Top Emotional Intelligence Expert Gives Practical Steps to Improve EQ (Dr. Travis Bradberry)

Well, hello, my friend. I have been working on something behind the scenes. It's called the Intentional Leader Lab, and it launches the first week of October. This is going to be a private community to accelerate your growth. I'm limiting it to 12 people. It's going to be one-on-one coaching with me and you and group coaching once a month. We're going to do live sessions where I'm teaching the Narrow Path curriculum. You're going to be amongst other leaders who are challenging themselves, who are trying to lead teams, who are trying to lead at home.. We're going to look at your mindsets. We're gonna look at your values, your vision. We're gonna look at your relationships, your energy. We're going to look at what drives you, your purpose. I'm going to challenge you. I'm going to encourage you, and we're going to get to know each other a lot better. I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity. If you're interested, go to intentionalleaderlab.com where you can apply to be part of this group. I'm only taking 12 people because I want to keep this intimate, and I know that after 6 months of being part of this group, you're going to be transformed as a leader, and you're going to have a lot more clarity.

You're going to have a lot more vision, a lot more peace, and it's going to be a wonderful experience.

So join me the first week of October. Go to theintentionalleaderlab.com to apply. I hope to see you in the lab when we kick things off the first week of October. So I teach emotional intelligence to a lot of different leaders, and I always get the question, hey, whose book do you recommend? And I always recommend Dr. Travis Bradberry's book Emotional Intelligence 2.0. So I was so pumped when he agreed to come on the Intentional Leader Podcast. He wrote Emotional Intelligence 2.0, he wrote Emotional Intelligence Habits, and he came out with the new book The New Emotional Intelligence. So I was so excited to go deep with him on emotional intelligence. He is probably the expert on emotional intelligence. If you wanna know how to practically get better as a leader, we talk about self-awareness, we talk about self-management, social awareness, relationship management. What's the difference between IQ and EQ? What's the difference between personality and EQ? I think you're gonna love this conversation. Go check out his new book, The New Emotional Intelligence. And as I just talked about, please join the Intentional Leader Lab that kicks off the first week of October if you want to become more emotionally intelligent, because that's what we spend a lot of time talking about, is how do you increase your emotional intelligence? Because there's specific habits you can do to increase your ability to perform and increase your ability to be an effective leader. And a lot of that has to do with emotional intelligence. So without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Travis Bradberry. All right, well, this is a real treat. I've been looking forward to this. Travis, thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

So how did you get into studying emotional intelligence?

That's a very good question. I was an undergrad at UCSD, and the— what's now known as the seminal study on EQ published by Peter Salovey at Yale came out, and a professor introduced us to it, this concept of emotional intelligence, that there's a separate intellect that is driven by how well you understand and respond to your emotions.. And that really spoke to me. I was at a school with really, really smart people. I was a, a medium-sized fish in a really big pond. All my roommates had higher SAT scores than me. And, and I, and I, I just really realized, wow, you know, it's, there's a separate skill here that can set you apart. So I started studying it and, um, I was only an undergrad for 3 years. So I went right into grad school and my graduate degree is a dual PhD in clinical psychology, you know, psychology of the individual and industrial psychology, business psychology. And I realized right away that my interest in EQ was a way to meld those two fields. They just, it just really brought those two together. So I did all my research projects on it. By the second or third year, people, it wasn't a very big school. They started calling me the EQ guy. And I actually launched my former business with a professor while I was in my fourth year of a five-year program. So it's something that I launched in grad school.

What time frame was that? When did you, when did you launch your business?

So we, we, our official launch date was January 1st, 2003, but we were, we were doing the work for about 18 months before that, before we, we, we sort of rebranded and launched it officially.

Okay. Because you, you've got Peter Salovey, that, that paper that you mentioned, and then Daniel Goleman had written Would his book come out in like '95, or when did his—

he was '95.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because when I teach emotional intelligence, I always recommend your work, Emotional Intelligence 2.0. And you've just come out with a new book, The New Emotional Intelligence, which I'm really excited to get into because I feel like one of the things you do so well is you help people quickly realize how do you increase your emotional intelligence, and you give a lot of specific frameworks and activities for how to do that. So why is emotional intelligence so important? How is it different than IQ and other things that we might focus on?

Well, the, the reason EQ is so important is because our brains are hardwired to ensure that emotions are the primary driver of our behavior. We have more than 400 emotional experiences every day. We essentially don't act in any significant way without an emotional response. And the pathway between the, the emotional and rational centers of your brain is one that is very malleable, and it can change. And with effort, you can improve the flow of information between the rational and emotional centers of your brain. You can also allow that pathway to wither and die and have very little communication, and you end up with your emotions just driving the bus, which, you know, um, when you're getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger or something, it's great just to have a really strong visceral emotional reaction. When you're in a meeting and someone says something stupid, it's not so great. You know, you want to have a rational understanding of what you're feeling so that you can do something productive with it.

And I guess why— because some of the research you demonstrate and that you pull from seems to indicate that emotional intelligence is a difference maker in high performance and leadership. So in other words, if you want to be a really high performer, if you want to stand out in your job, if you want to stand out in leadership, focus on emotional intelligence.

Why is that? Well, the, the biggest reason you want to focus on EQ is because you need a way to differentiate yourself. If you're a leader, if you're in a highly skilled profession, there's a threshold that everyone's passed for their, their IQ, their industry knowledge, their experience. There's just not that much of a difference, but there's wildly different levels of emotional intelligence, and that's just a great way to set yourself apart in any skilled profession, particularly leadership.

Can you, can you flesh that out a little bit of just what have the studies shown in terms of that differentiation. I'm just curious, like, what, what industries have you seen that in? What, what roles? Because I think it's just really interesting to me, like IQ, we know that's important, but to your point, there's a threshold. Okay. It's like in my field, in the legal industry, everyone's probably got a pretty high IQ if you've gotten through law school. If you've studied for the bar and passed, if you've made your way. So it does, it does make sense to me that the EQ might differentiate you. But I guess I'm just wondering, what does that actually look like in leadership and in industry? What, how does that end up differentiating people in these different studies that you've, that you've seen?

Well, there's a couple ways. So, uh, more than 10 million people have taken the emotional intelligence test that I've authored, and we do a lot of comparisons between EQ scores and job performance. So in leadership positions, we find— and this is based on the latest research from my new book with my new test— and it's about 92% of top performers are high in emotional intelligence, whereas only, um, about 12% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. So it's practically a linear path Wow. And, you know, you, so you ask the question, why? Well, as a leader, you need to make a lot of very high-intensity decisions. And when your emotions are driving the bus and you don't understand them, they affect your, they make you irrational. They make you lash out, they make you make poor decisions. So, your own performance suffers, but that's probably not the worst of it. The worst of it is the trickle-down effect. And the effect that you have on other people through the emotional tone that you set. I— attorneys are the group that I probably did the absolute least work with in my 25-year career because law firms probably spend the lowest amount per person on training and development.

So interesting.

Yeah. And my, my sister, whom I'm very close with, and my brother-in-law are both attorneys, and she's now actually shifted Careers, and she's an executive coach. And we talked about this a lot. And, you know, it's, it's, it's your behavior impacts other people. If you're a leader, if there's people that you're responsible for, your emotional tone creates a culture. So if you're a yeller, if you're going around exploding at people every time someone does something wrong, that's the kind of culture you create, and people emulate that.

Hmm. And the, the, one of the reasons I think this is such good news and why this is such an encouraging message is that, uh, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, Travis, I'd love to get your perspective, but that our IQ is largely fixed. Our personalities are largely kind of baked in. They're not going to change that much over the course of our lives. But as you've already said, EQ, our emotional intelligence, is an indicator of high performance and of really effective leadership. And it's something that can be developed. To me, those— that combination of things is a really encouraging message, which is why I love talking about it with leaders. It's like, hey, if you want to be a great leader, if you want to improve your performance, I know you can't really improve your IQ that much, you can't really change a whole lot about how your personality is baked in, but you can improve your emotional intelligence. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the brain science behind that. How does that actually happen over time?

Well, it has to do with brain pathways and the, the areas, you know, different areas of your brain have different levels of neuroplasticity. And, and that's just how, how malleable and receptive to change they are. You know, IQ is not what you know, it's not wisdom. It's the pace at which you assimilate new information. That's why smart people seem so smart. They absorb things like a sponge. They can spit it back out. And, you know, they've done longitudinal studies. It's IQs measured relative to your peers. So they've, they've followed people age 5 to age 50, and they've seen that from a very early age, IQ is crystallized and it just doesn't change all that much. There's not really much you can do to affect that brain pathway. Personality is the same way. And it's something people really try to debate. And they, what they do is they, they basically start calling EQ personality. The people that try to say that personality isn't fixed. The traditional view of personality, how personality is measured, right? These are stable traits that affect— so it's sort of what gets you out of bed in the morning, right? If you're a hopeless extrovert, you just really need to be around people to derive energy. Whereas if you're deeply introverted, people sap your energy. These are personality traits and they also don't change very much. You can force yourself into those environments, you can make yourself socialize, but you're not going to change the fact that that has a draining effect on you. Also crystallized, also they follow people. I mean, you know, people our age have seen this. We've watched people grow up and you see this little extroverted 4-year-old who is an extroverted 20-year-old, lo and behold, you know, very early age. So, the beauty of emotional intelligence is it's really driven, you know, your limbic system is sort of in your, the middle of your brain. The rational area of the brain is here kind of in your forehead. And there's a path between those two areas and it's very flexible. It's very malleable. It responds to change. And, you know, some people are going around with sort of the rutted country road. There's not a lot of traffic flowing back and forth. And other people have built a 5-lane superhighway because they spent a lot of time thinking about what they're feeling, why they're feeling it, what's driving their behavior. And it just, it just creates this flow of information that changes your brain.

This is really helpful, and this is one of the things you do really well in, uh, both of your books and in Emotional Intelligence Habits, is you talk about how do we do this. Okay, so great, so the things come through the limbic system, we make a lot of our decisions in our rational front part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex area. And like you said, for many of us, that path is like a— like an old country road. We haven't done a whole lot of actual intentional work to increase that pathway. And again, I'm no expert on this, but that's, that's my understanding of it. But it sounds like to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, Travis, the more we work at it, the more like we take these, these skills that you highlight in here under these 4 different domains and we work at it over time, we are going to become more emotionally intelligent. We're going to have a— there's going to be more of a highway, like a 5-lane highway within that path where we can have more of our decision-making in that front part of the brain. Let's talk about some of the skills. So you, in your book, you lay out 4 skills, which I love this too, because I think it's a really helpful way just to think about developing not just as a performer, but as a leader. Starts with self-awareness. And then you also have the second one is self-management. The third one, I believe, is social awareness or empathy, something like that. And then the fourth one is relationship.

Management.

What, what is social awareness? I'm sorry, what is self-awareness in your mind? What does that mean from an emotional intelligence perspective?

Well, self-awareness is, it is being aware of your emotions in the moment, understanding what you're feeling and why you're feeling that way. What's provoked this, this, this emotion? It could be something very situational in the moment. It could be something that's driven by past experience. It's— self-awareness is also understanding your pref— your tendencies, how you tend to respond to people in situations, who and what pushes your buttons, being able to know when you walk into a situation how it might affect you. And so people who are really self-aware, they're sort of reading and understanding themselves on the fly, but across time too, they have that perspective. And I'll tell you that self-awareness is a skill that not a lot of us possess. Of those 10 million people who have taken my assessments, we find that just 36% of people are able to accurately identify their emotions in the moment. It's just not something that a lot of people are very good at.

How do we increase that? How do we, how do we— what are some specific ways that you would tell leaders to start? If I want to, if I'm a leader right now and I'm like, yeah, okay, maybe I'm not as self-aware as I'd like, but what are some specific ways ways that I can start increasing my self-awareness?

Well, it's a, it's about perspective and seeing the things that you don't currently see. So some of that is taking the time to think about what you're feeling and trying to understand it better. A lot of it is driven by feedback. So this is why my book includes an assessment. You know, this is an assessment we sell separately for $50, but I can't with good conscience teach you how to increase your emotional intelligence without giving you some perspective. So we go to the trouble to print the unique passcode in each book so that you can go online and take the test and gain some perspective. You can see what you're good at, what you're not so good at, and drive new thought. Um, there's also some exercises you can do, which obviously, you know, the book has 60 strategies there. They're divided up amongst the 4 skills. So one of my favorite self-awareness strategies is something I call You Spot It, You Got It. And the idea with You Spot It, You Got It is there's things that people do all day long that are potentially annoying, and yet they don't bother us. There's only certain things that get our goat, that drive us crazy, and that's because they reveal something about ourselves that's very significant. It could be something that, you know, you're working on that you struggle with. It could be something that it reveals about you that you're uncomfortable with and you're not aware of. So this self-awareness is often this exercise of increasing your awareness, taking the blinders off, trying to look at the whole picture, which is something that people struggle with because they're taught you are the way you are. And in a lot of ways you are. Your IQ and your personality, you are the way you are. But with EQ, looking at the beauty and the blemishes actually equips you to make change that will make you more effective.

Does that include our thinking about our thinking? Is that a part of self-awareness?

Absolutely, absolutely. There's a lot on— the book focuses a lot on self-talk, right? The things that we say to ourselves in response to our feelings, because that can really magnify and prolong an emotion versus shifting your behavior in a different direction. We tend to get in a very negative state around certain things, and we just you know, just throw gasoline on the fire to keep that going, which allows your emotions, your limbic system to override your rational thought. And then the emotions are driving the bus. So how you read these emotions and how you choose to respond to them, that plays a big role.

In this new book, because you have an assessment in EQ 2.0, talk to us about the new assessment that you have in the new Emotional Intelligence, because it's different, right, than the one you did in your previous book.

Yeah, I mean, the, the, the assessments, the assessment that is in my previous books is something that I wrote in 2001. I was, uh, 6— 23 years old when I wrote that test. Um, not even finished with grad school or just finishing up or, um, or just in the middle of the program actually. And it got really popular. People liked it. And when people like your test, they really, really don't want you to change it. Yeah. So over the ensuing decades, I had lots of great ideas about how to improve this test, and I couldn't improve it. But I've sold that test and my business. I'm no longer involved with that. So I had the opportunity to start fresh and to use the knowledge I've gained over the last couple of decades to, you know, make something better. So I'm really excited about the new test. I think You know, it is a self-assessment, and self-assessments always have some element where if you want to try to fake good, you can alter your scores. This test, I feel like, minimizes that as much as humanly possible. It's an aspect of the test I'm very proud of. The most accurate feedback you can get is always going to be from other people, but I think this test does a really darn good job of, of giving you some perspective on your behavior because it's just very hard to fake good.

There's—

if you think you're picking the right answer, you're just completely screwing up your scores.

I, I'm wondering, so let's— because you mentioned the self-assessment, someone does the self-assessment, is there anything else they can do to increase their— get even more awareness after they tell— because after they take the assessment? Because I've seen, for example, uh, sometimes I'll take an assessment and I'll say, hey, I'll talk to my wife and say, sweetie, how does this— how does this look accurate? Or I'll talk to other people in my organization. So is there anything additional steps that people could take or should take after taking the assessment to make it even maybe more helpful?

Yeah, actually there's an action plan section in the book that's geared towards that. The idea is doing exactly what you just suggested, which is, uh, you know, the, the test will give you your scores, it'll show you your strengths and your weaknesses. It will also pick the which of the 60 strategies in the book will increase your EQ the most based on your score profile. So it says start here, this is where you're going to get the, the, the highest result from the least amount of effort. And what I suggest people do in this, in this action plan spells this out, is to go and seek counsel and talk to the people that you get advice and feedback from and show them what the test told you. Show them what you're working on, what sort of information you glean from this, and get their feedback. That in itself is really powerful. It will take you a very long way, I think. And as you start to work on new strategies, it's good to continue to get feedback. The only thing you can do beyond that is to get 360'd. And we, uh, it doesn't come with a book, but we do have a 360 version of the test, and that allows other people to take the same test about you. Oh, wow. And then it's putting side by side what you say and what they say. And you can probably guess what the research says is the most accurate picture of your behavior is what everybody else sees. Uh, Also, amongst leaders, the top performers are those with the most accurate self-assessment. And our 360 actually measures the amount of time, the amount of accuracy you have in your self-perception, because it's really important. You want to understand where you see yourself, how other people see you, for good or bad, and where you overestimate, where you underestimate your abilities.

Do you like the framing of internal self-awareness and external self-awareness? I've seen that used. I'm curious what you think think about that?

Well, I mean, I suppose it depends what you do with it. I mean, how would you define external self-awareness? What does that mean to you?

Well, external self-awareness, I guess, is just how others see me. Internal self-awareness could be things like what the things that I think about, the things that I care about, my values. Um, so it's things that people might not know about me. It's kind of knowing myself. Which often is a product of reflection and actually taking the time to think about the things I think about, the things I care about. Whereas externals, largely what you talked about of how do other people see me? I mean, I can think I show up a certain way, but then if you talk to the people around me, they're going to give you the most accurate sense of what it's like to be on the other side of my leadership.

I think being able to integrate the understanding between those two things is really sort of the the essence of self-awareness. It's understanding what's going on with you, but also what you look like. Okay. There's also a sort of self and social awareness become intertwined there because you are aware of other people. But part of that is being aware of how they perceive you and your own behavior. It gets really dynamic. But yeah, I think that's very, very important, the ability to do that. And I find that people that are very self-aware They don't just say, this is me, this is what I see, this is how I am. They also understand that other people's perception is really also part of how they are, and they integrate that.

I should ask you this earlier, but what do you say to people? And I sometimes get this in the military that say this is soft, like this stuff. Come on, this is, this is, this is not about getting results. In an organization. Let's talk about real leadership stuff. We don't need to talk about emotions. What would you say to that leader who might be thinking that?

Well, you have to understand, I, I started my career almost 25 years ago, and that was the prevailing thought. People were not okay with emotional intelligence. They didn't care that Dan Goleman was on the COVID of Time magazine. He was on Oprah as well, and, and people thought it was soft and there was a lot of new research that was making the business case for emotional intelligence that was showing why it's so closely tied to leadership performance. So my whole career was built on this idea that I had to prove that this idea had merit. It's interesting now, and even, you know, I took a bit of a breather because I sold my business in 2019 and I took a few years off and got completely stir crazy, which is why I'm writing again and sharing my ideas. And even in that— I'm glad you're back. Yeah, thanks. Even in that small gap, I noticed increased adoption, increased awareness. It's, it's, it's— I don't have to spend a lot of time convincing people. I do. There's an appendix in the book, the new book called The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence, that shows the research linking it to bottom-line performance in organizations. I think it's always worthwhile to have that information handy. But yeah, I don't hear that a lot. And it's interesting too, because early in my career, you know, we would get— I mean, you work with a lot of pharmaceutical companies and insurance agencies and just everybody, right? But there's certain organizations that are a little harder to land, like pro sports teams. And the military was that way for a long time. But the last, you know, in the last 5, 10 years of my career, we've done massive amounts of work with the military, particularly with the Air Force. Because there is— people have gotten over the idea that this is soft. It's false to think that. And they understand that, like we've been talking about today, that everybody comes in with a well-defined skill set and level of experience and intellect, and it's the EQ that sets them apart.

Do you think it's even more important now? I mean, with— we think about the AI becoming more a part of our life, it seems like with politics and just the nature of things changing? It seems like it's changing so fast. I just, I wonder your take on that. Does it seem even more relevant and important today, and increasingly so?

I think what I see happening is technology provides increased challenges to emotional intelligence. It makes it harder and harder for us to be emotionally intelligent, to connect with people in a way that our brains are built for. Our brains are not built— our brains are built for face-to-face communication. Yeah, plain and simple. Not through a screen, not through a telephone, not through a text message or a Microsoft Teams, you know. And, and, and these barriers to regular communication make people behave differently, often in a less emotionally intelligent manner. And this is something that I address in the new book, The New Emotional Intelligence. I actually have strategies that are, that are geared towards virtual communication to help people bring a more human element to that.

Yeah, Travis, I actually struggle, I feel like, with Zoom meetings. I don't— I, maybe I just haven't done enough of them, but I feel like it's a lot easier for me to meet with someone in person, to be part of a meeting. It's like, I don't know when to talk. I don't know when to listen. I don't— I don't want to— it's just, it's really interesting. I think a lot of my wife works remotely. She seems like she's very good on those meetings. So it's interesting to hear you talk about how that has impacted the way we live. Do you think emotional intelligence is going to be, uh, even more of a superpower, if you will, with AI? I kind of think— I remember when Cal Newport wrote his book Deep Work, his, his argument was the ability to do deep work is going to be a competitive advantage because people can't do deep work. It's— we're all just so distracted. And it makes me wonder with AI, as things become more, you know, we can have a conversation with an AI agent, like we can— we're— AI is doing more and more of the writing. It's— I just wonder if people are— that can actually live emotional intelligently, can have a conversation, can actually listen to people, are— I just wonder if that's going to become a competitive advantage even more as we move towards AI.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable thought. I mean, this idea that people are using AI instead of going to therapists. Yeah, it's wild because the AI tools will spit out sort of truisms and sort of telling you what you want to hear. What should I do? I have conflict with my spouse. You know, it might, it might give you something that's the equivalent of reading a blog post. But it's not a therapist that understands you and understands your history and your tendencies. And, you know, it's, it's, it's not human interaction. So yeah, I think people that are very human and well-connected to their emotions and their feelings and can, can bring that out in other people are going to set themselves apart, particularly amongst people who isolate themselves. So I have a teenage son and he's already telling me that kids his age are basically choosing to have virtual girlfriends instead of real ones. What? Because they tell them everything they want to hear.

Yeah.

And that is these— it's, it's just makes me sad because being with a real human being that doesn't always tell you what you want to hear is, is, is— I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of what love is, right? That's how we connect with people. It's there. So it's wild.

And that's how we grow. I don't know about you, Travis, but like my wife has helped me grow more than probably anyone because she's helped me She doesn't tell me what I, what I want to hear all the time. She tells me what I need to hear in a loving way. Yeah, man, it's so interesting to think not just what's changing in technology, but what technology is doing to people. It's fascinating to think about. In fact, I saw, I think Greg McKeown did a poll on LinkedIn the other day and he asked who's better at listening to you? And it was your, your boss, your family, or AI. And AI won the poll. And I was like, oh my goodness, I wonder what are the implications of this? Let's move to self-management. What is self-management? And I'd love to hear a couple just strategies you would give for that skill.

Well, the thing that people mistake self-management for is stuffing your feelings, right? Is turning them off. And that's not what it is. You can't do that. You can't turn your feelings off. The only thing you can do is do something productive with them. And sometimes that means not letting them— as I use this metaphor a lot— drive the bus, not letting them dictate how you're going to act, but choosing how you're going to act in response to your feelings. This is much easier to do when you're self-aware, when you understand what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, what's driving you. People who are very self-aware are very good at channeling emotions into producing the behavior that they want. Different. For me, I'm some— I do a fair amount of public speaking because I've sold a lot of books. It's not a— I'm more introverted, so it's not a real natural fit for me. I know some guys in the field that I've known for a long time, and they do a lot of talks a year, and they're what I call hopeless extroverts. They just— they're built for it, and they just— it doesn't take anything out of them, and they go city to city, crowd to crowd. And so, so for me, when I have, let's say, you know, sort of the anxiety or apprehension that comes from public speaking, I've learned how to be very aware of that and translate it into energy and motivation. Because what it is, is I'm feeling anxious because I'm feeling the gravity of the situation and how badly I want to perform. So instead of letting it shut me down, I allow it to sort of open me up and share myself with people. And that's when I give the best talks is when I'm feeling the most sort of just, here I am, you know, sort of take it or leave it. This is who I am. This is what I have to say, that energy. So that's, that's a lot of self-management. It's understanding what you're feeling and being able to use it to drive the behavior you want.

Yeah, I noticed that I interviewed a Navy SEAL and he talked about this as well, where that, that feeling right before you're about to jump out of an airplane or right before you're about to go on a mission, knowing that that is not a sign that something's wrong, it's actually a sign that your body's getting ready to perform. And so having— I could see I can see how that would be such an important way to frame that when you start to feel that anxiety. Get ready. Any other tips you would give or skills to, or any other strategies that are your favorites for self-management?

You know, a big one is that positive emotions need to be managed too. So a lot of people think that self-management is about managing what we label as negative emotions, feeling anxious or feeling down or feeling frustrated or feeling angry. Angry. And those emotions can lead to a lot of bad behavior, don't get me wrong. But when things are going well and you're walking on clouds, people actually make a lot of really poor decisions, particularly in business and in the workplace. This, this idea— and I see this culturally in organizations, I've worked with a lot of different organizations where you're walking on water and you've, you know, your product is the better mousetrap and people are just tripping over themselves to buy it— creates gross inefficiencies.. And often that's because, like I said, you just, you just feel like you walk on water, you can do no wrong, and you're no longer a discerning analyst of your own behavior. And that leads to poor decisions. So sometimes positive emotions need to be managed and understood as well.

How would you recommend someone manage those positive emotions?

Well, it's a matter of understanding how they're influencing your decision-making. So a lot of times it's, you know, when things are going well and they're going the way we want them to, are we still going to sharpen the saw? Are we still going to look at what we could be doing better? Are we still going to analyze inefficiencies? Because, you know, not cutting, slashing that budget line may come back to haunt you 6 months down the road when you need those funds. You know, being, being efficient is always, always important.

Yeah, I remember that feeling playing high school football and winning the game, and it's like, oh, we must have done everything right, as opposed to, no, actually there's probably a lot we didn't do right, but we're winning, so we're just going to kind of ignore those little, little problems. Let's talk about social awareness. What is that in your mind? What is— and how do we— how can leaders increase their social awareness?

Well, social awareness is how well, obviously, you understand the emotional state of other people, but there's more to it than that. It's understanding what the world looks like through their eyes, what they are experiencing, not just emotionally, but what drives their behavior, what's important to them. And this is something that a lot of us struggle with, and we struggle with it because we have a hard time focusing more on other people than we do on ourselves. So when you're in a conversation and someone is talking to you, you're thinking about what you're going to say next. You're thinking about how what they're saying affects you instead of really trying to understand where they're coming from and why they're delivering the message this way. People who are really astute at social awareness pick up on a lot of unspoken forms of communication. They understand people better because they're really, really focused on what's coming their way.

What is the difference? I've heard a lot of people talk about this, but I'd love to know your take. What is the difference between empathy and sympathy? And which one? And I guess, how does that play out in leadership?

Well, the biggest difference is that, you know, sympathy is having some concern for what they're feeling, but empathy is— the way it's traditionally defined is having experienced the same thing yourself. But it's really understanding what they're feeling, not just caring about what they're feeling, but really sort of understanding it, feeling it yourself. It's a higher form than sympathy because it's really trying to— so, so if, if I don't know, my— someone cheated on me and then you went through the same thing. Now I'm supposed to relate because I had the same experience. Sure, it makes it easier. But what about if you are sharing your political views that are entirely different than mine? How can I be empathetic to that? Well, by understanding what drives you and why you have these views, why you feel this way. This is empathy. So people are afraid to understand other people because they assume it means you're condoning how they think and feel. And it's not. It's that you're understanding how they think and feel, and that arms you with important information. It's, it's, it's— you're not succumbing to someone else's beliefs. You're just understanding people.

That's really helpful. How would you coach a leader to increase their social awareness?

You know, I really, I really, really try to get people to focus more on other people than they do on themselves and to trust their intuition. There's a really interesting study that I talk about in the book, and it was at a university in the Netherlands, and they took people who whose eyes work perfectly, but they had cortical lesions. So the visual cortex is in the back of the brain. Your eye sees what's going on in front of you and it sends a signal back there and the visual cortex processes it. And that's how you know what you're seeing. So these individuals had perfect sight, but their visual cortexes were damaged. So their brain— they were effectively blind because their brain didn't know what they were seeing. What they did is they put them in front of computer screens with people demonstrating strong emotions. And if I do that to you, you're going to mimic the emotions on the screen just really quickly. Mirror neurons do this, you can't control it. So if someone's really happy, you'll crack a little smile. Someone's really angry, you'll furrow your brow just a little bit. And they found that these blind people were doing the same thing. Oh, wow. And it really, really bothered the researchers because all the medical knowledge at the time was that we don't know what we're feeling until the visual cortex processed this. And they did layered MRIs to provide some different analysis. And what they realized— and there's an image in the book that helps, brings, makes this a little more clear. But the long and short of it is that the optic nerve, you know, that goes from your eye to the back of your brain, was sending off signals to the limbic system along the way. So their brain didn't know what they were seeing, but they were having an emotional reaction to it. So think about it. How many times have you walked into a room full of people and there's just something going on and you don't know what it is, but you can feel it? That is that process. You're having an emotional reaction to what you're seeing before you're able to process So a lot of the book in focusing on social awareness, it's not just focusing on other people, but it's also learning to trust your own intuition about what other people are making you feel.

Mm. That's so helpful. Well, Travis, I really appreciate your time. In our last just minute here, I'd love, uh, for, for leaders who are like, okay, we've covered self-awareness, we've covered self-management, social awareness. I would really like to start becoming more emotionally intelligent. I'd love for you just to— and we've already talked about some of the practical tips, but any other just practical things that a leader could go do this week to start increasing their emotional intelligence and ultimately becoming a better leader?

Well, the way to think about it is the pathway in, in your brain that, that is responsible for emotional intelligence is, is kind of like a muscle. You know, if you go to the gym 3, 4 times a week and you do curls, your bicep is going to swell. That's just how it works. Your brain loves efficiency. It does not— it wants to make behaviors as easy as possible. So if you repeat a behavior, if you're a yeller, the example we used earlier, then there's a pathway that reinforces that. And you need to have an alternate behavior that you're going to pursue, which will then allow the original pathway to wither and die, and it will form a new pathway. So the book is all focused on these very specific strategies, and that's why the test says these are the 3 strategies that you're going to work on. Basically, these are the 3 pathways that you're going to form. And I, and I explain this in the book. I tell people, pursue it until you're doing it without thinking about it. That means you've formed a pathway, you've created a habit. This— you've, you've killed this urge to yell and you've replaced it with something else. Then you want to move on to something new. And that's the process of increasing your emotional intelligence. You're forming new pathways, you're building on top of them, and over time you're changing your behavior and you're doing it in a way that doesn't require a lot of conscious thought. You're just doing it naturally.

I think it's so cool. I really appreciate how you've made this work accessible to leaders. I love it. I definitely will continue to teach it. In the last few seconds here, Travis, tell folks where they can connect more with you and the work you're doing. And of course, go get the new Emotional Intelligence, Travis's new book. I'm excited that you came out with this, but really appreciate your time.

Yeah, you can find that book on Amazon. It's in the airports as well. I also publish weekly articles on LinkedIn, so if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, I'm— I, I try to share something new and interesting once or twice a week. And yeah, I'd be happy to, to have you me there.

And then you're doing work at LeadX. Is that, uh, something that people can connect with? Is there anything you want people to know about that?

Yeah, so I've developed an emotional intelligence training program with LeadX, and this is something that, um, you know, if you like the concepts in the book and you want to actually teach them in a more formal training environment, you know, in your organization, we have a certification program so you can get certified to be an emotional intelligence trainer and train people inside your organization. And then there's some other things like the 360 version of the assessment and some stuff like that, consulting work we do around EQ. But, you know, just the idea is to capture what's, what's in the new emotional intelligence and bring it to people in a way that they can use it.

Well, Travis, I'm glad you're back. It's good to have you.

Glad to be here.

All right, well, that was a lot of fun. Thanks for sticking around to the end. If you're someone that will invest an hour of your time and learning about emotional intelligence, you are someone that I would bet on. So thank you for investing in yourself. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I know I sure did. I've been wanting to talk to him for a long time, so that was a lot of fun to nerd out on emotional intelligence. Go check out his book, The New Emotional Intelligence. And again, if you want to become a more emotionally intelligent leader, join the Intentional Leader Lab that kicks off the first week of October. We're going to be talking a lot about self-awareness and self-management. How do you become more aware of others? And how do you bring all that together on your teams and at home? And I, what I've learned is as you become more emotionally intelligent, you succeed at work, but you also succeed in all of your relationships and at home. So I hope you'll go join the Intentional Leader Lab that kicks off the first week of October. Just go to intentionalleaderlab.com where you can apply. There's only gonna be 12 spots cuz this is gonna be a powerful intimate community where we can really challenge each other, get to know each other and grow together. That's what I've found is that If you really want to grow, you got to join a community. You got to put yourself in a different room of people who think differently and who expand your way of thinking and your way of growing, and you will accelerate your growth. So that's what I'm going to try to create. It's kicking off the first week of October. So go to intentionalleaderlab.com to apply. Once you apply, I will reach out to let you know if it's a good fit. Hope you go and have a wonderful day. Remember, life is short. Let's go make it count.