how to be aware of them. And so I want to start with this, right, that self awareness. So when it comes to like emotion, like how can someone develop better emotional self awareness? Because you can't react differently if you're not realizing what's happening.

Yeah. And that for that exact reason, Katie, self awareness is in nine times out of ten where we encourage people to start. There are exceptional few people that are really advanced in self awareness but struggle in some of those other areas. But for most people, self awareness is the starting. That's the starting line. You need to understand where you're at before you can go develop some of these other skills. One thing I want to all the listeners I want you to understand is you're not alone. This is part of evolution. This is the reason that our species was able to evolve and survive is because we had instincts that were driven by emotion. Think of fight or flight. Right before we had really developed our frontal cortex, when we saw a big bear running at us, we didn't need to rationalize anything. We just needed to know, can I win this fight or do I need to run? But over time, as our frontal cortex is developed, that's the area that allows us to rationalize emotion. We literally feel emotions before we can rationalize them. As you trace synapses through the brain, through the alligator brain into the emotional center, you literally feel it before it reaches the part of your brain where you can rationalize it. And that's why the self awareness is both scary because it involves a lot of self inspection, it involves some hard looks in the mirror. And that's one of the reasons that people struggle to get started is because you can't get started on social awareness until. Or excuse me, self awareness until you're ready to take a hard look in the mirror and agree to go make some changes, right? So a lot of areas that we encourage people to do is things like just picking up a book, opportunities to see other perspectives of the world. Because when we look at the overall Venn diagram, we have intelligence quotient, iq. How smart are you? And really what that comes down to is how quickly can I understand and retain information? And unfortunately, IQ only goes down as we get older. You drink, you smoke, you don't sleep well, all sorts of habits can hurt your iq. It's not going to get any better. Then you have your perspective or your personality. That depends on who you talk to. There's a lot of argument, but most people in medical fields agree that at some point in time personality becomes somewhat locked. And that's where you hear the old adage, people don't change. Right? That's your unique. Everybody who has glasses has a unique prescription based on their eyesight. Perception is that unique prescription that you have that has been cultivated by your upbringing and your surroundings. That is your unique way of perceiving the world. Right? And then you have EQ emotional intelligence. So one way to help advance your self awareness is to gain the perspective of others and then reflect that back on your own perception of the world. So world travel, reading books, watching documentaries, right? These are all great ways. A big one for me personally is meditation. And that scares a lot of people, like, oh great, this is some Zen guy. I do eight minutes twice a day. It's not that big a deal. I'm a busy guy, Anybody can do it. And my advancements in my self awareness by taking that mindful exploration of my own self is just absolutely tremendous. And then there's tons of books which I'll make sure to talk about some of those more tactical if you want to take this to the next level. Some different resources that we can use, but those are some great places to start. Go have conversations with people that aren't in your bubble. Go experience other people's perspectives, layer them against your own. And if you really want to take it to the next level, meditation is a great way to start illustrating and growing that self awareness.

Interesting. So you said something here I want to call out and go a little bit deeper on. Right. When we started talking self awareness at the beginning was right. You know, you got to take a hard look in the mirror, right? Like you know, to look at yourself. But at the same time, one of the recommendations was actually exposing yourself to other people to improve your self awareness. So let's go a little bit deeper on that. Right? Because I know a lot of people that travel that are not self aware. I know a lot of people that meditate actually that aren't self aware. So I guess let me rephrase this question here. How do you connect the dots? Okay, I'm reading on people, I'm traveling, but how do I then internalize that? So it's actually impacting my self awareness.

Yes, it's a great question, Katie. And overall, the pursuit of emotional intelligence is a incredibly mindful pursuit. It requires great levels of intentionality. So let's take the example that you just said. So I'm out there, I travel to Italy and I have some conversations with Barista at a coffee shop. I hear a little bit about the local town. Great conversation. That could be it. Now, now introduce intentionality. Right? Oh, I noticed that this person treats strangers differently than I do. I wonder why that is.

Right.

And then going and being curious and asking more of that. And then the piece that I said a few times is then you have to layer that over your own self. And that is where the hard look in the mirror occurs because you have to address your biases. And that is very difficult. We're living in this world of social injustice. Clearly people are struggling to address their own biases. And that is where the self awareness can be very challenging for some people. Because I don't know if your listeners or yourself have heard of the term cognitive dissonance, but what that is is it's a reaction similar. Like they've looked at people's brainwaves and synapses undergoing what we call cognitive dissonance, and it mimics life or death situations. It's incredibly stressful. And all cognitive dissonances, I believe X, I'm presented with Y, and the gap between my belief and what I'm being presented makes me really uncomfortable. And that cognitive dissonance is why the self awareness is so difficult for many people, because they have to admit some culpability. They have to admit that they have room to grow. And some of us don't have egos that allow for that. And that can be very challenging to overcome.

And that's a great call out too on biases because it's one of those things where it's actually the denial of biases that prevent us from fixing them. And people hear that word like, well, I don't have biases. But just by saying that means you'll never improve because you're not willing to accept that. We all have biases. We all have it. And to your point earlier too, I don't know if people caught this. Our biases happen at an emotional level, not at a rational level. They happen without us even knowing they happen. One of the most frightening books I think I've read in my life was called Behave the Biology of Humans at Their Best and Their Worst. It's a heavy read for anyone reading it, but it talks about like these biases Again, at a like a chemical level, you see my face and your brain fires differently than seeing someone else's face that looks like yours. Not rationally at an emotional and like at a synapse level. And it's just, it's scary actually when you think about it. But knowing that is actually the first step to make a change. Where I want to go with the next point then here is like, okay, so I'm looking in the mirror. What should I be looking for? Right? Like, because again, people like, they look all the time, they go, you know what? I'm good. I'm so self aware. You know what my EQ is? I'm probably the most EQ est person and the most humblest person ever, right? So when I'm looking in this mirror, if I'm truly trying to up my self awareness, what should I be looking for?

Yeah, it's another great question, kd. And that hubris that you just mentioned is one of the biggest challenges to people really making productive strides against their emotional intelligence, right? And some of us have been so wound up in our upbringing by really negative things that that lens that I was talking about earlier can be very difficult to break through. So here's something that I want all the listeners to remember. There is no such thing as a good or a bad emotion. It just is being happy doesn't mean that's good. There are plenty of scenarios that we can all think of where being happy is not an appropriate emotional response to the situation, right? And so many people have the tendency to say, I'm mad, that's bad, I should be happy, or I'm happy, that's good. That is the number one mistake that most people make in beginning this journey. And so what you need to look at is why am I feeling this way, right? So let's take a racist example. I interact with a black man. He says something that in a normal circumstance should not make anybody upset. And suddenly I'm angry. I need to pause and reflect on what about did that person say what triggered me towards being angry? And then that's where the real introspection begins. And for somebody with some of those really damaging ingrained biases and beliefs, that can be very, very difficult to overcome. So when you think about moving from recognizing and understanding the emotion to taking action on it, one of the things I encourage a lot of people to do is to journal triggers, right? We all have triggers. We all have triggers. What are those? Most of us have a pretty good idea of, at least some of them. Write them down. Take a look at those triggers. Are there commonalities, are there things that are in my control that I'm allowing affect me versus things that are out of my control? And that is where you start to see some consistency, where you start to see some trends that you can start to take action on. And so I would really start to look at those triggers. What are the things that drive these difficult to manage these big emotions in you, and do they make sense? Like, are they reasonable? And that is a great starting place because one of the other areas that people struggle is they try and eat the entire elephant in one bite. This is not that type of journey. You will never master emotional intelligence. You have to nibble away at the elephant, right? And by starting with triggers, I find that to be a very reasonable and digestible place for people to really start picking out where are some of these things that I can start noticing and flagging and recognizing that I am typically going to have an unreasonable emotional response When I'm in this scenario, now I'm aware, which means now I'm armed with the knowledge I need to react rationally and not based on emotion.

And I think this ties back to one of the things you mentioned at the beginning too, right? If you think about meditation, so much of what it allows you to do is to be present in the moment, right? If you heard how we said this, right? You hear something, you get angry in order to ask yourself why. It means you're staying in the moment versus either going into the future, what you're afraid of, or going into the past. All this has happened to me before. Being in that moment to stay present and slow down for a second and just recognize the emotion. I'm glad you called this out, because it's a big part of my journey too, is like for a long time I tried to avoid certain emotions because I thought they were bad. Right? Anger, jealousy, sadness, those are bad emotions. I should just always be happy. And it doesn't work that way. It truly doesn't work that way. Not only in life, just in general, but also too. Emotions are chemical reactions. Yes. You can't have that chemical just always pumping in your brain. It also doesn't work that way. And so as you go through this process, right? So we're starting to become more aware of the emotions. What do we do next? Right. So, okay, I'm starting to become more aware. I'm looking at these triggers and I am angrier than maybe I wish I was, or I do seem to be snappier, or I am in A low place emotionally. How do we then start to, I guess, get to that next part you talked about, which is like, the rationalizing of it or the changing of emotions, like, where do we go next?

We got it. And that's where the hard look in the mirror. You got to ask yourself, why? Why did what this person say upset me the way that it did? Or, you know, why is it that when I close a transaction, I experience levels of elation that I never experience in other areas of my life? Is that healthy? I don't know. That's for you to answer. But to Katie's point, until you take the mindfulness and the intentionality to pause and ask why, you're foregoing so many amazing learning and development opportunities that only you control and only you will see, nobody else knows this is going on. And that's why it's so first off, go find an accountability partner. Go find somebody you trust who you can go to in a safe place and say, hey, I'm feeling this way when I'm under this type of circumstance. And I'm really having trouble figuring out why that is. You know me really well. Like, how do you take that? What do you think about that? Is that surprising to you? And a lot of times you'll find people like, no, everybody knows that about you. Again, that can be really tough. So, like, one of the challenges that we give to a lot of our members of the nonprofit People First Professionals is the self perception challenge. So if you want to really challenge yourself and learn a lot about yourself, go to three to five people that you trust and you care about and mix it up. Family, friends, professional. Like, mix up the cohort that you bring in. And I want you to ask them just two simple questions. How does the world perceive me? Secondly, what's the one thing I could do to positively impact that? And you're going to be a little bit upset by some of what you hear. Let me be really honest. Because again, it's going to go against some of your beliefs and how the world perceives you. But now that you have an accurate representation, you have a baseline that you can improve on. And then further, people who you love, you care, you trust, you admire, have given you guidance on how you can go get better. Right. But you got to be willing to take that step and put yourself out there a little bit and be vulnerable. And that is a huge component to really evolving somebody's emotional intelligence is vulnerability. Yeah.

And I want to touch on that one. I want to take it one step back to something because what it popped in my head as you described it, when you're asking the questions about the emotion, is there another way to ask besides why or to ask it the right way? Because I think sometimes too, we ask that question why? And it can turn either self deprecating, right? Oh, because I'm weak, I'm soft, I'm. And it actually goes the wrong way. Or the other way when we get into social where why am I mad? Well, because Devin was an asshole, like, and we. That's why I'm mad. Because they did something and we put it away. So can we go on that just a little bit further? Because I think that's sometimes where, you know, okay, I'm angry, I'm sad, I ask why. And sometimes that can almost go the wrong direction. So can you touch on that a little bit further on either how to ask that question the right way or maybe even another way to approach it if that's, you know, maybe not the best exact question to ask?

Yeah, and it really, it starts with why it does. And then you got to go down a couple of layers further, right? And there's a level of extreme ownership that needs to be taken and a big focus on mindfulness and being in the moment, right. Which. Which you highlighted and starting to catch yourself, right. Where you start to pass the onus onto the other person. That other person has nothing to do with your emotions.

There we go.

Nothing. We all got to just accept that as fact. Now, that doesn't mean that people might try and piss you off or try and upset you or try and make you happy, certainly, but only you are in control of how you react to all of that. And so it's about taking accountability and focusing on yourself. And even if that person was trying to piss me off, that doesn't mean I'm obligated to react in turn. Go be the better man or woman or person. Right. Go learn from that situation, make a decision if that's somebody you want to continue to invest in or not, or if that's a healthy relationship or not, and go focus on the ones that are valuable and healthy. And another thing, and this is back to being mindful and intentional. I find this so fascinating because people get so wrapped up in like, oh man, emotional intelligence. It's got to be a really tricky journey and all that. What you'll find is some of the exercises are kind of like, duh, like, I can't believe I hadn't thought of that. One of the best exercises for self awareness and self management is to practice taking deep breaths. That's it. So I have mastered the ability to be in a, in a tight group of people and take three deep breaths, like meditative breaths without anybody noticing I'm doing it. And that gives me enough time to get the oxygen to my brain that it needs to think clearly as well as to take a step back, work through everything I'm feeling and respond in turn. Because typically it takes literally seconds for those impulses and those synapses to reach that frontal cortex where we can rationalize. But the problem is we don't let our brain go there. We spend too much time focusing on the emotion itself.

And that's what I was hoping to get you there is how we separate those things versus internalizing it. And I love the call out what the other person does or did. Your emotion is your emotion. We do control that. We may not control the reaction. And that was a big learning for me. And Yashi called this out at the beginning. You're going to react a certain way. Someone jumps out from behind something, you're going to react. Doesn't mean you have to stay there. It doesn't mean you actually have to accept that state of being like, okay, now I'm going to be angry right there. And that was a big one for me is like the difference between being and feeling. I feel angry versus I am angry. And separating the emotion from who I am as a person and going, hey, I felt anger, I did felt anger there doesn't mean I'm going to be angry and I don't have to stay there.

Absolutely.

So now let's go one layer. So now we've kind of, we're working our way down right. Of like our self awareness, our practice. So breathing was one. You've mentioned trigger journaling. Anything else on the self before? We now start to translate this to the social.

Yeah. Again, accountability, coaches, people you trust, you can just have these conversations so you can talk about your emotions, your reactions and you can get advice, especially from somebody who you believe is very self aware and does a great job of managing their emotions and not reacting in the heat of the moment to things. Go find somebody like that that you can partner up with that you can use as a mentor. Breathing techniques, journaling, especially trigger journaling, meditation, those are all great ways to get started. As we mentioned, reading, getting healthy amounts of sleep so we can actually process emotion appropriately. All of these things. Again, we all think that it's this, you know, crazy journey and all these crazy exercises and processes that we need to introduce but honestly, it really isn't. It's just intentionality and a little bit of commitment to some unique practices that maybe are new to you and you'll see changes literally overnight. It's incredible.

Intention is one of my favorite words. You could talk to my entire management team like that was like our theme for all of 2021 was execution with intention. Right. Most people don't get what they want out of life because they just don't execute, plain and simple. They just don't execute on the right things. But just because you're executing, if you're not doing it with intention, you won't get what you're looking for. Right. Like I can execute, I can look in the mirror if I'm doing it with an intention, if I'm not being intentional with it. Right. And that's everything. And so now let's bring this the next layer, right, because. Okay, let's connect the dots first then. So how does being more self aware, how does having stronger self EQ benefit you as a salesperson? Let's start to now connect the dots for people. So I'm doing this work, I'm becoming more self. Aware. How does that translate over into being a better salesperson?

Well, I think most of us as salespeople can admit there were some times in our career where we acted on emotion, not on rational thinking. And I would suspect that in most cases the outcome of that was less than ideal. Think about, you got maybe a little bit of a nasty email that you weren't expecting from a prospect. And instead of sitting on that for a few moments, you immediately played keyboard warrior and responded in turn. Just little tiny examples like that that proliferate both from the happy, elated I've got happy years. I just ran up to my BP and told him how I'm about to close this million dollar deal. That's emotional reaction to what just happened or the inverse to me shutting down what was a really great deal or alienating a potential champion because I acted on emotion and not rationality. So these are massive in terms of understanding yourself and not not shooting yourself in the foot as a sales professional. I mean that's really what it comes down to for sure.

Right. And also then too, if we are in a better emotional state, let's talk about how that allows us to read other people. Right? Like because the better we are at self awareness, the more we can pick up on the people we're talking to. So it's now transition to social awareness. Right. How do you become more socially aware And I have a follow up question to this because I think about some of like the top salespeople I've ever had on my team and I would actually say some of them weren't very socially aware. It was almost like because they didn't have the fear of rejection or because they didn't like sometimes even pick up on some of the uncomfortable cues and kept going, they were able to sell more. So let's talk about social awareness and I would love to get your thoughts on like, is more social awareness or less social awareness actually better for a salesperson?

Yeah, you know, that's, that's a really great question, Katie. I actually hadn't thought about it in that context of where can we be too socially aware to the point where can be information overload, you know, analysis paralysis or anything like that. And I think it's analogous to everything we just talked about with self awareness, how the more socially aware we are without adding the management aspect, the rationalization aspect. Sure, it can absolutely be overwhelming. I'm picking up on too much and I'm overloaded and I'm kind of paralyzed by what I'm seeing. Or maybe I'm so hypersensitive to other people's emotions that what I'm picking up is really just a little bit of dissatisfaction. But I'm taking away that this person is egregiously pissed off at me and now I'm going to change how I interact with that person based on that misbelief, right? But one of the beauties, I think maybe you'll agree with me, maybe you're not, but what I found to be one of the commonalities and the most successful reps I've ever worked with is curiosity. It's just unbridled and authentic curiosity. Right? And instead of just taking that at face value and making a whole ton of assumptions, just asking like, hey, I saw that, what I just said there, like, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm seeing your, I'm reading your body language and I, I think I might have upset you. Am I off base there? Did, did I say something that really put us on the wrong track? Just go have a conversation, right? Go be open and just think about how much growth and knowledge transfer and relationship building happens. I mean, you think about it when you interact with somebody and you can tell that they are genuinely interested in learning about you and what you have to say. I mean, that's where champions are built, right? That's where true friendships and relationships are established. Is off of that understanding yes.

So 100% agree on curiosity. 100%. Like asking that follow up question. Ask, like you hear something, you actually ask about it versus having the happy years and moving on. Do you have any tips for people, especially now in this like remote environment, how to be more socially aware? Right. Like how to do that? Because we're talking right now and we're connecting, but you're, you know, nine inches on my, my screen right now. You're not in the room with me. I can't see your hands, I don't know if you're wearing pants. Doesn't matter. Right. Like these are all the things like, so how can I guess what would your advice be for people? How can you be socially aware when we're all remote? Right. When we're not next to each other, When I can't maybe pick up on the vibe or I can't pick up on the body language as well.

Yeah. So first off, I want to say pants are heavily overrated. Just want to throw that out there.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not angry by it. Right. But I'm a curious person. Right. So now these things happen.

That's right. No, but you know, in all seriousness, it can really be, it can be difficult. And I think one of the reasons so many people are struggling, you know, and you and I were chatting about this a little bit before we hit record, is because it's so difficult to pick up on other people's emotions. So in many cases we feel like we're kind of fumbling in the dark where before we had at least, even if we weren't very social, aware, we at least had some information that we could take in. And now to your point, it's very difficult. And so that feeling of true connection, I think is driving a lot of people's unhappiness, lack of fulfillment, lack of feeling connected to other people in a meaningful way. Because we're all living, to your point, through these nine inch windows every single day. And so it can be very, very challenging. But the thing is, you know, facial recognition, facial reaction, body language, we can still get that through a virtual window, a zoom, a webex, or whatever. Is it going to be limited compared to all of the information that we could get if we were in person? Absolutely. But people's tone changes. Right. Think about how, as sales trainers, right. We tell people, when you're smiling and dialing, smile and dial. Because people can hear the inflection of somebody who's smiling versus somebody who's frowning. So there's still tons of Information points that we can use and we can pick up on. We just. And here's that word again. We just have to be a little bit more intentional about it.

I was hoping it was going to come back to it because that's where my head went to. It's like you have to be doing it with intention. What's the purpose? Are you even trying to pick up on social cues or while that person's talking, are you thinking about how you feel and what you're thinking about and where you're trying to go and what you're trying to say next with and really bringing that intention in. And so I guess what else on that social side? Right, so we're listening for body language. We're sorry, looking for body language, listening for tone. Like what else can an individual do to improve their social awareness when it comes to eq.

Yeah. Again, the more questions that you can ask in a genuine and authentic level of curiosity, the more your social awareness is going to improve. Right. The more perspectives, opinions of other people, the more you start to form a real picture that is beyond your biases and all of this. And again, because you've put in the effort and the work to grow your self awareness, you are now more able to see the world for what it really is without that unique lens that we all carry giving you the rose colored glasses or whatever. Color glasses, right. And that is a massive step in being able to truly understand what other people are thinking, feeling and going through. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Like tonality, different body cues, facial expression, we talk about people crossing arms versus taking an open stance. These are all things that the brain does. And in most cases, especially if we haven't invested in eq, we're not even aware that we're doing it. So that is something. And again, one of the reasons we start with self awareness is that by unlocking that, your understanding of social awareness will to some degree naturally improve. And then we shift over and we start applying more intentionality to understanding people's posture, facial recognition of emotion. Right. All of these different things, tonality, all of that type of stuff starts to come into play and it starts to click. But without, if we're doing all of this, if we're taking all of these efforts and we're still riddled with all of these biases that we don't even know exist, candidly you're not progressing as much as you might actually believe you are. Which is again why so many times we have folks start with that self before we move to Social?

Yeah. I mean to your point, like you can't do social without yourself because you have to be sociable, right? Like you have to be there. And if you don't know where your emotions are at, if you don't know how you are staying present in the moment, it's like you can't be social. Like you really can't pick up on other people if you're so busy still thinking about yourself. So I just realized we're already at like 40 minutes, like, and I still have so much more that I want to dive into here. So I got a couple questions to wrap on here. Is like, let's try to make it, you know, I don't want to say it's like, like super tactical in terms of. Then how do we apply this to sales? Right? Like how do we connect this dot to say. Because I don't think it surprises anyone if we say like EQ is important for sales. I don't think you're going to get too many people that go, no, EQ is not important for sales. But how does it apply? Like, where does this really show up in the sales process that you think helped drive results? Because right before we recorded, you're like, my results went up, my relationships improved. Right. Like I hit numbers I hadn't hit before, my connections with my people improved. Like, how do we connect those dots to actually use this in the real world?

Yeah. So there's some statistics out there. There's a group led by Dr. Travis Bradbury called Talent Smart and Dr. Travis Bradbury is an anthropologist amongst many other things, and one of the modern day thought leaders around emotional intelligence, especially in the professional workplace. And they did a massive, massive study. Thousands of organizations, hundreds of thousands of people. And what they found is that 90% of top performers are high in EQ and any job out there, at least 60% of the core responsibilities of the job are emotional intelligence related skills. It's the reason guys like Gary Vee and Michael Dell and many others are saying that emotional intelligence is the most highly sought after set of skills in today's age.

Right.

It ties back to performance. Right. Even down to how much people earn. Right. They looked at two people, same level experience, same industry, same company. One who is high in emotional intelligence versus the one that was lower, averaged close to $30,000 a year more in earnings because companies invest in these skills and people with these skills are successful. So there's all sorts of statistics that support this. But let's think about some of the things related to sales, right? We talked about happy years because we're letting emotion drive. Think about how many times you've had reps who have wasted countless months in sales cycles, all based off of happy, right? Now what happens if that eight month sales cycle that had 60 meetings, what if we avoided that before it ever got started? What could you do with all of that time back? How could you go interface with clients who are actually going to drive business and drive sales? Right. In the school of thought that I've come up with in sales from John McMahon around medic champions. Champions are core to everything we do. Well, how do you build a true champion? You understand their personal wins and you align to how you can help them achieve their goals. And if you're not making real human connections, you're never going to get that. You're only going to get topical positions. You're never going to get down to interests. That level of curiosity, right? That's how you build strong relationships and really understand what the underlying motivating factors are. It's how you interact with your team and your ecosystem around you, right? We constantly say win together or lose alone. Right? And how you build internal champions has a lot to do with your emotional intelligence and how people view you and the quality and attentiveness that they see from you, right? These are all things that come back to. So all these soft skills, right? Imagine if I now understand what that client is feeling and I'm able to respond based on that as opposed to kind of fumbling around in the dark. There's so many applications to emotional intelligence, whether you're an individual contributor in sales or candidly, even more so as a leader in sales, right? And one of the big things for me, Katie, about all of this is empathy. Empathy, giving a shit about other people. Excuse me, Right.

But that.

Giving a crap about other people and understanding that. Just because I'm making this snap judgment doesn't mean that I've accurately written this entire person's life biography, right? And nor do I have that right? And just having empathy and creating that true connectiveness and that curiosity that comes along with it, it's how you build amazing teams. It's how you build amazing companies. It's how you build champions at your customers who truly believe that you care about them. Because you do.

Man. All right, so 100%, I'm bringing you back for round two for, let's go EQ and leadership. Because, I mean, we could go for another three hours on that because it's, I mean, it's so important actually Another book. We'll get into some book recs here real quick too. There's a book called Barking up the Wrong Tree. And one of the things that they broke down too is like, all right, career success. And the number one, number one correlated thing that they found in career progression and promotion was likeability, which comes down to eq. Right. And like they didn't connect those dots, but that's a huge part of it, right as you go through this. And so my man, where can people get more of what you're putting out there? Like, where can they follow you? Like you've mentioned we a lot as well. You've said we work with people, we help people. So like, where can people get support in this if they're really trying to elevate their eq?

Yeah. So I appreciate it. I'm going to do a shameless plug real quick. I am co founder and president of an organization and nonprofit called People First Professionals. We do not charge money in any way, shape or form. We are completely volunteer based, chapter based organization and our whole focus is trying to help people bring emotional intelligence into the professional work sphere and help create a community of people that believe putting people first is not just the right thing to do, but it's also good for business because those are the people who are going to build awesome companies that we all want to go work for where we have high levels of fulfillment, et cetera, et cetera. So that is my passion project. We have lots of resources attached to that. So go check out peoplefirstprofessionals.org there's a ton of goodness now if you want to really get in the weeds and go take this seriously. You know, I've talked about things like watching your caffeine intake, your blue screen time, your sleep, quality reading, meditating, getting vitamin D from the sun, especially before noon. These are all ways without doing too much that you can kind of naturally improve some of your emotional intelligence. But if you really want to take it seriously, I can. At People First Professionals for our onboarding of our members, we use Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Dr. Travis Bradbury and Jean Greaves. And the beauty about that book is it is not a read cover to cover book, it's a workbook. And it comes with a very easy to take test that get online tests that gives you a baseline of your EQ scores across those four categories we talked about. And the rest of the book are exercises in each of the four categories. So it'll tell you, hey Devin, you're high in self awareness. You're high in social awareness and relationship management, but your self management is a bit lacking. Here are three specific exercises based on your unique scores that if you go invest in, you will see improvements. And then the awesome part about it is it gives you a second test. So after three to six months you can go look at your improvements and move on to the next set of exercises that are going to personally benefit you. Not a peanut butter spread, everybody. It is for you. So that is an amazing workbook. It gives lots of great best practices. It gives you a baseline and a way to measure your improvement. And that is for anybody that really wants to take a serious intentional effort at improving emotional intelligence. I have not yet come across a better singular resource. And then in general, y' all go jump on the Internet, Google Emotional Intelligence. Check out some of the Harvard Business Review articles that they've done on EQ and its development since the 80s. There's endless and countless resources, but those are a few great places to get started.

My man. This was. I actually, I can't say this is everything I was hoping it would be because it was better than what I was hoping it would be. Man, you got tactical. We went through this. We are not done. I'm not joking. We are going to do a part two of this episode so we can get specific into sales leadership because there are a lot of sales leaders out there that need to develop their own EQ and then of course help their people do it, but definitely their own sort of. Devin, dude, thank you so much for your time and insights today, man. This was great.

Katie, thanks for having me. I got some stories to share when we talk about sales leadership, so I'm.

Looking forward to it. We're going to get it on the calendar.

All right, brother, thank you so much for the time.

Absolutely.