NASW Social Work Talks - EP65: Emotional Intelligence

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

George Anderson, is a is a board-certified diplomate in psychotherapy, and author of author of "Gaining Control of Ourselves," among other works. See show notes for resources and a transcript.

This episode is brought to you by the University of Louisville. From the National Association of Social Workers, I'm your host, Aaliyah Wright, and this is Social Work Talks. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode, which focuses on emotional intelligence and what social workers need to know about this critical skill. Today, we're chatting with Los Angeles-based social worker, George Anderson. Mr. Anderson is the author of several books on emotional intelligence, anger management, and domestic violence. As a psychotherapist, he uses emotional intelligence as the theoretical basis for the work that he does. Thank you, Mr. Anderson, for joining us today. Thanks so much for giving me this opportunity.

Tell us first about why you became a social worker. I had been a probation officer in Los Angeles County for 10 years, and I worked exclusively with adolescents. And I was always concerned that the amount of influence that I had was really not great. And so I was encouraged to go to graduate school. And first I thought of psychology, but it was actually a social work professor who asked the question, what exactly do you want? And I said, I'd like to do psychotherapy. And he says, you're better off with a master's degree in clinical social work with a specialization in working with children and adolescents.

So that's how I got into social work. Tell us about Anderson & Anderson and the work that you do. Anderson & Anderson is actually a professional corporation, and it's actually a social work corporation. and we've been chartered by the state of California for about 40 years. And it has changed over the years. Initially, I was on the faculty at UCLA School of Medicine, and the psychotherapy is the only thing that we did,

and we specialized with children and adolescents. That later became a psychiatric clinic in which we provided inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment in 12 states. And we had corporate clients like United Airlines, British Airways, Mexicana, Amtrak, and so on. So that was a huge business. It lasted for 12 years and then came managed health care. And so that would close the operation.

And then I wrote first a curriculum on batterers intervention at the request actually of NASW in California. And that curriculum became the largest that's used in California with emotional intelligence as a theoretical base. What exactly is emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and manage your own feelings and to be able to sense the feelings and moods of others and to use that information in a way that leads to a positive outcome. I personally, since 2008, have worked exclusively with physicians relative to emotional intelligence for what's called disruptive behavior or leadership or burnout. I was asked to see a heart transplant surgeon, so I went. I actually sat in the operating room and observed this heart surgeon do surgery on four patients,

and then he did one leg amputation, and then finally, using a computer, did orthoscopic surgery on a burst appendix. I'd never had an experience like that in my life. Wow. But what I noticed, yes, what I noticed, though, was how he treated the rest of the treatment team. And so all I did was observed. I never said anything at all on that day. It was the next day that I spent an entire day with him away from the hospital in his private office. during that particular time, as I'm going through the assessment, instead of saying,

I disagree, he said, that's wrong. So he did it three times. And I became aware that I was feeling uncomfortable. And when I thought about it more, I was feeling uncomfortable because I thought it was like a put down. He says, I disagree. When in fact, I devoted so much of my time to be really astute and good at what it is that I do. So I use assertive communication. I say, doctor, you are a heart transplant specialist. I'm not even a physician. If I told you that something that you did was incorrect, that I disagreed, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. And I said, I'm sure you have not thought about it, but when you tell me that's wrong, it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable could instead you think in terms of saying

I disagree he continued to do it and so that this is important because one of the first tasks to be successful in an interaction in social work like this is you have to have a trusting relationship between yourself and the client and so that I decided that I need to do everything that I can to influence him in a way that would make the relationship positive for the two of us. And so I said, let's move now to focusing on the skills that you score highest in. And so that's what I proceeded to do. And so there was less of a reason for him to say that's wrong or I disagree. emotional intelligence is consistent with social work practice and it doesn't really matter

what the specialty is and so you got to have a relationship with the client and it's important to constantly be aware and empathetic to the client for example i realized that one of the reasons that he was responding negatively was he was mandated to see me no one wants to be mandated for any intervention. And so that I needed to make sure to him that this was something in his best interest, is that I wanted him to perceive me as being helpful, not a person who came just to provide negative or bad information. And so then we articulated a plan in which he decided of the scores that you have that you may need or may want to improve, can we narrow it down to three initially? And then we will develop exercises in which you can practice in those

areas. For example, since he was negative in relation to interacting with the people on his team, one of the goals was to help him see that there may be reasons for any particular behavior. So it was another example from the same situation. In the afternoon of the day that I'm observing him, he kept saying to the surgical tech, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. I brought that to his attention. And he says, in the afternoon, the surgical techs or the people in the operating room are thinking that the shift time is over at three. Where are they going to shop for dinner what they're going to make for pick the kids up and and things like that and they're not paying attention and so that again the focus for me is are there ways that you may

be able to present what it is that you need from them in a way that is more positive being empathetic to the concerns of that surgical tech so again it's most on intelligence but it's very very practical i'm teaching at him each step of the way how to change the behavior that is in question so one of the most dramatic things that could possibly dream of on my part while having a person's heart in his left hand and suturing a part of the heart with his right hand he got in an argument on the telephone uh the kind of telephone that you used to wear around your head He had an argument, a yelling, screaming argument in the operating room. I almost had a nervous breakdown.

So all of that became fodder for our work together. And so it turns out the argument was with someone who was calling again with yet another complaint in which he had been disrespectful to another physician. Why do you think social workers need this skill? Because we tend to work with clients who have less than what is optimal. Right now, during the pandemic, it is the people of color and persons who have less in terms of financial means that are most likely to die and most likely to have difficulty in finding services. In order to get, for example, clients or patients going forward to buy into the vaccine, it's often that it's going to be the social worker who's involved in discharge planning in terms of, okay, here are the services that you need. And it's an example that I can give you is that even in health, if you want a patient to follow through with following the recommendations for medication,

the one who has a good relationship with the doctor is likely to follow through. The one who doesn't is likely not to follow through. And so that we work with clients like this every single day. So empathy is a critical skill as well. That's part of it is what I'm hearing. Yeah, so it's self-awareness, self-control, social awareness. That's the part in which you're picking up with the displeasure or what the life situations are with the persons in relationship management.

What can you do? What can they do? What can you help them do in order to see the value of making slight changes in understanding and perceiving in a different way what they may have thought of as punitive, for example? Mr. Anderson, what can social workers do to practice being more emotionally intelligent? First of all, I think you can start reading as much as you can about emotional intelligence. The book that I recommend to everyone is by Daniel Goleman, and it's the Emotional Intelligence in 1995, I believe. I also have my own curriculum that I use in working with physicians.

It's called A Practice of Control, and it's available on our website, which is andersonservices.com. It's very practical and down-to-earth, easy to follow. I also have an anger management workbook. It's called Gaining Control of Ourselves that is based on emotional intelligence. Listeners, we'll be right back. the university of louisville offers a cswe accredited highly ranked mssw program 100 online gain the knowledge resources and skills to promote social justice and the well-being of others in your community you can make a difference visit louisville.edu forward slash online to learn

more. And we're back. Mr. Anderson, what are some of the social work tasks that knowledge of emotional intelligence can address? Making decisions as well as, maybe I should start at the beginning, assessments first. It's like once you meet a client for the first time, in addition to developing a working relationship, you need to define the problem. That entails a good interaction between you and the client. The next one is, once you define what the problem is, then it should be in that assessment, what is needed? How can we accomplish the task at hand? And then decision making. All of those are elements that are in almost every interaction between a social worker and a client. And so when you start with the assessment, identification of the problem, as well as then now let's focus on the solution, which is going to take a longer period of time.

You're going to be using emotional intelligence all the way through self-awareness, self-control, social awareness, relationship management, empathy, as well as assertive communication and stress management and so on. And when we deal with stress management, for example, which is what is happening now worldwide, anxiety and stress and depression is higher than it's ever been in our history. Social workers are not immune themselves, so you need to start off with self-awareness. It's going to be a lot more difficult for you to help the other party if you overwhelm with your own situation. But the self-awareness gives you the opportunity to control yourself. I am recommending that all schools of social work implement emotional intelligence as part of social work training.

And it can be initiated in the field placements, which is essentially the internship a social worker should take. Can emotional intelligence be useful in social work assessment, client engagement, and decision making? It can determine the success of psychotherapy if that's what you're doing. And so let's take the work that I do. We start with an emotional intelligence assessment, and after six months we do an emotional intelligence post-assessment, which is the same assessment. So we have now evidence-based.

Did the client make progress? The answer is yes or no, and here's the evidence. And so the same thing can be done or really should be done and is beginning to occur more with some of the procedures in social work. Keeping in mind that social workers really have been, since World War II, the largest provider of mental health services in the country. Seventy percent of all mental health services in the United States have been provided by social workers since World War II, but we don't give ourselves credit for it. which means that if you adopt these same principles to the clients that you're seeing who are in social service agencies for counseling or psychotherapy

and hospitals for discharge planning or psychiatric hospitals and so on, all of those are settings in which social workers are working, or even if you think of prisons and jails. We are encountering people who have actually problems managing their lives that's based on having some type of psychiatric impairment. Is emotional intelligence something people can put in place to manage their lives better? It can be learned right away.

And so that basically only about 15 skills. And so that if you pick out just five, these are the ones that I would focus on. Self-awareness, self-control, social awareness, relationship management, and empathy. If you first start off by defining all of those in a way that is natural for you, then recognizing it when you see it, and then beginning to practice just those five, you'll be able to see the difference between you and the other party, and it gives you the impetus to make even a greater skill enhancement in those particular areas. Mr. Anderson, is there anything you'd like for our audience to know that we haven't covered? It's time, I believe, to take advantage of something negative that has occurred, which is the pandemic, and making it into a positive.

It isn't me who introduced the idea of emotional intelligence for social work. This has been something that we've had research on from the British Journal of Social Work for probably 20 years. but few schools, or I don't know any schools in the U.S. that actually have introduced emotional intelligence into practice and so that we should also encourage master's level social work students as well as those in doctor level programs to begin doing research so that we have right up as a part of the social work literature the value of adding emotional intelligence.

intelligence, even if we initially did it just in terms of basic interviewing techniques when you end with a new client. Mr. Anderson, thank you so much for joining us. And listeners, again, you can find details about the resources we've discussed in the show notes on our website. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. Don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your

podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.