Assessing Your Emotional Intelligence (feat. Alison Whitmire)

Hi, I'm Susan Drum and welcome to the Enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness and a different dream office backdrop. Today we are going to be talking about a very powerful assessment, the EQ assessment, or emotional intelligence that Learning in Action brings. And I am excited to introduce Alison Witmeier. So Alison is the president of Learning in Action whose focus is to help people reveal blind spots and create awareness resulting in breakthroughs. She's an authority in the emotional and relational intelligence space which focuses in on our capacity to be in relationship with others, each even in times of conflict, and how we can develop that capacity through conscious awareness and intention. Allison is a professional certified Coach, a Master EQ Practitioner, and has thousands of hours of experience coaching CEOs and business owners. She's a certified yoga teacher and a TEDX speaker and a three time TEDx conference organizer. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago. And I am just thrilled to welcome you, Alison.

Thank you so much, Susan. I'm happy to be here.

Now, you know, I love this assessment and I kind of call it EQ and empathy because it also measures your capacity for empathy, accuracy and empathy, compassion. And I think that is such an important topic, particularly given today's environment. But it's a tool I've been using with my clients and it's quickly becoming a regular part of our leadership development programs. So I'm super excited to bring you in to talk about this tool and what it offers. So maybe we'll start a little bit about what is the assessment and what makes it unique.

Yeah, it's called the EQ profile and the idea is it provides a profile, a snapshot of your internal experience, in other words, what's going on inside of you in relationship, particularly under a little bit of stress. And it's uniquely determined. In other words, it's completely different in how it assesses eq. Most of the EQ assessments out there are very much about tell me about how emotionally intelligent you are and then we will sort that all out and tell you back exactly what you told us, which will tell you exactly how emotionally intelligent you are. Right, Right. Not super helpful. And so what this instrument does is it captures our internal experience by putting us inside mock conflicts that are the kinds of conflicts that we would experience day to day in our work setting. And then we are asked, or we ask the participants to reveal, like what was going on inside you? What did you think? What did you want, what did you feel? What was your experience of yourself? What was your experience of the other person? And we capture all that, and then what we get is not what the person would say and not what the person would do and. Or what they would say they would do. Right. But instead what's actually going on inside of them. What they're thinking, what they're feeling, what they're wanting, how they're seeing themselves and the other person, which then informs what.

They would actually say or do. So that's how the EQ profile is completely unique.

So it really creates what you're saying is a picture of this inner world. Like, what's going through my head right now as you're talking to me and I'm thinking through this, and I'm not going to necessarily say that to you or let you know, or I might be skeptical of something you're saying, but.

Might not even know. See, that's the other piece, and that's where emotional intelligence and relational intelligence, internal intelligence, we might say happens, is I might not even know what I'm thinking or feeling or wanting to even tell you. Because a lot of what is being captured by the instrument is what's outside of our awareness. It's in our blind spot.

That is where it reveals the blind spot.

Right.

So. So something, an internal experience that you may not even know is going on. The deepest subconscious, you know, it sounds like that. That could be running you. I'm always fascinated because I do a lot of work with executives on triggers. Like, what triggers them, because often what I see is they're triggered by something and they almost have an outsized response to it. Right. You know, maybe somebody. They feel like somebody kept a secret from them, and it really wasn't intentional. It wasn't that much of a secret, but they've made it out to be. And truly, it's triggering some old memory of when somebody kept a secret from them or something of that nature. Is that basically what this would reveal? A little bit. Why that. What's going on there?

Yeah.

What it gets up under is what our internal reaction is, like, what's going on inside of us when we're triggered. It doesn't necessarily help you predict what triggers you, because as you said, it's a little bit different for everyone. What it does reveal is, like, the meaning we're making of whatever's triggering us. So if we get angry, that'll show up. Like, that's offensive to me. If we blame ourselves, then that'll show up. If we focus on the other person as the problem that'll show up. So it's not so much the trigger that shows up, but what goes on inside of us when we are triggered and the meaning we're making of that triggering experience.

Yeah, yeah. I think it would be super helpful to hear a little bit about what difference this tool has made for people. If you've got a couple examples for us on how we use this with leaders.

Yeah, so I've got a couple of.

Examples and we can determine as we go if you want to hear both or just one. I work largely with entrepreneurs and business owners of small to medium sized businesses. And one of the things I've learned after working with that market for 17 years now is that their company, our company, I'll include me in this since I'm an entrepreneur too. Our internal experience shows up in the company in ways we don't know and can't see. So the company, its challenges, its successes, its secrets, its culture is an expression of the leader, of the CEO, of the entrepreneur, often in ways that they have no idea. So they will, perhaps all of us will tend to otherize. You know, we'll tend to say, oh, the culture and that person and this problem that is about them. And particularly when we're a business owner, particularly when we're the entrepreneur. No, actually it's some part of us that is showing up in the organization. So what this, I'll give you an example. I worked with a particular entrepreneur who goes into incredibly nascent spaces in which he's not only having to sell into a new market, but actually create the market and educate the market. So I was working with him and his pattern is this. He will set these extraordinary goals for himself and his company. And not just set high goals, but set high goals in incredibly uncertain circumstances which doubling down. And then when there's incredibly high goals and uncertain circumstances are met, he will tend to beat himself up. Beat himself up, beat himself up. And then that beating that he takes from himself shows up in terms of a need to really self soothe and how he tends to self suit is with food.

Oh yeah.

So he'll eat and he'll eat and he'll eat and he'll eat and then the pounds come on and then he's ashamed of that and then ashamed of that. Then he'll try some incredibly challenging like workout routine, incredibly challenging food routine. And of course same thing, isn't able to hit those goals, beats himself up again, turns to food. So he wasn't able to see that pattern when we used the EQ profile with him and he could see the shame, just the skyrocketing shame and some sadness. And he was bullied as a child and that came out in the debrief as well. So when he was able to see what was going on inside him, when he was able to detect and we were able to sort through, wow, this is the pattern I keep doing over and over and over again in my entire life and it's making me miserable. Then we were able to change his internal experience, change his internal narrative by saying the mantra we just kept saying over and over again is don't beat the puppy. And we are the puppy. Particularly. It's like potty training. A puppy is brand new. It doesn't know what it's like. You can't beat the puppy. The puppy will disconnect from you. The puppy will be angry, be hurt. That's not how you train a puppy. Similarly, he was trying to go into all these brand new spaces and do huge things for the first time and then beating himself up. So, so when he dove into like don't beat the pup, don't beat the.

Puppy, don't beat the puppy.

He's more gentle with himself. And you know, I recommended some books on self compassion, some self compassion exercises in it. And this is a life work. But he's become to do that. And what's happening is the weight is falling off. Not that that was the point, but the weight is naturally falling off because the food isn't there to sell. He doesn't need the food to self soothe. He's self soothing himself. He's loving himself more. And he's recognizing he's more at choice about whether or not oh, like before he'd take on this great big enormous project or goal, do it nonconsciously. And now he can go, you know, I could do that. Yeah, I'm going to choose not to now or not at this time. We're not as big.

That's what I was wondering if he ended up changing his the way he did his goal planning so that, I mean it just sounds like he kept setting himself up to create the experience where he would beat himself up.

Exactly.

Right, Exactly. That's what's this myth of Sisyphus thing that we have going on. And we all do this. He's not unique. His pattern is unique to him. I haven't met anyone on this planet who doesn't have a pattern of some kind. Even if it's the imprint is light or the imprint is heavy.

We all have an Imprint.

And it stays in control of us as long as we're not conscious of it. And when we become conscious of it, we have more choice around it.

Yeah, absolutely. And so now he has the opportunity to stop recreating what happened to him. That's what I. You mentioned. He was bullied as a child. And so he just created that experience for himself in the workplace.

He just took over where other people left off.

Yeah, yeah.

Before anyone could do it to him.

Isn't it interesting that we can see for others, but we can't see it for ourselves?

It's so true.

It's so clear. And that's why there are coaches and.

That'S why assessments like this. Right. It's showing you what you can't, you know, see for yourself as a result of that.

And there's reasons for that. And the reasons we can't see it is our brain, our neurology is literally wired to keep us from seeing it. Because.

Why is that?

Well, so we are born, all of us as babies are born into this life with very nascent brain development. Only like the brain stem and the most primitive parts of the brain are developed. The rest of the brain is developed in the first few years of life. And in those first few years of life, everything we do is mediated through the relationships around us. We learn what's okay, what's not okay, what's rejected, what's accepted, what's denied, what's celebrated, what's rewarded, what's punished. We learn all of that from the people around us. And then we assimilate it. And our brains literally wire together in a ways that assimilate this good, this bad, this right, this wrong. And we push down the parts of ourselves that don't fit into that. And we literally push down so just we can't see it anymore. We push it out of our awareness so that no one else will see.

It as a survival technique.

As a survival technique.

Thanks for survive.

Yeah.

In the relationship with all these people that.

Yeah. Is there anything you can tell us a little bit about the assessment in more detail, how it's administered, what. What type of information? We've talked about it kind of generally, but maybe a little bit more like the. I know it well, but the different categories, because I found as I studied the tool this to be incredibly helpful. And I mentioned one of them being empathy and that ability to measure your accuracy and your compassion. That one in particular would be great to talk about, but some of the other things. That'd be great.

Yeah, sure. So for the Most part, we train coaches like you in the administration of the instrument. And coaches like you then administer it with their clients.

And so any leader out there, and if you're not working with a coach.

And you want to take the assessment, you can come learning in action. We'll match you with a coach.

And so what happens is you, everything's.

Online, you go on, you get your invitation to take the assessment, you're presenting with these series of videos, you're asked to respond a series of statements and you get a report and you sit down with a certified practitioner to debrief your results. So the report will tell you this is what the instruments measuring and saying, it doesn't come alive until you breathe life into it.

So you bring your own life experience and you bring that to the debrief with your coach, say these are the kinds of conflicts I'm getting into, like can you help me read what's going on inside of me that are leading to those conflicts? And the trained practitioner can help you connect what's happening outside in your life that you're non consciously creating and recreating. Again, that is actually the common denominator within you. That's creating it. That's in report. The seven dimensions that are measured in the instrument is first, access to a range of feelings. And so what we're measuring is what emotions do you tend to over access, perhaps what emotions do you tend to under access? And of course we learn that from our earliest experiences from our caregivers, what emotions are okay and what aren't.

So the example would be the shame that you mentioned in the last example, over indexing on shame.

Over indexing on shame.

Yeah.

And then of course we have a lifetime of experience that informs the emotions that we access and those that we don't. So that's one dimension. Another dimension is what we call positive negative orientation, which is just another way of saying do we see life, others, ourselves in the situation as half empty or half full and do we tend to lean more like, oh, that's not only half full, that's three quarters full, you know, or do we something else? And so because that influences our relationship with everything and everyone, the third dimension is what we call self, other orientation, which is just another way of saying is that when I'm under stress, where do I look for responsibility? Do I tend to look to myself to like, how am I going to fix this? What did I do to do this? How am I going to get out of this? Or do I look to outside myself to say, you know, this all happened because of something out there and it's something out there that needs to change. So that's the third dimension. The fourth dimension is looks at all of the dimensions of our internal experience, our thinking, our feeling and our wanting and looks at the extent to which we rely on those different access. Am I really heady? Do I really come from my head and think, analyze and yeah, yeah, trying to figure everything out? Am I operating like out of my emotions and am I overly saturating my relationship with emotions or do I bleed from my what I want to have happen and act and fix and do and plan. And ideally we want to be integrating and evenly accessing all those dimensions and not relying on one over the other. And that's what we're measuring there. And to the fifth dimension, to your point, is empathy accuracy. How accurately are we able to identify what someone else is thinking, feeling, wanting and then empathy, compassion, which is how much am I willing to join in the experience of another, not just see and care about but like really join in. And then the last dimension is what we call relationship strategies, which is just an indication of once I have that entire experience of my thinking, my feeling and my wanting tapping into me, tapping into you. Now who do I trust in this relationship? Do I tend to trust me more? Do I tend to trust you more? Or do I tend to trust neither of us and just check out? That will more than anything else will indicate the way in which we engage in relationships, particularly under stress.

Yeah, yeah. So now one question that probably comes up is can you game the assessment? Because particularly some people have asked us, can we use this in hiring so we can determine is this person more likely to be a collaborator or more likely to disconnect when the tough challenges happen?

Yeah, for sure. So can it be game? I've never known anyone to be able to game it the first time they take it. Now you take anything enough, if you take it again and again, smart people can figure out a way to game it. But then like what's the point of that? Who's going to learn and grow from that? I mean, so it begins to be kind of self fulfilling. Then the, then the growth opportunity is what is it about me that feels like I need to trick myself and my coach into believing I'm actually different? Like then that becomes the work. But so can it be game? I have not met anyone who can figure out the way that this is constructed while they're taking it to game it. And it's because you don't know what it is you're giving up about yourself.

In the process of doing it. Got it, Got it. Okay.

Oh, sorry. And I did want to pick up on what you said about hiring.

Yeah.

So we strongly recommend that this is not used for hiring. And it's because what I just said, people don't know what it is they're giving up about themselves, and it's unfair. People say, well, you know, hey, in order to get this job, you've got to take this EQ profile. People say, sure, okay, I'll do it. But they don't know that they're really revealing their innermost selves, and it feels unfair. We have ethical reasons for not. Not recommending that people use it that way.

Okay. Yeah. Good to know. And what do you say to skeptics of it? How do you approach it? What are some of the most common pushback that you get?

Yeah, well, we embrace skeptics because, like, Jon Kabat Zinn has this book that says, everywhere you go, there you are. And the EQ profile reveals that. So if we are skeptical about the.

EQ profile, it's because the way we relate to ourselves, others, and our world is through skepticism. So then that becomes the work. And so the richness of the profile extends way beyond the profile itself. And it becomes, what is the client's experience around the EQ profile? Do they push back? Do they dive in? Do they delay? You know that. What is it about them that's relating to them, to the instrument in that way? So skeptics, we love skeptics. And kind of what we do is we say, you know, I hear you. I'm hearing you say, let. I don't think this is representative of me. I'm hearing you say that, you know, how. How can you know this about me just from some videos? I hear you kind of questioning the. Even though we've got this zillion page technical report, I hear you asking questions about, you know, the efficacy of that. And we say, okay, how about just for a minute, we just want to answer all those. Why don't we put those to the side for just for now and look at what's possible by exploring what's here for you. Are you open to that? And it's. It's just. I just never had a case where, you know, when people were willing to put those things aside that we didn't then have a really rich, revealing, insightful conversation. And if people aren't willing to, like, hey, I can't. Like, what's the point of having that conversation right then they're not ready.

Yeah.

They're not ready for the work, and that's okay too.

Yeah. And they're not there. And I always say, like, you are who you are in everything you do. And the way you show up to engage with the instrument is probably reflected in the results. It's uncanny. Right? You say, like, oh, yeah, I can see why that is your internal experience. And it's usually. It was designed to protect you.

Right.

To come with this skepticism. And it can be really healthy. We want to honor that and see, not let it be a roadblock. It's kind of like the difference between, honor it, but don't let it be a roadblock to exploring what there is to learn.

Yeah.

Yeah. What I would say is that accept it, see it if you want to continue engaging in the kind of behavior that it drives the. And do so consciously. Awesome. And with one kind of big proviso, all of us think we're exactly right about however we feel and act. We've spent years and years perfecting our rightness around whatever we think, feel, and do. And so that's where we want to take a really healthy degree of curiosity before we kind of protect and honor, like, what we've been doing and how we've been feeling and say, okay, like, if I'm really, really curious about what.

This is about for me and what.

It is I'm protecting and what I'm losing in the protection, then that's the richness. Yeah.

And sometimes I've seen assessments, like, great assessment, but what do I do about it? You know, do you have maybe share a little bit about the pathway? I mean, obviously, that's the work with a coach to help determine, well, what is it that you want to shift to? What's getting in your way? Right. All of those pieces. But anything you can share around, what do you do about the results?

In essence, we're encouraging is people to begin to ease the grip of the imprints that our past have on us.

We have these imprints that then create the patterns. How do we loosen the grip of those patterns? And there are many, many modalities that can be used. Of course, there's coaching, there's therapy. There's all different types of therapy. Art therapy, somatic therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. There's mindfulness. I'm also a mindfulness meditation teacher. And so taking mindfulness and meditation very seriously, that will begin to also reveal the ways in which our imprints are showing up and begin to loosen the grip. Psychedelics, plant medicine. That's a Modality that will help begin to help us become very aware of those patterns and imprints. Journaling, you know, anything we can do in which we're turning inward and looking at what's there with acceptance and love and curiosity, that will begin to loosen the.

Yeah, yeah.

Awesome.

Well, how can, you know, people curious about this? How can they learn more? Obviously, there are coaches like myself out there that are delivering these assessments for executives, but say people just want to study more or learn more about it. What could they do? Where can they find you?

Sure.

So you can find me@learninginaction.com if you want to learn more about the programs that we have for leaders, audiences that aren't coaches, you can go to learninginaction.com relationships and see what we offer there. And then, of course, we have mindful coaching certification. I don't think I told you that we have a mindful coach certification coming up in the second half of this year. And then the course of our EQ certification training that we hold several times each year for coaches.

Yeah.

Well, it was a really rich experience, both learning about the assessment and using it with my clients. So I wanted to bring this to our audience because I found it to be super powerful to help clients, and it's helped me. So that's the beauty of doing this work. I always like to say, if I'm not walking the talk, then how can I be a credible authority on leadership development?

Well, I really appreciate it, Susan. And you're doing this and doing the work that you're doing in the world. Our mission at learning in action is to heal the dividend.

And as we were talking before we went on here, I mean, we are so divided as a country, as a world, and we believe that by healing the divide within us, in other words, the ways in which we're divided from the essence of who we are, which is it's our patterns that divide us. The ways in which we can heal the divide that separate us from our essence will then heal the divide between us. So.

Yes.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much, Alison, for joining us today. Incredibly enlightening. So glad you could be part of the show today. And we'll see you on the next episode.

Thank you so much for having me, Susan.

Hope you enjoyed today's episode. And I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.