Increase Your EQ for Self Development and Sales with Devin Williams

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset, goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. But first, a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Vidyard. If you aren't using video in your sales process, I promise you, you are leaving money on the table. I personally have been using Vidyard with my teams for years now and we use it everywhere. Top a funnel to book more meetings via email and LinkedIn. Middle of funnel to improve show rates, to demos, host demos to do proposals and follow up and close deals faster. Using video allows you to connect better with your prospects, bring your personality, energy and enthusiasm across off every single time and they have a much more impactful and memorable experience for your buyer. So again, if you're not using video, you need to be. And if you are using video, you should be using Vidyard. Check out vidyard@vidyard.com and with that, let's get back to the show. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And we're going to talk about another very important two letter phrase, eq. Eq Emotional intelligence. Right. Which sometimes gets thrown around as this idea that it's light, it's fluffy, it's the soft skills. 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 gonna dive in today and teach us 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 I'm mad. 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? Right. So 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's not hard to grasp at those.

Straws No, I love this and I love the two buckets because that let us split us up here a little bit and let's start on the self, right? This self eq, which again, we're never taught how to do, right? Like we're all born with emotions, right? We're all born with the capacity to feel. And yet no one ever teaches us how to control these things, like how to be aware of them. And so I want to start with this, 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 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 has 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 kind of 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. That's where you hear the old adage, people don't change. 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, it was like, 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, kd. 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 introduce intentionality, right? Oh, I noticed that this person treats strangers differently than I do. I wonder why that is. 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 am probably the most EQ est person and the most humblest person ever, right? So when I am looking in this mirror, if I am 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 call this out because this is 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, 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 why is it that when I close a transaction, I experience levels of elation that I never experienced 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 into 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 when 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.

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, and 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 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 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 of 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 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. It's like 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. 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, I 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 not reacting in the heat of the moment to things like 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, like 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 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. That was our theme for all of 2021 was execution with intention. 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 not 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 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. Right. You know, 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 VP 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. Right. So these are, 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 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 it can be information overload, 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 in 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 think I might have upset you. Am I off base there? 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 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, actually ask about it versus having the happy years and moving on. Do you have any tips for people.