Emotional Intelligence and Information Trust | Ep 3

Trust Factor with Rob Greenlee focuses on all aspects to building human trust in online communications, only on 100TV.

10 factors of emotional intelligence to build trust and how to verify information in our world today. Hi, I'm Rob Greenlee here again in episode 3 of Trust Factor. Thank you for joining me. The trust factor in your life is essential, and the lack of it or abundance of it has profound impact on the quality of your life. So thank you for joining me here each week. If you're a returning viewer, I appreciate that a lot. If you're new, thank you for joining me today and watching Trust Factor or listening to it. And hopefully I can bring a more positive human experience to your life and other people's life through this podcast. Also wanted to announce here too, I'm excited that this show is now an audio podcast. So we are now available on the Spreaker platform. They're slowly rolling out up there. My first episode has been published up there and this, and the second one will be soon published up there. And then obviously this one will be posted eventually too on And so you'll be able to get it in Apple Podcasts actually right now and a few other places too. So definitely follow me over there and also subscribe on YouTube to this podcast. And I definitely appreciate you being here and I'm excited to, to join you again and bring you another kind of episode exploring the world of trust and its impact on all of our lives. And so here we go. The 10 factors of emotional intelligence. And this is an interesting aspect or a little bit of a spin on the concept of trust building and your ability to adapt to the world around you to build other people's confidence in you based on some characteristics that I'm going to talk about. And it refers to your ability to recognize and understand and manage your own emotions, as well as manage and fit in with other people's emotions without creating any kind of disruption in their perception of you around whether or not they can trust you. So it really involves building a crucial trust in effective communication and how you communicate with others is really critical here. In your personal and professional relationships. So let's dive into this a little bit deeper. Here are the top 10 elements of emotional intelligence as a factor of trust building. So let's just dive into it and dig into it. So self-awareness is a big part of this in recognizing and understanding your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. So really, you need to get in touch with who you are and, as best as you can, understand how you communicate and how people perceive you as much as you can and have an understanding of your own emotions and thoughts and behaviors out there in the world. And also, the other part of this is self-regulation. So as you communicate into the world and as you think for yourself about your place in the world and your contributions to others around you in the world, you need to really focus on trying to develop some level of control of your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors as well. And that gets back to the self-awareness part. So if you understand how you react to different situations, you can create a better experience for yourself and for your others, especially in stressful situations where you get into maybe conflict or you're nervous or you're frustrated or you're emotionally charged. This is when trust can be lost. So if you lose control or you lose your ability to stay focused on What's important? I think that's a critical piece to this. So what is your motivation to achieve personal and professional goals? I think that is a big part of this as well. And the ability to persist in the face of setbacks. So if you can have an idea of what those potential setbacks are, then that'll help you better manage your ability to motivate others and to motivate yourself to achieve your personal and professional goals. So being able to persist, I think, and stay focused through challenging times, the challenging world that we live in, is so critical to being able to succeed. And also a huge factor here is empathy for others. And I think these are all flowing to your emotional intelligence and your intelligence of what's happening around you in the world is to have empathy for others and the ability to understand and relate to the emotions and perceptions and perspectives of others as best as you can. Some of us really struggle with this, and I totally get it. It's not, this is not easy stuff to try and work through this thing. And it does— maybe, maybe you don't inherently have this ability to have empathy for others. And I do think that there are folks out there that struggle with this, or maybe even don't even think about it as something that they need to be concerned about, about how they come across to others, because maybe they're so focused on what they are thinking and what they are pushing on others that they don't really see the forest through the trees on this issue. But having empathy for others is key to I think, our civilization's survival here. And I know this is a very serious topic that I'm taking here, but I do think that putting a smile on your face and getting through emotionally difficult times and having empathy for another person, I think, is so critical. And this gets into social skills, right? Your ability to communicate effectively, build relationships, and resolve conflicts. So empathy and resolving conflicts go together, and those kind of have a lot of social skills and a lot of discipline behind them, and it gets back to the social regulation. So a lot of these points that I'm raising are all interlinked with each other and how you think about your interrelationships with other people and how you even think in your own mind. And the other huge element here is what I call active listening. And active listening is listening intently to what other people say. And I think all of us struggle with this because of the conflicts that are in our world around information. We're getting bombarded with information coming at us from all angles, whether it be our smartphones, the world around us, noise, people trying to talk to us, people trying to communicate with us. And that is a skill, the listening side. And being able to focus on that listening is important. It's something that I need to work on. It's something that I think all of us can obviously do a better job of listening intently and understanding what others are saying. And having that information be fed into us from what others are saying to create more of a conversation, more of an interconnection with another person. And it actually will surprise you. It'll create a much deeper comprehension of what another person is saying. And maybe a topic, maybe you hadn't thought of that particular twist on that topic. And it may be something that opens the door to greater understanding about whatever topic that you're talking about or whatever information that's trying to be communicated to you. It's also about having an open mind and that communicates to other people too, of being able to receive information from other people. And I think this is really a skill that we all need to work on. And I think it will solve a lot of the problems that we have that I'm going to talk about a little bit later in the episode around our information and where we're getting that information from. And is it reliable? And also some emotional resilience as well. Is your ability to recover from emotional setbacks and adapting to change in your environment also is a huge skill? And maintaining through all that a positive outlook. It may seem like this is like emotional or thought gymnastics in your life. And while that may be true, I think a lot of these things, if you think about it, they will develop into skills that you can, you can just act on. It's almost being an athlete, right? So you probably need to think about some of these things from almost like how, let's say, a basketball player or a football player plays where he has to practice and he has to think about these processes. And what you're doing is you're developing new skills. And I think the next thing that once you've developed these skills, thinking about these skills from an emotional intelligence perspective in any kind of leadership that you're doing with other people, it's the ability to observe others and to understand others, to be able to create an environment where you're inspiring others and you're helping others and you're motivating others, and you have the ability to manage conflict because you can actually listen to where the conflict is coming from and maybe drill right in on that hot-button topic that is driving that conflict. And through all that, create a positive environment, whether it be a work environment or a personal home life environment. I think these are skills that are things that all of us need to think about more and work on. And I think it will create a much better world for us to all live in if we can create that type of dynamic in our lives. And I think that being able to, you know, better make decisions too, and the ability to consider emotions and perspectives of others. And this really, I think, fundamentally gets back to some of the free speech issues that we're facing in the world today. I believe some of this requires us to have a little bit of a thicker skin around judgment and trying to cancel other people in their validity of their thoughts. I think this is really a topic for the times. I just think more and more information is weaponized and is used against others when that isn't really the best way to think about information. The best way to think about information is we can all learn from it and we can all move forward with it. We can help each other. We can try and make decisions based on all the inputs and that can affect everyone involved. And this will go so far to helping so many people resolve their conflicts that they have in their lives here. So in summary, the, Emotional intelligence is a critical piece to building trust and effective communication with others by recognizing and managing our own emotions and our own understanding of the emotions of others. I think this is such a critical concept, and being able to communicate effectively once you've had that understanding of the emotions of others And being able to filter that. And I'll get back to what I just said just a few minutes ago, is that this is a skill that may be very difficult to do now because there's a lot of people that are very entrenched in their beliefs and their thoughts and that they're right and nobody else has any kind of an opinion that is valid. And that is not the way for us to conduct ourselves or to conduct our society. To have a free and open society that will work for the betterment of many. And that's, I think what we want to build is solid relationships with people, not people that we want to go to war with. And that's the world that we live in right now. And this will help us all achieve personal and professional goals. So I know I really beat that one down a lot. And so I wanted to kind of transition over to another topic, which is also very timely as well. And I think these two topic flows of emotional intelligence and also our ability to verify and trust the information in our world today. Can we trust our information in our world today? Is one of the biggest questions that pops up in my mind. Trust is the number one thing in my mind that is impacting the world right now. And how can any of us trust any information that, that we have? I do think that there's clues out there, and I do think all of us need to use our intuition and our ability to look at the world and use some common sense, use some values that maybe we learn from our parents, hopefully, and to be able to better filter the information that we're getting from the world. To help us better determine what is information that we can trust, regardless of the source, regardless of who says it. It's also about how it's being said and is the information there verifiable. In the world today, there is so much abundant information, and it's available online, I think the biggest challenge, like I said, is verifying and trusting the information is very challenging to, to do today. So let's talk through some of the tips to help you verify and trust information. And there is a spectrum here of people's perception of whether or not they can trust any information. So, I think one of the key things is understand the source, understand where it's coming from. Always check the source of the information you come across, and also look for information from reputable sources. Not always reputable sources will be the government or government websites or academic institutions or well-known news outlets. Those are not always the most reliable I'm sorry to say this, but that's just the truth now more than ever. There are agendas out there, and I think we all need to agree to be cautious about all information and apply common sense reasoning and critical thought. This is one of the most important skills that kind of gets back to what I was talking about earlier about interpersonal communication and trust too. Is be cautious about all sources of information. But I will say that my own experience here over the last couple years is information from more independent sources seem to be maybe a little bit more passing the sniff test of common sense and reasoning and thinking about how is best for our society to operate, right? And think about relationships and think about our society and our culture. Some of the mainstream media sources and the government, they don't always feel like they're giving us reliable, good, trustworthy information about what's happening in the world because you see the world through your own eyes and you talk to other people and you verify things that you see in the world. And sometimes those things just don't match up. And I think we've seen that happen a lot more over the last couple of years. And I do think some independent sources are starting to be seen as more reliable and trustworthy. And independent sources are what it feels like are the only journalistic sources that are available out there while we will see or hear from our leaders and our governments that independent sources are the source of misinformation or incorrect information or information that needs to be eliminated. That is a red flag to me that there's something else going on here because our society and our culture, at least Western society and Western culture, has been built on a fabric of more open free speech and more free speech type of communication. So as you think about these issues, apply your common sense, apply your own experience in your own life to the information that you get, and verify this stuff. Look for evidence to support whatever claim is being made and compare that to your own experience. Sure, check for reliable citations, check for statistics, I think data is a very important component of pulling this apart, but data can also be manipulated. And so also look for other references to support your claims or support other people's claims. Are there people out there that disagree with those claims? Are there people out there that agree? Are— and who are those people? And are they considered to be credible sources? I think these are all important aspects of trust. Oftentimes mainstream sources, I'm sorry to say, just can't be trusted anymore because they feel like an agenda. They feel like they're trying to push something on us that doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel natural. It doesn't feel like it's common with our society and our culture, at least my experience anyway. Now I could be wrong. I'm not saying that I'm entirely correct on everything that I say, as most information has an agenda. And I think we just have to just step back and say, generally, all information has some element of an agenda behind it. And mainstream sources do too. What is their financial affiliations? Who are their advertisers? Who is supporting that network? There's the potential that those folks are being influenced by money. As more and more we suspect and we're seeing examples and exposure of corruption in our society and in our culture and our government and our institutions, I think those are factors that we have to think about. And also consider the information author, right? Who is the one that's putting this information out? Could that author have a bias? Could that author be funded by some group or some corporation or some agency that has a bias agenda that they want to put out there? Is the government somehow behind this? I think as we've seen with some of the information that's come out about the government entanglement with maybe social media platforms, that there may be some interest in trying to suppress certain type of speech, certain type of topics and influence the promotion of other types of topics. Those type of things do not build trust. So, so just be aware of where the information comes from. Do your research. Think with a critical eye. Don't just assume that just because it comes from a mainstream source that it's reliable. Information that you should automatically just trust. Look at opposing views, look at opposing sources, and to try and get a more balanced view on a particular topic, open the other side of your brain that is more open to flexibility and looking at things as gray topics, not black and white topics. And also, the last piece of this too is question the fact-checking tools. And I think some of those fact-checking tools are funded by government, corporations with agendas. So you have to question the fact-checkers. That's the other part of trusting what you hear. So, so verify trusted information and just be skeptical use your critical thinking, and obviously look for as reliable sources as you can. So that's the main segment of the show today, but I wanted to get into some comments and some show feedback from episode 2 before we wrap this episode up. So a couple of comments that were in the threads on a variety of different, like YouTube and other platforms. Beauty Bubble wrote, oh, the brilliance of Rob Greenlee. Thank you, Beauty Bubble. It makes me so happy. All of this with Coach Jenny and has really created quite a liftoff week for the 100 TV network this past week. And Claudia Santiago also wrote, thanks Rob, for your insights. So good. And, and so thank you for all the feedback. I definitely want to hear from you. I'm on Twitter, obviously on YouTube, so you can give me feedback on these topics and what your thoughts are on them. I definitely want to hear from you about your topics on trusted information. Where are you getting that trusted information? I would love to hear from you. You can post those on Twitter @RobGreenlee. You can also do them on LinkedIn @RobGreenlee as well, but do it in YouTube or do it in any podcast listening platform too, so you can get this show on those platforms as as well. So thank you so much for listening today. I definitely appreciate you being here. I'm doing episodes every week of this show, and I'm going to increasingly build this show out as an audio podcast as well. So please join me if you can't see the video or you prefer to listen to this podcast as an audiophile. I definitely want to encourage you to actually do that. And be connected with me. I want to be here for you. I want to be that helpful person that gives you some ideas on how to think about your life and the information that flows to you and from you to others. Can you help others feel trustworthy? Can you help others trust you? And I think at the end of the day, that's the key point here. Is you want to have people trust you. And that's critical to all of our success as a society and as a world. So thank you for joining me on episode 3 of this series. I'll be back the following week with episode 4. And so look for me on Mondays. That's when it's aired for the first time on YouTube. So, and then this show will be on demand in YouTube and in as a podcast as well. So you'll be able to catch up with this series over there. I hope that you have a fantastic week and I hope that things this week turns out terrific for you and in your life. And like I said, please let me know if you have any questions or comments. My email address is Rob robgreenlee@gmail.com and would love to hear from you. Please feel free to express yourself. I will talk about your email in the show next week. So get that email out to me as soon as you can think about it and fit it into your schedule. I would love to hear from you. So please write me. I appreciate you so much and tune back into the show next week and we can talk more about this topic. I will find another derivative topic of this that we can explore and expand. So thank you so much for spending time with me today. Thanks.