Stop Letting Your Emotions Hijack Your Success | Travis Bradberry

We have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day. We find that just 36% of people are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.

That is wild.

Our brains are structured so that emotions are the primary driver of our behavior. So if you understand what you're feeling, you can then channel that feeling into producing the behavior that you want.

What if the single biggest predictor of your success as a partner, a leader, or even a parent isn't your IQ, it's not your technical skills, but it's your ability to work with emotions?

Emotional intelligence in its simplest form is understanding what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and using that to produce the kind of outcomes that you want in life. If you think you can stuff your feelings and ignore them, they control your actions.

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries, to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's guest is Dr. Travis Bradberry. He sold over 5 million books about emotional intelligence, and he's got a new one coming out, The New Emotional Intelligence, and it's awesome. Now, in this week's conversation, we explore why emotional intelligence, EQ as it's named, is the foundation for almost everything that matters.

It doesn't matter if you throw a football for a living, conducting surgery, manage a team, doing sales, your behavior's driven by your emotions. People with higher EQs make about $37,000 more on average. Every point you increase your EQ leads to about another $1,700 in annual salary. So there is a linear connection between EQ EQ and performance and EQ and earnings.

We dig into what emotional intelligence really looks like in practice and why it's part of the foundation for living a great life in the modern world.

Just about the only thing you need to keep in mind as a parent is that—

That gives us hope.

If you can master that, you've won 90% of the battle.

I'm excited to share this one with you. So let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Travis Bradberry. Okay, Travis. Here we go. Emotional intelligence. You've got a rich and deep understanding based on research, and it seems like it's your body of work, your life work right now.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Okay. So first and foremost, like, what's important for me to know about you to really understand you?

That's a great question. I suppose my background is probably somewhat relevant. I was an undergrad studying psychology when I got exposed to emotional intelligence. There was a study that came outta Yale that Peter Salovey, who's now the Dean of Yale, conducted showing that this is a separate psychological construct of how we think that's really important to how we do in life and how we perform. And for me, growing up in a home where I wouldn't say emotions were ignored, but maybe they weren't quite valued and talked about as much as they could. You know, my mom grew up on a farm in a small town in South Dakota, and her parents, my grandparents, you know, lived through the Great Depression. This whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. So I was a young guy learning about this, thinking, I need this. I need to know more about my emotions and how I can use them more effectively. So when I started, I did a dual PhD in clinical and industrial psychology. So clinical psychology, the psychology of the individual, and industrial psych, business psychology. And I just found that emotional intelligence melded those two fields really well. So I focused all my research on that. And by the time I was a couple years into my program, my colleagues were calling me the emotional intelligence guy. And I ended up going into business with one of my professors. We developed, uh, started with an emotional intelligence test and ultimately a training program. And then I started writing books and speaking, and I've been doing this for almost 25 years now.

Awesome. So in there, there's probably some stories that we could pull on about, like, when, when you're a young man and kind of muted with emotions, what was the cost of that at any part of your life, either early times or now? Like, what was the downside of that?

Oh, wow. Yeah, the costs are massive. I mean, I can think of, you know, my wife is a psychologist as well. Oh boy.

Oh boy, you too.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

We're quite a pair. But she and I started dating in high school. We're high school sweethearts with a little break there in college before we— And I can think of how our relationship has evolved over the years. And how my mastery of my emotions and my ability to talk about them and how just that's allowed us to evolve and have more constructive conflict. You know, I can think of being young in my 20s and running a business and having employees and not having management experience and how I was able to better tolerate, perhaps, my urge to micromanage or sort of things of that nature. And then it's just personally for me, you know, we all have our things that hold us back, right? Achilles heel.. And I'm a very driven person. I'm a very competitive person. I'm a very driven person, and I'm the kind of person that will push too hard. And sometimes when you do that, you crash and burn. I mean, I did undergrad in 3 years. I did a dual PhD in 5 years. I was the first person to complete that degree on time. And there's some moments along the way where you really get tested and, and, and you get pushed really hard.

What are you trying to solve or prove? Or do with the speed that you're on. What is that about?

One is big goals. So you need to get going quick if you want to, if you have lofty ambitions. One is impatience. I'm not the most patient person you're ever going to meet. I want to go. But when it was, when I was an undergrad, you know, I still think that the way we go off to university and we learn about a lot of abstract stuff before we enter the field, I feel like it's a little twisted. I think more of the apprenticeship model as a way you should be learning a profession. So I was very impatient to be taking electrical engineering at UC San Diego when I was a psychology major. I just wanted to get it done. I wanna get the whole thing done. I wanted to get out in my PhD program where I was gonna be learning from psychologists how to practice my field. So there was a method to the madness. There's a reason I wanted to do it fast. And I feel like as I got out into the field, I became a little more patient. But yeah, those are the factors driving me.

Are you working from a more Anxious place or inspired place?

Ooh, they both get me there. They really do.

If we had a ledger, which one has more checks on it?

Yeah, I would say it's, when I was younger, definitely more anxious, right? You've got, you know, you don't have any money, you don't have any career success, you're just all ambition. And so I think anxiety, this desire to prove yourself, can really drive you. And that's really morphed because, you know, I did achieve a lot of things at a young age and certain things, I did way more than I thought I could or would. And that really shifts your perspective.

How many books did you sell?

I've sold 5 million books so far.

Yeah, there you go. Say it again.

5 million, yeah. And my original goal was to do 100,000 copies with my first book.

And you shot way too high. Way out, yeah. So, all right, well, hold on. I get your ambition, right? That you've got a motor, you gotta drive. You needed to understand how emotions work if you were going to go to the places you wanted to go. And so there's some tension inside of that. I do want us to ground on the definition of emotional intelligence.

Yeah.

So I want to get us to that, which is the kind of the bulk of this conversation. I appreciate that there's an— you're working with emotion. It's not like you just studied it. Like, they're in you now. They are a driving force for you. And as much as you can point to them and the research and the best practices, the best teacher is like how you're actually navigating with them right now and teach us from that place as well. That's what I'm hoping to do with you. Yeah. So many people, you know, when they sit in that chair or they walk on stage and present, there's a flood of emotions. I say the Olympics and World Championships are for big emotions. How are you navigating in this moment right now, whatever emotions are present? You might be like, oh, actually kind of easy, or like, whoa, all of a sudden I felt my heat turn up, or, you know, like, what, what, what's happening actually right now for you?

Yeah, that's interesting because, uh, before podcasts existed, you know, I would do a lot of TV and radio interviews, and TV especially, national TV, it's a 3-minute interview.

Better get it in.

And they want— and your publisher is— they want the sound bites. And to me, that's a tremendous amount of pressure. I love podcasts because it's conversation. And I know I can have a conversation. I don't really have anything to prove. I'm just going to share what I know and maybe ask you hopefully some good questions, and we'll have a conversation and leave it there. But there's also, for me, familiarity removes pressure because whether you consider this kind of setting with lights on you and cameras or speaking, I've spoke to some really, really large audiences, and that was really difficult for me at first. There was a lot of anxiety. And familiarity helps with that. I mean, you still have to put in the work, but it does help to have some reps, right?

Yeah. Cool. Let's do the definition. Let's start with— take us back to like 6th grade. You know, how do you clearly articulate emotional intelligence?

Yeah. So, you know, emotional intelligence in its simplest form is your awareness of emotions in yourself and others, and then what you do with that awareness. So if you understand what you're feeling, and why you're feeling it, or perhaps what someone else is feeling, why they're feeling it, what the world looks like through their eyes, you can then channel that feeling into producing the behavior that you want. So, you know, we have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day. Our brains are structured so that emotions are the primary driver of our behavior. Everything you experience in the world around you, it goes through the basic— goes to the base of your brain, travels through your limbic system. You have an emotional reaction first, right? The limbic system is where emotions are generated before you're able to think rationally about it. So if you understand what you're feeling, you then have some more choice in what kind of behavior that feeling produces. If you think you can stuff your feelings and ignore them, then they just drive the bus, right? They control your actions. So I, I'll just sort of loop back. Emotional intelligence in its simplest form is understanding what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and using that to produce the kind of outcomes that you want in life.

All right, let's pull on two pieces here. One is I want to understand if— think about like the triad here, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. And it's the syncopation of those that get us to performance. Okay. So is your position that emotions are influencing thoughts, or is it the primary driver thoughts influence emotions? Or it could be interactionist, bang, bang. You know, it's like too quick for us to really know.

Yeah.

Let me go one more turn on this because I think you'll appreciate it. You're talking about the high road and the low road. Of when information comes in. So the low road is like be— before conscious awareness, we are taking in information and responding to it from a survival mechanism, which is the limbic system.

Right.

So it's fast. Yes. Before it gets to conscious awareness. That's the high road. It takes a little bit longer to get up there. Yes.

Okay.

So you take both of those bits of information. Are you more interested in the thought to emotion or are you more interested in the emotion to thought?

I see thought and emotion operating in a loop. You know, it's the chicken and the egg type of situation. It doesn't really matter which came first, although it's probably the emotion, but it's a feedback loop. And what you think in response to what you feel then affects the trajectory of that emotion. So you can't make it go away. You can't think it away, but you can—

You can't think the emotion away.

You can't think the emotion away, but you can prolong it. You can intensify it. You can allow it to steer you in the wrong direction or in the right direction. So I think of it in terms of that, that feedback loop. And when I think of the high load, the high road and the low road, you've gotta understand that I've worked with some really low EQ people over the years in very high level positions. They have way too much responsibility to have low EQ. And some of them, they go on the low road for a very long time, right? It's, it's almost like the way you might respond if you were attacked by by a lion for 30 seconds. They run that out for 20 minutes, you know, just throwing chairs and yelling. And it's just— some people can be very, very hijacked for their emotions.

Do they know it, in your opinion? Do they know that they are working from the primal limbic system and that's governing or running the whole show?

I think it's more of a 'this is the way I am' type of thing. I'm just a yeller. And, you know, a lot of finger-pointing, 'a lot of people deserve it' type of mentality. That's, that's what I see a lot of. Yeah.

Let's go back to the thought-emotions loop is when I design, let's call it training or intervention, emotions are bottom-up and then thoughts are top-down.

Okay.

Is how I think about it. And so we can devise bottom-up strategies for training and top-down strategies depending on what is most available to the person. Like, oh yeah, man, I get caught in my head and I'm just looping on this thing. And yeah, I have these feelings that like, I don't, ah, it's just unsettled or whatever. The narrative is. Oh good, let's go top-down and let's get— let's start working with them thoughts. Now people are like, man, I feel sick to my stomach, or like, it's just I'm flooded down there. Oh, we're gonna do some bottom-up strategies. Yes. Where do you go with training? Because I know you know training.

Yeah.

Where do you go with training?

Well, I, I like, I like your, your, your model there, you know. Um, and I think the people that are pretty aware of their emotions are candidates for top-down. Right? So some people are— they're so aware of them, but they don't know what to do with them. Right? And they get caught in these thought loops. And the people that don't understand their emotions, they just know they're feeling something and they don't know what to do. You know, those are your bottom-up types. My plan or my focus with training and even in writing a book is it has to be tailored to the individual because there are different levels of awareness. There are different understandings of emotion approaches, just like you just shared. And so if you don't give someone a tailored approach, they're not you're not going to go very far. And that's why, you know, for example, you know, my book comes with a test. There's a passcode and you can go and take a test and see how you score, what your score profile is, how you look, you know, in a unique way. And that's a test that, you know, we sell for $50 without the book. But it's— I'd be a hypocrite if I wrote the book and didn't give someone a test when I'm— I believe in a tailored approach.

I also think $50 for that assessment is, is pretty cheap. Like, yeah, you did a nice job on helping bring to the surface patterns. Yeah, you know, and so nice job on that. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Mack Weldon. If you've been a community member here at Finding Mastery for a while, you know our position on confidence. It's built from the inside out. It's not about flash. It's about really knowing who you are and showing up with clarity and conviction, a sense of purpose with substance. And that's why I'm so excited about what Mack Weldon is doing. They make clothes for men who live that same philosophy. It's understated, it's sharp, it's grounded in quality pieces that do not scream for attention. More like they quietly say, I've got this. Right now I'm wearing their Latitude Bomber. It's clean, it's simple, travels really well. And whether I'm heading to work with an organization or just grabbing dinner, it's great. And their silver and denim jeans, it's an elevated fit, it's got great fabric, and somehow they feel broken in from day one. They did a really nice job with them. And what stands out most to me is their mindset. Mack Weldon believes, quote, "Knowing is more important than showing." And that really resonates here with what we're doing at Finding Mastery, working from the inside out.. And if that aligns with how you want to move through the world, I'd encourage you to go check them out. Head to macweldon.com and use the code Finding Mastery for 20% off your first order of $100 or more. Again, use the code Finding Mastery at macweldon.com for 20% off your first order of $100 or more. Okay, before we get to the assessment piece, if somebody wants to increase their emotional intelligence, emotions. Let's start— let's say you start with an assessment. Okay, good standard. Let's say somebody does not have available resources to go buy the book. They don't have available resources. I'm not sure who that is in our community. Of course, people are going to be flooded buying your book here. Where would you suggest they start right now before the book arrives to get a little bit better at emotions?

Well, you have to think about what your strengths and weaknesses likely are.. And there's a great deal of research that shows that the most accurate representation of your behavior is not what you think, it's what everybody else sees, right? So in leadership trainings in companies, we do a lot of 360 assessment where you rate yourself and your peers rate you and your supervisor or supervisors rate you and your direct reports rate you, and then you get a comparison of those things. And the people with the most accurate ratings are the top performers. So if you're waiting for the book to come, you need to go talk to somebody, your, maybe your business partner or a colleague or your spouse and say, hey, I just learned about this emotional intelligence model on this podcast. Here are these 4 skills. Where do you think my strengths and weaknesses are? Right? What should I be working on? What should I be leaning into doing more of? I think, yeah, that's it.

That would be good. So you're, you're an advocate of exposing blind spots as a way to get better.

Absolutely. Because, you know, we'll, we'll talk about the 4 skills, right? But emotional intelligence hinges on self-awareness. That's the first skill. You can't go anywhere until you increase your self-awareness.

You and I are singing at the same table, the high note. It all begins with awareness. Yes. And I will say that awareness alone will never be enough. No. It's important, it's necessary, but not sufficient. I'll say that again. But when you only are aware, it actually compounds the experience and can make it a much more difficult experience for you. Case in point, I'm aware, let's say, that I'm sick to my stomach because I'm so nervous. Boy, I'm aware, but I have no skills to manage it. Yeah. And now I'm even more aware that my stomach is in knots and I'm sweating and, and I'm, man, I'm even more aware. I wonder what they're thinking. Are they noticing me? So I'm, my awareness is heightened. It's gone from an internal awareness, good, to an external, like navigating of what they might be thinking. And I don't have the skills to actually maneuver through that. And that's why I wanted to talk to you. Okay. And so awareness alone is not enough. I do want to get to the 4 main skills, and I want to do one more thing here, which is how do we move from where we are— this is like a big question— where we are now globally with our lack of emotional intelligence to where you envision if you could envision the world flourishing? So this is a big arc from to, from the state we're in now to something significantly better.

Yeah, that's an interesting one. It's an interesting because, so when I started this work, there was the first big emotional intelligence book came out in 1995 and it was on Oprah twice and it was on the COVID of Time magazine. And for those who didn't remember Oprah, if your book was on Oprah, you had it made, right?

And so this was not your book.

No, this is not my book. Dan Goleman's book.

Yeah.

So when I was starting my career 6 years after that, people said, aren't you worried this is a fad? This is going to go away. And I've heard that for the last 25 years. And the opposite has happened. Emotional intelligence has increasingly become a part of the vernacular. You see it in people's dating profiles. They say, I'm looking for someone who's emotionally intelligent. I never thought I'd see something like that. That's wild. To me. So that's good. That's progress. Uh, the only way we're going to get anywhere is through people putting in the work. It's one thing to talk about, it's another thing to have some personal accountability and work on it. And the thing that I struggle with where the United States is as a society as a whole is when I look at all the political divisiveness and, and the, the separation and conflict around that, it seems not a very constructive approach to us making progress. So I see things that are progress, I see things that are more difficult. I don't know if they're exacerbating motivated by social media or what the deal is, why we're becoming so polarized in this country. But, you know, the country, like a person, there's kind of strengths and weaknesses, and we need a path to follow.

I think on the emotional skill set, it's a little bit like a barbell mechanism for me that I think we're overstimulated with emotions and then kind of numbed at the same time, like the weights on the barbell. And that kind of sweet spot in the middle is just not well traveled.

Yeah. And there's— and we're spending less time face to face. I mean, I have a 16-year-old and I'm watching him date and it's like, wow, there are a lot of conversations that happen in text before there's any face to face. How the heck do you understand a person sending sentences back and forth? You know, it's wild to me.

So you're saying we got to work to get to a state. The other thing I think is also important is the difference between emotions and feelings. Feelings. Are you aligned with Antonio Damasio's kind of differentiation between feelings and emotions, or— and Damasio is one of the USC professors, leading thinker, as you know. And he's essentially saying that emotions are the physical observable sensations, and then feelings are the subjective making sense of the emotion. So feelings are private, emotions are observable in public.

Yeah, well, you need to be able to label what you're feeling, or you label your emotion and call it a feeling, right? So there is no absolute measure of what you're feeling, and any language you can have around it so that you can better understand what you're feeling, I, I think that's, that's a positive thing. So in that sense, I agree with this model, and I'm not too in one camp or the other in how you should go about it. It's just a matter of, as as an individual, do you have a way to really take a look at what you're feeling? Do you have a way to identify these emotions and understand them? And that's the path you need to be on, however you do that.

Cool. So, and we'll do it one more time, that emotions, like this observable nature of emotions, meaning they're physiological. So if I'm sweating or my hands are shaking and my breathing is changing, those are all emotions. My interpretation of those states could be, I am so excited. Or it could be, oh, this is what love feels like for me. Or it could be, I'm out of my mind scared. Yes. Right? So it's the— that's a feeling, the labeling of the observable emotional expression.

Yes. And often it's a combination of the two.

It can be.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So when I, you know, a lot of people in my field that are authors, especially that cater to the business world more. I mean, I certainly— not that I don't sell books to people that are individuals trying to improve themselves. They're on the speaking circuit, and I know people that love it. They're like, you know, Ram Charan doesn't even have a home.

Who is it?

Ram Charan. I don't know. He speaks to businesses, and he goes hotel to hotel 365 days a year. He's at the Plaza. The only place he goes back to if he doesn't have place to be is the Plaza in New York.

And what does he talk about? I gotta go check him out.

Oh, he's a high-level strategy guy. So it'd be like C-suite team, let's, let's work on strategy. Okay, cool. I'm not that guy. I like to be home. I'm pretty introverted. And so put me in front of a room of 5,000 people and yeah, I'm feeling some anxiety and I'm also feeling some excitement. It's a mix. But what allowed me to overcome that, because I'll just tell you, I'll, I'll be vulnerable here early in my career. Uh, especially because when you, people are paying you a lot of money to speak, they expect a lot. I would have a drink before I would go on stage so I could be fun. And that would, and that would make me calm and it would make me outgoing. And that's not how I, I'm sad I'm not doing this for 20 years.

Same said Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Exactly.

Yeah. Okay. And, and now I have a bottle. No, I, you know, it's something I did for a little a while until I learned how to channel all that anxiety and all that excitement and let the excitement win and just go out there and go for it. So my, my point is, to, to go back to what you're saying, is it's often a mix, and understanding that mix can take you pretty far when you're feeling something.

Would you think that drinking alcohol before a nervous event is always a maladaptive coping mechanism, or Or would you be so bold to say, ah, I mean, yeah, it's dangerous, but it works. And where would you position your voice there?

I mean, for me, you know, when I was doing it, I was saying, well, it wouldn't make me, I wasn't drinking enough to do anything absurd, you know? And I would do well in the talk, but my goal is to have a mindful approach. And at the time I felt like, perhaps I couldn't do it on my own. And that's what I worked towards.

Got it.

Yeah. And it's a little, I don't know, I'm not one to drink in a work setting. So it's a little bit weird to like be drinking and going on stage. I don't know. So it wasn't aligned sort of like with how I wanted to be.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, I feel the same way. I purposely like, I've got some structure about how I go about ready. You know, there's preparation and there's readiness. So you do training/preparation, and then the final dusting is readiness. And so that readiness, I definitely don't want to have anything to do with alcohol. It mutes me. Yeah. As opposed to like opens me. So yeah, I'm totally with you on that. Okay, let's, let's do this. You said something. I want to get to the 4 pillars of your model, but you said you can have 2 emotions at the same time, which I'm confused by that. I don't have the internal experience that I can be excited and scared at the same moment. I feel like I can toggle back and forth, but tell me more about what you're experiencing and what that insight that you can have two at the same time.

You have, as you mentioned, when you feel an emotion, you have sort of this physiological arousal that happens. And oftentimes it is a combination of feelings. It's just how you, in that moment, what's producing that. And okay, sometimes it's very linear and one wins over, but I don't know a better example than my speaking. Okay, I'll give you another one. There's theorists in the field that don't believe anger is a real emotion. It's not a core emotion. And that's because a lot of people funnel their emotions into anger.

I consider it a secondary color. Secondary. Like there's primary colors, you know? And then there's a secondary. You need a couple combinations or you need something else. To get to anger. I'm curious your take on it.

So, so the way I see it is, you know, the, the thing, the thing that I teach in my book is to understand that you're using the anger funnel. So you take a less palatable emotion like fear. So someone does something that makes you feel threatened, that makes you feel really uncomfortable. So you get mad at them, right? And the reality is you don't like feeling threatened, you don't like, uh, feeling vulnerable. And so you don't wanna sit with that. That. So you're very willing to sit with anger. But my point is, though, the water gets muddy really quick. At one point, are you just vulnerable and threatened? And at what point are you angry? It's a mix.

I like, I like your, your language around a funnel. Yeah, that's like the primary to secondary color. I feel like anger is a second hit. Yeah, there's a first hit that comes in, and hurt or fear are kind of the two that, for me at are the ones I've seen with athletes when they're embarrassed or hurt or let down, something on that scale versus the other scale, which is like vulnerable, scared, da da da, that those can funnel right into a response that's more, oftentimes it can be more facilitative. You know, there's an energy around anger for performance at least. I'm not advocating anger. I think we need less anger in our world.

Yeah.

You know, but I think what you're saying, if you're aware that you're in the funnel, then you can make a choice.

Right, because if you wait until you completely come out the other side and it's like, it's full-blown anger. Then let's say you're an athlete, you're yelling at the umpire and you're getting kicked out of a playoff game, right? So that's a bad outcome. But there's a moment where you, you, you feel vulnerable, you're in a slump, you just got a bad call for strike 3 and you start to get angry, but you don't do anything with it, right? So that's why I say it's kind of a mix. There's, there's, there's states where you're sort of in limbo between two emotions. You gotta choose which, which path you're gonna follow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is a great clip. Edelman is, uh, he's playing for the Patriots. It's an intense moment. He gets called for something. He comes flying to the ref like he's gonna front the ref and argue with the ref. And the ref looks at him, you know, like, are, are you really up in my space right now? 'Cause you can get ejected. You know, there's lots of things that additional penalties. And then it was awesome. Edelman takes this moment and he goes, oh, I'm working on it. I'm working on this. I just get so mad so quickly. And then he smiles. Smiles, the ref smiles, he runs away, and it's a good moment. So for me, it captures just about everything. It's like sometimes I need somebody outside of me to look at me like, what, what's going on? And if I haven't done some work, I can't be light about it. I can't shift out of that state. And, and so I just love that clip. I'm going to send it to you and make sure it is Edelman. But nice, you know, Julian, if you're listening, I gotta talk to you about it. So, all right, what do you think? You want to go to the— your model model?

Yeah.

And kind of open that up.

Yeah, let's do that.

Yeah. 4, 4 pieces to your model.

So we talked about self-awareness, right? That's opens the door. When you're working on your emotional intelligence, you're working on increasing your self-awareness. You are constantly leaning into the discomfort and trying to see something new. I've done a lot of work with really high-level execs, very successful people, and I'm continually amazed at how willing they are to suffer. To get ahead, but the moment it comes to increasing their self-awareness, they can't tolerate it.

It's hard now. It's hard.

It's hard. And that's because we're taught that this is the way we are. So you don't wanna look at the blemishes, but that's not how EQ works. That's not how the region of the brain is structured. It's very plastic and malleable. So when you lean into the discomfort, when you learn what you should be doing differently, you are opening up opening doors and you can, you can change your behavior.

Make this concrete. Tell a story or invite me into an experience you've had that highlights the, the, the self-awareness training.

Sure. So early on in my career, I would do executive coaching and that's something eventually my business got too big and I was just whatever, the author and the speaker. I didn't get to do it anymore, but I really enjoyed it. I was working with an executive at a telecommunications communications company, and she was very successful. She was an up-and-comer, but she really rubbed her team the wrong way. So there were some performance problems that were the result of her inability to be effective with people. She was the proverbial bull in a china shop type of leader. So we took her through the 360 process that I mentioned. She got to see what she thought, she got to see what everybody else thought, and we talked about some different approaches. We increased her self-awareness. She also happened to be a very, very fired-up softball coach. You know, she'd sit there in session, she'd tell me how many inches her daughter's pitches would break. And you know, it had to be, she had to get that out. So we talk about that. I love baseball. Great. No problem. We could talk about it. So she comes into session one day and she says, um, yeah, so I was at practice last night and, uh, one of the dads comes over and he, you know, grabs the chain link fence and he says, you're, you're working with an executive coach, aren't you? And she said, I said, did Travis tell you? How do you know? He said, I can tell by how you're treating the girls. So she didn't realize that she was treating the girls differently. We worked on self-awareness of how she approached people in a business setting, and it translated. It opened a door to how she was as a softball coach. And I see that a lot.

Our bodies matters. If you want to live a high-performing life, if you want to live a good life, nutrition is part of it. So is your psychology, so is investing in your craft, so is being part of a community that's switched on. All of that matters. I want to talk about a company that I go to for supplementation that I think is a really important part of my nutrition game. It's Momentous. The reason that I love what they're doing is that everything that they build is based on NSF certification. So NSF for Sport basically means that what's in the label is actually in the product, which means that athletes who get tested on a regular basis, they can take this stuff knowing that what they're taking is actually what's in the product. I know the founder, I know their team, I really trust what they're doing, and I just want to talk about— they've got a new product, it's called Creatine Lemon. And great, creatine, it's been tested, we understand the value of creatine by now. Good for cognition, good for muscle growth. But the thing that I actually love about this product is the form that it's in. When I'm on the road, which happens a lot, I don't need to kind of figure out how to get the tub into my luggage. They figured it out for me. So I love what they're doing from what's on the inside. I love the product form is awesome. I want to encourage you to go check them out as well. Why do people change?

Why do people change? Oh wow.

Um, because to do self-awareness work means that you're gonna— you're looking for a change. And I think there's two— there's a hinge idea about being uncomfortable and actually changing. And so what is your insight around why people change?

I mean, I think it's because they're motivated to get better.

That's interesting.

And it could be that you're motivated to just be a better version of yourself or to not be bad, right? Sometimes maybe let's think of your spouse says, I really wish you wouldn't do X, Y, and Z. And you're like, well, I don't want to bum my partner out, so I'm gonna make a change. But it's motivation to get better either way.

So yeah, I think that that's right. And I think that that's aspirational. And my experience has been, and there's a book on, it was foundational, I don't know if you remember from grad school, "How Do People Change?" That was the title. And one of the big insights from that, from the book and from my own experience is that people need to experience some sort of suffering and pain. So pain is why we change. Like, I'm done with this. Yeah, I can't keep doing this. Why am I— why am I stuck in— like, there's like something that has to go through a filter, be like, I'm gonna do the work. So self-awareness, it's a bit of work. Yeah, yeah. Like, okay, self-awareness is the first pillar. What would you suggest? 1, 2, 3 practices to increase self-awareness.

360, you hit on Yeah, or any form of assessment. So any sort of objective look at you.

Okay.

The rest are exercises, right? Like the anger funnel exercise. Or another really good one is you spot it, you got it. And the idea with you spot it, you got it is there's stuff that people do all day long that is potentially very annoying, yet certain things get our goat, right? And they just really, really rub us the wrong way. And that's because they reveal something about us that we know we need to work on. It could be a struggle with confidence and you see someone else struggling with confidence that really bothers you. It could be something you're not even aware that you need to work on that someone else is struggling with.

Spot it, you got it.

You spot it, you got it.

It's clever. And another strategy I really liked in your writing was watching movies. Actors are really good at working from emotions. Is this a self-awareness practice or is this a self-management practice, which is the second pillar?

Well, the way I translate that into a strategy in the book is to think of your life like the movie. Movies. So when you're watching the movie, the protagonist is about to do something and you're like, no, you know, you can see it coming because you have an objective understanding of what you're looking at. You need to learn how to do that mentally about your own life. You need to be able to pull back and see that, that higher level view. That is self-awareness in action.

Yeah, another way to watch a movie. Yeah. Okay, self-awareness to self-management, right? Define that and give us some practices.

So self-management is what you do with what you're feeling. Okay, so the mistake people think about self-management is that it's somehow stuffing your feelings or turning them off. You can't do that.

You can. It's not very good, right? So you're saying you just can't?

I don't think you can. I think you convince yourself that you did, that you stuffed it down. And in my experience, when you do that, it erupts to the surface in unexpected ways.

Is that— is that— I don't know the research on this. Is that research-based or is that your intuition?

That's my intuition, yes.

So there's been plenty of times, like let's say Recently, somebody— oh, it was just recently. It was just yesterday. Yeah, this is good. I lost a dear friend, and I was on a call with one of our friends, and we were talking about the experience, and I was— I needed to kind of transition in the next kind of, I don't know, 2 minutes to something else, and we're just getting ready to end the call, and we're telling each other how much we appreciate each other and da da da. And I was totally kind of rich in my throat with sadness and just all of those feelings that you can conjure up. And I recognized it, and I was like, not just— not now though. Like, yeah, yeah, I just couldn't go to that place. And I haven't opened the valve since, right? So I put it somewhere. I didn't open the aperture, have it move from my throat to my jaw, behind my eyes. I didn't— I didn't let that happen.

Okay, so what I see you describing is compartmentalizing a feeling, which I think is distinct from stuffing a feeling. Okay. So not allowing that feeling— you needed to shift gears and you needed to work, so it wasn't the time to cry, and you're able to compartmentalize that and move in a different direction. To me, stuffing a feeling would be not allowing yourself to feel grief. So you say maybe— who knows why you would say that? Maybe you think it's weak or something like that, and you say, I'm not going to feel grief, or maybe this person wasn't worthy of my grief. Like maybe you have a complicated relationship with a person you lost, whatever. If you try to turn that off, it will come back with a vengeance when you least expect it, right? You need to process the emotion. You need to grieve. You need to let it run its course. So you, I, I agree. You can compartmentalize emotion. I just don't think you can turn it off.

Yeah. Okay, cool. All right.

So self-management is, so self-management is channeling your emotions into producing the behavior that you want. So you're aware of what it is you're feeling, and perhaps you're going to redirect it to produce what you want, or you're not going to let it drive the bus. So like with Edelman, he's aware he's getting mad. He runs over to the ref and he catches himself. He does something different. He still felt the feeling, but the feeling didn't win. Did he turn the feeling off? Not necessarily. It still happened, but he redirected it. Yeah. So that's self-management.

Okay. And I just want to make sure I hold this placeholder for men for a minute, is like, I think modern leadership, I think men have an unfair advantage here because different sandboxes when we were kids, men and women. And I do want to get into the gender and cultural aspects and age aspects of emotional intelligence. But we played in different sandboxes. And I feel like I could get in a lot of trouble for how I'm going to say this. This. I'll just use my experience rather than writ large men and women. I was told, and I think many people would identify with me, is like, big boys don't cry, you know, toughen up, that kind of thing. And then when I would look around, like, men at funerals are not really crying, you know. And then, you know, I hear suck it up and I hear all these things. So I'm like, oh yeah, don't show emotions. And then I come into this world and I got all these emotions inside me. Yeah, yeah. But shit, what's wrong with Hey, you know, and so I'm the one that's, I'm actually, boy, can't let them know now. So I gotta play these other games. I got tired of that, by the way. So that was a really good moment for me to do that work. It was kind of probably too late. It was in my 30s. No, not too late. It was later than I maybe would've hoped.

Never too late. Never too late.

Thank you for that. So, and I think modern leadership is like really understanding how to work with emotions. Emotions. And then I'll take care of my counterparts here. And, you know, the, the female experience is like they're told not to do emotions in workplace, but they've got some— I'll just use one person in particular, my, my loving wife. She's way better at it than I am. And if she's going to go into an environment and mute one of her great assets, we're both blowing it. Yeah. So I'm making this about me to not kind of straddle some writ large thing, but like, can you talk about the gender differences on management, emotional management?

Yeah, so in my own research, and, and I'll tell you, you, you bring up this, this sort of stereotype that men fall into, which is, you know, they're not supposed to express their emotions. And oftentimes you'll hear them say, well, I'm not even— I don't think about this stuff, I'm not aware of that stuff. Well, my research shows that that's not true. Self-awareness, men and women score identically. I mean, not even just statistically identically, like it's the same score. So we have the, the genders have an equal awareness of, of emotions.

That's why I didn't ask about awareness. I'm more interested in the management piece.

Yes. And when it comes to self-management, they're pretty equal, but it's the social side of things where I see the difference.

Okay, so you're now, you're moving us to Pillar 3.

Yes.

So, so before we go to Pillar 3, so we got, let's go So let's go back, self-awareness, self-management. And what is one or two things that we can do to better manage?

Okay, so to better manage, I mean, I'll tell you the biggest mistake that I see people make, and that is that they don't understand that positive emotions need to be managed too. So let's talk about sport when you're winning. Let's talk about in business when you've got the new product that's killing it, you tend to think you walk on water and things get sloppy really, really quick, right? Positive emotions need to be understood and managed too. It's not just, oh, when I feel good, that's okay, and when I feel bad, I need to do something with it. I need to understand all of the feelings and make sure they aren't sending me in the wrong direction.

Very cool. Yeah. If you name an emotion, is the research still tuned that just naming it dissipates the intensity of it?

Well, sitting with an emotion allows it to run its course.

So if I just say, whoa, this is sadness, sadness kind of feels like it's in my stomach, I'm naming it, I'm not really sitting with it, I'm just naming it, that doesn't dissipate it?

I mean, I think naming an emotion is part of the process of sitting with an emotion. Yeah. So it's, you're, you're, you're, you're participating in that.

It's like the entry point. Okay. Yeah. What are some other management strategies?

Self-management is often affects your relationships as well, how you manage in response to another person. And the biggest mistake that people make there is they win the battle to lose the war. Right. So they don't choose to self-manage in this moment. They're too tempted to prove that they're right. Right. And it erodes the overall quality of a relationship. So self-management is is often a tool that you can use to better your relationships, knowing when to bite your tongue, when to take a step back.

Cool. Walk us through the 90-second downshift.

The 90-second downshift?

Yeah. Like, this was a practice that when I heard you talk about, I was like, oh, there's a 90-second thing that you can do to downshift, to regulate just a little bit better.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, again, so this is about sitting with your emotions, right? It's giving them sort of room to breathe, to run their course. And if you are acting on an emotion the moment you feel it versus giving it some time to sit with it, you are going to have a far more effective outcome. Often, you know, one of the strategies in the book, another self-management strategy, is to sleep on it, right? So you feel compelled to act now. Well, if that judgment is a good one, it's still gonna be a good one tomorrow. So why not sleep on it and see if you still feel that way?

Grandma was right in so many ways.

She was, yes. She'd been around the block, so she knew.

Yeah. Okay, let's do social awareness now. This is pillar 3.

Yes.

Okay.

So social awareness is awareness, obviously, of the emotions of other people, but perhaps more importantly, it's understanding what the world looks like through their eyes. So it's not just what they're feeling, it's what they're thinking, it's what they're seeing, it's their perspective of a situation. People who are really people who are really skilled at social awareness understand other people's motivations, and they don't assign motivation to them, right? That's where we make mistakes and we get real ineffective in relationships, where we start making assumptions about what another person thinks and feels instead of trying to actually understand it.

Okay, so when that runs through my filter, I'm like, oh, it's not just being socially aware of how I'm showing up in an environment, but it's understanding the emotions that are happening in the other. And then understanding, um, like what's right behind that emotional experience. Yeah. The other, which is the primary drivers.

Yes. So, so it's, yes, it's, it's understanding, you know, what they're feeling, but also what, what are they motivated by, right? What does the situation look like to them? How does it speak to them?

Adjacently, are you more interested in motivations or commitments by other people? I'm more interested in commitments, but I'm I don't think there's a right or wrong. Like, I want to know what somebody's committing themselves to as opposed to like the temporary motivations. But there's a place for me for both.

Yeah, I, I, I definitely think there's a place for both. I think that again, it's if you want to understand the whole picture, you'd really have to look at both. If you just get hyper-focused on their commitments or on their motivations, then you might lose sight of something important.

That's cool. All right, brilliant. Let's hit maybe a couple ways to, to increase your social awareness.

Yeah, so let me give you a little bit of a counterintuitive one. Um, and this is why, you know, this book is called The New Emotional Intelligence because it's the latest thinking in the field, right? I— my biggest book was 2009, and it's gotten kind of outdated. I— it's awesome that it's still, you know, a bestseller and people like it, but there's a lot more to add. So when it comes to social awareness, you also need to trust your intuition. And there was a study conducted by the University of the Netherlands where they did something very interesting. If you take people that can see and you put them in front of a computer monitor and you flash images of people demonstrating strong emotion, mirror neurons in your brain mimic those emotional states.

Let's pause, get the conditions. My eyes work, but I can't see, correct? Like, so the brain, the region— I think that was the part of the study, is that they lost the connection. You're more intimate here than I am. They lost the connection to the occipital lobe, but their eyes could work.

Right. So what they did is, so you or I, if the person is angry, we'd furrow our brow a little bit. If they're happy, we might crack a little smile. It's involuntary. And they took people whose eyes work perfectly, but their visual cortex at the base of their brain had lesions. So it couldn't process what the eyes were seeing. So these people were blind. They had never seen in their whole lives or since they had an accident that caused the lesion. And they were having the same reaction as people with sight.

That is wild.

Wild, right? It freaked— it— I've never seen a research study where the researchers talked about being freaked out before.

It was kind of interesting because this is part of the entry point to the low road and the high road. Yes. So there's a something, there's a stimulus happening in the environment, and they are responding in an emotional— they are processing it with an emotional response. And if I have it right, that if there was a picture of somebody smiling and I'm looking at it and you're looking at it, we might actually kind of— the corners of our lips might turn up.

Yes.

Yes. And it's subtle. Maybe it's demonstrative, like, oh, the picture was smiling, they're happy. Oh, me too. Oh, that's nice. And my, like, I really smile. But they were doing the same thing, even though that they were technically blind.

And they were asking these people, you just cracked a little bit of a smile. What happened there? Did you see something?

What'd they say?

No, dude, I'm blind.

Yeah, what are you talking about?

So then why'd you do it? Well, I don't know, it was just a hunch. I just felt the need to, it was intuition.

And what's your takeaway from this?

Okay, so as I said earlier, everything you experience has to go to the base of your brain and then it travels, travels through the limbic system first. So these researchers went back and they redid layered MRIs, and they found an alternate pathway. Your eye has an optic nerve that runs from your eye to the back of your brain. And along the way, they realized the signals were branching off to the limbic system so that you have an emotional reaction to what you're seeing before your brain is even able to know what you're seeing. And the way this is demonstrated in real life, and we've all experienced this, you walk into a room full of people and you— something is up. You don't know what. It's not because you can tell someone's folding their arms a certain way. You just feel it the moment you walk in. Your limbic system is processing what you don't even know you're seeing yet. And to be socially aware, you have to learn to understand and trust that intuition.

I love of that insight. It is really high level to listen to intuition, then to take action on it. Like, I love that. And the people that are, let's call them intuitives, or they're just, they have this spidey sense about them, it's awesome. It's not necessarily as consistent and reliable as I would hope it is, and that's because I think I'm biased by the way that I learned about intuition. But my wife has this— talk about it twice now— she has this way that I'm like, wait, what, what do you, what are you noticing? And it's like, I love it. It's a real source. But for me, it's not as finely tuned as I would hope.

Yeah. And the way I think of it is it's, it's a process. It's a tool. It's not an answer. Yeah, right. It's like any feeling you have, you say, oh, I feel something. Where's this coming from? So you walk into that room, you get that feeling in your you say, I'm going to sit with this for a minute and figure this out instead of saying, why am I being paranoid? You know what I mean? The unself-aware response is to try to stuff it, ignore it. It doesn't have any value.

That's right. And if you're anxious, if you're drunk, if you're drugged, if you're something like, if you're muted in some way, you lose connection to all that stuff.

If you're staring at your phone, right?

Yeah.

If you're flooded with all these things. There's so many ways.

Yeah. Okay. So let's get to the last one. Um, the relational piece.

Yeah.

So relational management.

So relationship management is the fourth skill, and relationship management requires that you use the first three skills in concert. So you're managing relationships to a better outcome by being aware of your own emotions and what's going on with you, being aware of— socially aware of, of other people's emotions, what's going on with them, and you're gonna self-manage them as a result. So I know what's going on with me, I know what's going on with you, and here's what I'm gonna do about about it to improve the quality of this relationship. It's something that you do in concert, you know, it's something— it's— you're using all of these skills to improve your relationships.

Why did you not call it social management? Why did you call it relational management or relationship management?

I called it relationship management because Dan Goleman wrote the first book, and that's what he called it, and it made sense to Yeah. Yeah.

That's very cool. I like that you didn't shift that to fit your model because you can see like self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, social management. And you were— I saw that and I was like, oh, this is the nod back to Coleman. Yes. Yeah.

And, you know, it's interesting too because I started writing when I was really young. My first book came out in when I was 28. And I tried in the beginning to be a little more like Malcolm Gladwell, a thinker. But that's not what people want with emotional intelligence. That book had already been written. They want to know how to do it. And I started succeeding when I started just focusing on that. So I'm not going to change the model. I'm not going to, you know, I'm just going to tell you how to do it. And I'm going to apply everything I know to try to bring that to life.

Let's go back to two things. I want to understand the gender differences gender differences from your research. I want to understand age differences, and I also want to understand performance differences. So can we start with gender first?

Sure. Women outscore men on the social side of emotional intelligence. That's where the only place we see a statistically significant difference is that women are more effective when it comes to managing relationships. And there's some also some increases in social awareness.

Awareness. How about cultural, before we get to age?

I haven't done a big study for about 15 years, but you do tend to see some nuances in culture. Higher social EQ skills in collectivist cultures, things of that nature. I just found that it was a little too, uh, sort of labeling. In presenting that research, I felt like people wanted to make things too concrete.

Okay.

And it moved away from this individual focus. Focus, because you can be low in the social, you know, you can be from a collectivist culture and be low in the social side of EQ. It just depends on the individual.

So, okay, yeah, fair. How about age?

EQ tends to increase with age. Maturity helps. Being on this planet longer in your own skin and learning your dos and don'ts helps. And you definitely see in younger people, late teens, early 20s, there's more impulsivity, there's lower levels of self-management. That's related to brain development. You know, this idea we're not fully cooked until we're about 25, that prefrontal cortex where a lot of this self-management happens. Those are the two big indicators.

In the workplace, what are we seeing as a difference between, like, boomers and Gen Y or Gen X?

I don't see a massive difference between, like, generations that butt up against each other, like boomers and Gen X. It's more this trajectory as you move through your 20s to your 30s, your 40s to your 50s, it's just kind of this slow linear progression where EQ tends to go up on average.

Okay, so let's shift to performance.

Yes.

EQ and performance. This is a two-prong for me, is like you've got some research on EQ points relative to earnings. Mm-hmm. You've got some data on EQ stratified across managers versus executives. And then I want to dig a little bit on EQ and performance under pressure. So let's, let's start with the first one.

So emotional intelligence is a very strong indicator of performance in the workplace. We find that 92% of top performers are people with, in the upper echelon of EQ, they have really high EQs. A very small percentage of bottom performers have high EQs. And it's also linked to, I mean, right, it's linked to performance. And with performance comes outcomes like making more money. So people with higher EQs make about $37,000 more on average. Every point you, you increase your EQ leads to about another $1,700 in annual salary. So there is a linear connection between EQ and performance and EQ and earnings.

When you, you cited that executives are not as good at emotional intelligence as middle managers, what is your finding and what's your takeaway there?

Yeah, so let me, let me tell you two things about this. Travis Bradberry. One, when I first did that study, we found that, you know, people were promoted into middle management for being good with people. So an individual contributor had a lower EQ than a supervisor. It started to go up for the supervisor. EQ scores peaked in middle management, and from there was a ski slope all the way down to the C-suite where CEOs have the lowest EQ score on average. And that's because He says, once you move above middle management, companies tend to increasingly focus on tenure, short-term financial gains, industry knowledge. They would lose sight of EQ. The problem is that among CEOs, for example, the top performers are those with the highest EQs.

So the best executives have the highest EQs.

Right. Even though executives on average would have lower EQ. So that was in my 2009 book. Running those numbers for my new book, it's flattened out a lot because there's been much more emphasis on EQ in workplaces. But I still work with companies where I'll run that data for them and they have the original graph going on. They haven't put in the work.

Got it.

Yeah. But as a whole—

Got it. That's cool. So you can get better at emotional intelligence. Speak right to the heart of how you're thinking about emotional intelligence can be improved.

How emotional intelligence can be approved? Well, it's about self-awareness, right? It's opening that door and being able to form new habits, right? The pathway between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex, your rational brain, is very malleable and plastic. And old habits die hard because your brain loves efficiency. There's pathways that reinforce that behavior, right? If you're going to cross a river over and over again, your brain's going build a bridge. And if you stop crossing that river, those pathways wither and die, right? So if you're a yeller and you learn how to bite your tongue, to redirect your behavior and stop yelling, suddenly that pathway's gone and you don't even think about yelling anymore. You do something new. You have an alternative that your brain forms a pathway for. So increasing EQ, my whole method is to start small, right? The book has 60 strategies. When you take the test, it just tells you 3 to work on. And I suggest you start with 2 of those 3 until they become habitual, till you catch yourself doing it without thinking about it. Now you're ready to move on. You can work your way through all 60, but you're gonna have to do it a couple at a time or you're never gonna get there because you can't form 60 pathways at once, but you can form a couple.

You had a piece of research that 70% of people are— not very good at working with stress. And was that your research or was that something that you cited? Was that a meta-analysis?

That's my research. Yes, stress, the ability to manage stress is one of the most glaring weaknesses when it comes to people's EQ profile. That and awareness of emotions. We find that just 36% of people are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.

That's remarkable.

Yeah, it's just, it's a real, there's a real deficit there.

How did you, what was the research that you did to have that finding. 36% of people are able to accurately identify the emotion that they're experiencing.

Right, so that's one of the aspects of my assessment that we measure. And I have, well, 10 million people now have taken all of my assessments combined, and we're able to just churn numbers on that and see. We also collect performance data on people that take the test. So we're able to run connections between different EQ skills and, and outcomes.

That's what I want to hit to next. But before we go to the stress, like, so 70% of your population has said that they're not very good at dealing with stress.

They've shown through their test results that they're not very good at managing stress.

They don't self-identify, I struggle with working with stress.

That's—

you've backdoored it. Yes. In the ways to deduce that they are not good at working with stress.

And with, with the new test that comes with the new book, that a lot of the people that are trying to make themselves look like they're good at it actually are lowering their scores. That's fun.

Because, okay, well done. I want to understand that later. So are you talking about acute stress or are you talking about chronic stress? Both. So you're not— are you not differentiating, or are you differentiating between the two?

I'm assessing both.

Yeah, yeah. And for the listener, acute stress is like when the alarm bell goes off and you have that response. How well are you able to deal with that moment? And then chronic stress is over time the pebble in the pond just keeps filling up and I feel like I'm overwhelmed. That diff— that's a very different— 70%.

70% of people are not skilled at it.

And only 36% can accurately name the emotion.

Right. And so what's the connection there, right?

That's right.

If you're aware, it opens the door.

There you go. Okay. So now let's talk about performance. What do we need to know if the listener really wants to be a better performer in life? They want to, they want to show up more as themselves. They want to be more agile as the demands of the environment require it. They want to be able to access more of the skills that they have inside them and express them eloquently. That can be in a living room, that can be in a boardroom, that can be on a wave, that can be wherever. If they want to be better at performing, what do we need to understand about emotional intelligence?

If you want to be better at performing, you need to be the master of your emotions. Emotions are the primary driver of our behavior. It doesn't matter if you throw a football for a living, if you're conducting surgery, if you manage a team, if you're doing sales, your behavior is driven by your emotions. And here's the crux of the matter. Most people are in highly skilled professions. If you're an accountant, you're competing with other accountants that went to, through the same schooling that are doing the same job. So what is gonna differentiate you? Well, IQ has already been pulled out because you have to have a certain threshold to get there. I'll give you another example. Doctors have the narrowest IQ range of any profession. You have to have about a 130 to get through med school. Well, it tops out at 155. So you've got this little tight range. So the 150 is not necessarily gonna shine that much over a 135, but the emotionally intelligent doctor sets themselves apart, as does the emotionally intelligent basketball player, the emotionally intelligent salesperson. It's the only edge that's left.

If you've been taught to suppress your emotions based on your family, based on your gender, based on whatever those narratives are, how do you get ahead of getting better at emotions?

Well, the biggest thing you're missing is awareness, right? So you spent your whole life ignoring them, so You've got to build that awareness. That's the only way you're gonna get there. And you just, you gotta start somewhere.

All right, I'm really interested in psychological agility. Okay. And when you hear the phrase, knowing what you know about emotional intelligence, where do you naturally kind of pull apart or open up what people need to be better at to be more psychologically agile?

Right. So, I mean, ultimately we're talking about flexibility, and I feel like flexibility and agility, that's dictated by your perspective. When you see things one way, you have one path to follow. You're not gonna be very agile. And that can be how you see yourself, how you understand yourself, or a situation or other people. So to me, it's an awareness exercise. To achieve psychological agility.

I also think that if I am— let's call it I'm in a tornado of emotions. Emotions are so noisy, they're so loud, they're so consuming, they're so potent that if I'm in that tornado, I got to deal with all of that because it's the signal for survival in many cases. And then I— it's costing me something. It's costing me agility. It's costing me to— take in information and respond, you know, in an agile way. So to me, I feel like if I am stuck in the tornado of emotions and I'm just managing the emotion, I'm not eloquent with it yet, I'm not masterful with it, I don't have a chance to be psychologically agile.

Yeah, and even if you are, once you get in that tornado, it turns your skillset off. So in the book, I recently did a series of keynotes for a a really big tele— one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country. And by and large, they've done a lot of work on EQ, and their senior leadership, they're high EQ folks, except when they get stressed. So we did some really kind of thorough analysis of them, and we found that all those relationship management skills with their subordinates kind of turned off when the stress level got too high. Again, once you're in the tornado, you can't be agile. Agile. So you have to have good stress management techniques because there's always going to be that looming deadline, right? As soon as it's done, there's another one. So what do you do in response? How do you keep yourself out of that tornado? How do you keep— maintain perspective to be agile?

When you think about parenting and EQ, speak to the parents in our community about how to help their children be better with emotional intelligence. They've got so many competing that looking inward is something that is challenging. Yeah, yeah. Point to the parents, like what you'd hope we do.

Honestly, the only, just about the only thing you need to keep in mind as a parent is that you set the emotional tone that your child is gonna follow. They are going to model off that. And it's something that's achieved day in, day out. So every time you find an opportunity to discuss and process an emotion, to own a behavior, even when you make a mistake, to own a behavior, to go back and go, you know what, when I lost my cool right there, I didn't have to do that. That was a mistake. I regret that. I wish I could have done that differently. We'll see how I do next time. Admitting a mistake actually helps your child to be more emotionally intelligent because it's showing them a process and they're going to model off of that. So as a parent, if you can master that, you've won 90% of the battle.

Battle. Awesome. That gives us hope. And you— because there's something we can do. It's not like a script we need to run.

And, you know, you don't, you don't need to be perfect. You just, you just need to create the method.

Yeah. When you, knowing everything that you know, and you think out 5 to 10 years from now, when it comes to emotional intelligence, when it comes to emotional health, what do you see for us?

You know, I, I hate to be a little negative, but my only concern is the continued movement away from face-to-face communication, right? Our brains have eons of face-to-face communication that they were built for, and we have a rapid influx of technology over the last 20 to 30 years with intensification in the last decade that moves us further and further away from that. And something is lost. But when you're so used to sending a message in Microsoft Teams versus versus walking down the hall to talk to somebody, you just, you, you get so used to it, you don't realize what you're missing anymore. And anyone, I'm 48, anyone my age that thinks that they're not missing out on that, just compare yourself to the 20-year-old that you know and all the stuff that they don't do face to face or, or via voice and they don't think they're missing out. You know, they are. That's right. You're just, you're doing it too. Just maybe not quite at their level. You know, just 'cause you're not on TikTok all day doesn't mean you're and not using technology as a substitute for real communication.

Travis, what a great conversation. You really understand both from an applied standpoint and a research standpoint. You've written eloquently. You understand how to communicate clearly. I just want to say thank you for the dent you're making, and this has been awesome. Where would you like people to go to be part of your community?

Well, you are welcome to read my book, The New Emotional Intelligence. I am also on LinkedIn at Dr. Travis Bradberry. I'm also on Instagram and the socials under that handle. So I'm always posting stuff if you wanna check it out.

This was awesome. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a great conversation.

Yeah.

Next time on Finding Mastery, Canadian beach volleyball stars Brandi Wilkerson and Melissa Humana Paredes sit down with their coach, Marcio Siccoli, and Dr. Michael Gervais. Hosted by USC's Dave Belasco, they relive the wild ride of Paris 2024. From near elimination to Centre Court under the Eiffel Tower, it's a story of resilience, trust, and what it takes to rise together. Join us Wednesday, September 17th at 9 AM Pacific, only on Finding Mastery.