Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Letting Your Emotions Hijack Your Success | Travis Bradberry

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

What if your success as a leader, parent, or partner depends less on IQ — and more on emotional intelligence?On today’s episode, we sit down with Dr. Travis Bradberry — best-selling author and one of the world’s leading voices on emotional intelligence (EQ). With over 5 million books sold, including his latest The New Emotional Intelligence, Dr. Bradberry has spent decades studying how EQ shapes performance, relationships, and well-being.In this conversation, we explore what emotional intelligence looks like in action: how it shows up in leadership under pressure, how it impacts the quality of your relationships, and what happens when it’s missing. You’ll learn:Why EQ often outperforms IQ and technical skills as a predictor of successHow to recognize blind spots that undermine relationships and performanceWhat leaders with high EQ do differently when stakes are highStrategies for cultivating self-awareness and self-regulationWhy EQ is central to living a “great life”Tune in to hear Dr. Bradberry share practical strategies for building EQ in the modern world — and why doing so can unlock deeper trust, resilience, and clarity in every part of your life. Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset!Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and use the code finding mastery for 35% off your first subscription order. 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. We're 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 Jervais, by trade and trading, a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple.

It's to sit with the extraordinarily, to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's guest is Dr. Travis Bradbury. 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 is 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 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 Radbury. 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 out of Yale that Peter Salivay, 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, live through the Great Depression and it's this whole pull yourself up by your bootstraves 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 science, 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, 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 you're a young man and kind of muted with emotions, what was the cost of that in at any part of your life, either early, early times or now? Like, what was the downside of that? Oh, wow. Yeah, the costs are are massive. I mean, I can think of, you know, my wife is a psychologist

as well. Oh, boy. You do. Yeah, yeah. We're quite a pair. But she and I started to date 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 it's 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 three years. I did a dual PhD in five 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 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 But 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 want to get the whole thing done. I want to get out in my PhD program where I was going to 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 ticks on it?

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 that's 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 five million books so far. Yeah, there you go. Say it again? Five million, yeah. And my original goal was to do $100,000. thousand copies with my first book and it you shot way to way yeah way yeah so all right well hold on i get your ambition right that you've got a motor you got a drive um 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 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, they're actually kind of easy or like, whoa, all of a sudden I felt my heat turn up or, you know, like what's happening actually right now for you? Yeah, that's interesting because before podcast existed, you know, I would do a lot of TV and radio interviews and TV especially, national TV, it's a three minute interview.

They're getting it in. 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. You know, 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, sixth 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 and 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 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'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.

Yes. So is your position that emotional, are influencing thoughts or is it the primary driver thoughts influence emotions? Or it could be interactualist, 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 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. Before it gets to conscious awareness. That's the high road. It takes a little bit longer to get up there. Yes. 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 think the emotional way, you can think the emotional way, 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 feedback loop. And when I think of the high road, the high road and the low road, you've got to 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 almost like the way you might respond if you were attacked 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 primalimbic system and that's governing or running the whole show i think it's more of i this is the way i am type of thing i'm just a yeller and you know or 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 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 a 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 start working with them thoughts. And people are like, man, I feel sick to my stomach or like, it's just, I'm flooded down there.

Oh, we're going to do some bottom-up strategies. Yes. Where do you go with training? Because I know you know training. Yeah, yeah. Where do you go with training? Well, I like your model there, you know, 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 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 bucks 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 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 Lisa. Sleep is one of the foundational pillars of high performance. There's no arguing that. And when we have great sleep consistently and deeply, we give ourselves the best chance to operate at our best, physically,

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let's say you start with an assessment, okay? Good standard. Let's say somebody does not have available resources to go by 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 by in 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. So in leadership trainings and 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, maybe your business partner or a call or your spouse and say, hey, I just learned about this emotional intelligence model on this podcast, here, these four 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 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 talk about the four 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 and point i am 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 and now I'm even more aware that my stomach is in knots and I'm sweating and I'm man I'm even more aware I wonder what they're thinking are they noticing me so 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 four 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 two, 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 cover 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 was not my book. Dan Golmes's book, yeah. So when I was starting my career six 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. 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 in a society as a whole is when I look at all the political divisiveness and 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 exacerbated 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 fall.

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 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 were 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.

Are you aligned with Antonio Demoscio's kind of differentiation between feelings and emotions or, and Demoscio is one of the USC professors, the 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 think that's a positive thing. So in that sense, I agree with this model. And I'm not two in one camp or the other in how you should go about it. It's just a matter of 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. And we'll do it one more time. The emotions, but this observable nature of motions, 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, this is what love feels like for me. Or it could be, I'm out of my mind scared. Yes. Right? So 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. 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 prove themselves, they're on the speaking circuit.

And I know people that love it. They're like, you know, a Ram Chiran doesn't even have a home. Who is it? Ram Chiran. 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 a place to be is the plaza in New York.

And what does he talk about? I got to go check him out. Oh, he's a high-level strategy guy. Got it. So it'd be like C-suite team. Let's work on strategy. Okay. 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 be vulnerable here.

Early in my career, 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'm said I'm not doing this for 20 years same said Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and now I have a bottle no I know it's something I did for a little while until I learned how to channel all that anxiety and all that excitement and I'll let the excitement win and just go out there and go for it.

So my point is 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 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, 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 go. going on stage, I don't know. So it wasn't, 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, I've got some structure about how I go about ready. You know, there's preparation and there's readiness. So you do training slash 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 in that.

Okay, let's do this. You said something, I want to get to the four pillars of your model, but you said you can have two 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 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, this, 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 I'll, a lot of people funnel their emotions into anger. I consider it a secondary color.

Secondary. 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 the way I see it is, you know, 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 feeling vulnerable. And so you don't want to sit with that. So you're very willing to sit with anger. But my point is 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 your language around a funnel. Yeah. That's like the primary to secondary color. I feel like anger's a second hit. Yeah. You know, there's a first hit that comes in and hurt or fear are kind of the two that, for me, at least, 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. It'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 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 feel vulnerable, you're in a slump, you just got a bad call for strike three, 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 states where you're sort of in limbo between two emotions. you got to choose which path you're going to follow. Okay.

This is great clip. Edelman is, he's playing for the Patriots. It's an intense moment. He gets a call for something. He comes flying to the ref, like he's going to front the ref and argue with the ref. And the ref looks at him, you know, like, are you really up in my space right now? Because you can get ejected. You know, there's lots of things, 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 that he 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'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 so I just love that clip. I'm going to send it to you and make sure it is out on them. Nice. You know, Julian, if you're listening, I've got to talk to you about it. All right, what do you think? You want to go to your model and kind of open that up? Yeah, let's do that.

Yeah, four pieces to your model. So we talked about self-awareness, right? That 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. And that's because we're taught that this is the way we are. So you don't want to 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 doors and you can change your behavior. Make this concrete. Tell a story or invite me into an experience you've had that highlights 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 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 affected 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 sit there in session. She tell me how many inches her daughter's pitches would break. And, you know, it had to be, she had to get that. So we talk about that. I love baseball. Great. No problem. We can talk about it. So she comes into session one day and she says, yeah, so I was at practice last night. And one of the dads comes over and he grabs a chainling fence and he says, you're working with an executive coach, aren't you? And she 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 translates

It opened a door to how she was as a softball coach. And I see that a lot. I want to take a minute to talk about the Happiness Lab podcast. Over the years, we've talked a lot about what it means to live a great life, a fulfilled, meaningful life. We know it's so much bigger than more money, a better title, or that craved for attention via social media. That's why the team and I have been loving what Yale professor and researcher,

Dr. Lori Santos is doing on her podcast, The Happiness Lab. Lori has found that many of us do the exact opposite of what will make our lives better. On the Happiness Lab, she takes you through scientific research and then share some surprising stories that just might change the way you think about happiness. Join Dr. Lori Santos this fall with episodes on her hand-picked back-to-school reading list for adults looking to lead fuller, happier lives. Listen to the Happiness Lab wherever you get your podcast. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Square.

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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. It'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 spouses. 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 I'm going to 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 I, my experience has been, and there's a book on, it was foundation.

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 stuck in like there's like something that has to go through a filter be like I'm going to 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 one two three practices to increase self-awareness 360 you hit on one yeah or any for 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, it 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 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 higher level view. That is self-awareness in action. Yeah, it's 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. Okay. So there's been plenty of times. Like, let's say 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 to kind of transition the next kind of I don't know two minutes

to something else and we're just getting ready to end the call and we're we're telling each other how much we appreciate each other and 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 recognize it and I was like, not just not now though. 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 moved from my throat to my jaw behind my eyes. 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 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 channeling your emotions into producing the behavior that you want.

So you're aware of what it is your 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, well, that'll mean, 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're kids, men and women. And I do want to get into the gender and, you know, 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. 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 me? You know? And so I'm the one that I'm actually, boy, can't let them know now. So I got to 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 have 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. And then I'll take care of my counterparts here.

And, you know, 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 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. Finding Master is brought to you by Mack Weldon. if you've been a community member here at Finding Mastery for a while now,

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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 that 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 genders have an equal awareness of emotions that's why I didn't ask about awareness I'm 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 three yes so so before we go to pillar so we got let's go back self-awareness self-management and we 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 the positive emotions need to be managed to. 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 to. 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 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. So it's, you're participating in that. It's like the entry point. Okay. 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 often. 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. their course. And if you're acting on an emotion the moment you feel it versus giving it some time to sit with it, you're going to have a far more effective outcome. Often, you know, one of the strategies in a 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 going to be a good one tomorrow. So why not sleep on and see if you still feel that way? Grandma was right in so many ways. She was. Yeah. She'd been around the block so she knew. Yeah. Okay. Let's do social awareness now. This is pillar three.

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 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 and effective in relationships, where we start making assumptions about what another person thinks and feels instead of trying to actually understand it. Okay, so if, 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, like, what's right behind that emotional experience? Yes. Which is the primary drivers. Yes.

So it's, yes, it's understanding. you know, what they're feeling, but also 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 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 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 increase your social awareness. Yeah, so let me give you a little bit of a counterintuitive one. And this is why, you know, this book is called the new emotional intelligence because it's the latest thinking in the field, right?

My biggest book was 2009, and it's gotten kind of outdated. 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 so what they did is so so so so your eye if the person is angry we'd fur our brow a little bit if they're happy we might crack a little smiles involuntary and they took people whose eyes worked perfectly but their visual cortex at the base of their brain had lesions so it couldn't process what the eyes were seen so these people were blind. They had never seen in their whole lives or since they had an accident that caused lesion. And they were having the same reaction as people was sight. That is wild. Right. 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. And it's subtle. Maybe it's demonstrative.

Like, oh, the picture of a 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 did they say? No, dude. I'm blind. 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 as 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 to 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 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 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 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 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. is coming from. So you walk into that room, you get that feeling in your gut, you say, I'm going to sit with this for a minute, 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. Yeah. If you're so many ways. Yeah. Okay. So let's get to the last one, the relational piece. Yes, 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 other people's emotions, what's going on with them, and you're going to self-management as a result. So I know what's going on with me.

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off that's summer and the number 75 summer 75 at finding mastery.com slash course for $75 off because it's not what you know that changes your life it's what you train 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 me 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. And, 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 bit more like Malcolm Gladwell, I think. but that's not what people want with emotional intelligence. That book had already been written. They wanted 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 from your research. I want to understand age differences. And I also want to understand performance differences. So can we start with gender,

Sure. Women outscore men on the social side of emotional intelligence. That's where the only place we see as statistically significant difference is that women are more effective when it comes to managing relationships. And there's also some increases in social 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 collective. cultures, things of that nature. I just found that it was a little too sort of labeling. In presenting that research, I felt like people wanted to make things too concrete and it moved away from this individual

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, 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 do's and don'ts helps. And you definitely see being 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 the 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. You've got some data on EQ stratted across managers versus executives.

and then I want to dig a little bit on EQ and performance under pressure. So 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 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 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 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 tell you two things about this.

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 out for the supervisor. EQ scores peaked in middle management. And from there it 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 once you move above middle management, companies tend to increase 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. So that was in my 2009 book. Rerunning those numbers for my new book, it's flattened out a lot because there's a bit of much more emphasis on EQ and workplaces. But, 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 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 in 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 to 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 three to work on. And I suggest you start with two of those three until they become habitual until 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 going to have to do it a couple at a time or you're never going to 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. It'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, 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 outcomes. That's where I want to hit you 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. So they don't self-identify I struggle with working with stress. You've backdoored it. Yes. In the ways to deduce that they are not good at working with stress. And with the new test that comes with a new book, 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 it's good. 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 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. Yep. That's a very different. 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 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 through the same schooling that are doing the same job. So what is going to 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 a 155. So you've got this little

tight range. So the 150 is not necessarily going to 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 spend your whole life ignoring them so you've you've got to build that awareness. That's the only way you're going to get there. And you just, you got to start somewhere. All right. I'm really interested in psychological agility. 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, what 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 going to 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 yeah 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 skill set off. So in the book, I recently did a series of keynotes for a really big

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. 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 demands that looking inward is something that is challenging. Yeah, yeah. Point to the parents, like what you'd hope we do.

Honestly, 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 going to 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 that. So as a parent, if you can master that, you've won 90% of the 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 need to be perfect.

You just need to create the method, yeah. When you, knowing everything that you know and you think out five 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 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 within 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 walking down the hall to talk to somebody, you just, 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 via voice, and they don't think they're missing out, you know they are. you're just you're doing it too just maybe not quite at their level you know just because you're not on TikTok all day doesn't mean you're 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 Bradbury. I'm also on Instagram and the socials under that handle. So I'm always posting stuff if you want to check it out. This is awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a great conversation. Next time on Finding Mastery, Canadian Beach Volleyball stars Brandy Wilkerson and Melissa Humana Paradis sit down with their coach Marcio Sicoli and Dr. Michael Javei, hosted by USC's Dave Belasco, they relive the wild ride of Paris 2024. From near elimination to center court under the Eiffel Tower, it's a story of resilience, trust on what it takes to rise together. Join us Wednesday,

September 17th at 9 a.m. Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to finding mastery.com slash newsletter to sign up.

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