Start With A Win - Emotional Mastery

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Adam shares his insights on leadership and emotional mastery in this episode of Start With A Win. He says many people neglect emotional intelligence and emotional maturity, pursuing financial- or performance-based goals. However, pushing your people to reach those KPIs without establishing a foundation of emotional mastery is counterproductive. The two aspects of emotional mastery—the ability to control your emotions—are emotional intelligence and emotional maturity.Emotional intelligence boils down to empathy, being aware of your own feelings, the feelings of others, and how they fit together. It is vital to understand that there are only two core emotions: fear and love. Fear is the default emotion and often accompanied by the word "but" or the phrase, "I’m busy." When you operate through fear, you can not master your emotions. Love, on the other hand, requires intentionality and leads to unconditional giving.Emotional maturity is essentially choice management, Adam says. Your choices will determine your results, so it is best to create your own good choices to get the results you want. Love and fear come to play here, too, because the ego enters into the arena to fight back when you make a bad choice because it has an inherent fear of failure. Adam’s mantra, which fits in well here, is “stay hungry, stay humble.” It is essential to learn from others constantly and to own your choices. Leaders control their emotions while demonstrating an example to others.Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Hey, Mark. Hey, Adam. Hey, I got a question for you, buddy. Okay. How's your ego? If you ask my wife. I want to get into the ego. I want to talk about emotion and emotional mastery on this episode.

What do you say? Let's do it. All right. Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Cotto, CEO of Remax with Start With A Win, looking across the virtual studio behind the other microphone I see. Producer Mark,

how you doing, buddy? Hey, I'm doing so good. Excellent. I love this so good. I mean, Start With A Win, right? That's right. That's right. I know. I was up this morning at the gym. I was texting you at like 445 or something. Get those health habits going, right? You know, the biggest thing I found is, and I'm what they call is, what do they say, big boned. I retain water. But the thing that I found is that, you know, building in that routine

and getting your blood going, even though I'm not shredding tons of weight and doing all this stuff, I'm being consistent and I'm starting each day with that, you know, checking that off my list and feeling good about it. And it just, it sets me in the right place to just keep going, you know? That's fantastic. And I'm glad to hear you say that. And you know what, we, we don't start by losing weight. We start by gaining muscle is truly how we build sustained weight loss and sustained, uh, you know, improved physique and things like that. And that's, that's something that's really challenging for a lot of people is they're like, I'm going to lose weight. Well, a lot of times we lose weight by just reducing our calories,

but ultimately what you need to do is you need to build, you need to build that muscle that exists and that's what burns the calories off. So good for you for getting out there and doing that. One of the programs I really like, um, it's called strong lifts. It's five by five strong lifts. And, uh, I think it's like kind of an ancient, you know, system of weightlifting and things like this. But, you know, they say people back in the day were just very strong because they had to like lift heavy things constantly. And so there's this app.

It's called Strong Lifts. It's really great. They're not a sponsor of the show, but it's something that I've been using. What's nice about it is that, you know, you start off with, uh, you know, like a, um, a, um, a free weights, you know, you just have a bar that's 45 pounds and then you just start with the bar is 45 pounds. And then every week it calculates what plates you need to put on that bar. And so it's nice because you don't have to use your brain like, Oh, I need to add 2.5 pounds. So that's this plus this. And then it has you work your largest muscles. So you're doing squats every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And then it works you through, you know, overhead press and then dumbbell rows. And you do all these different, you know, lifts, but they're

the same lifts three times a week. And then you keep adding that a little bit of weight each time. So then, you know, if you keep it up over a period of three, six months, now all of a sudden, you know, you're overhead pressing, you know, you're overhead pressing 200 pounds or whatever it is. And it's a good system. I'm enjoying it right now. Good for you. And it sounds like you're working those big muscle groups. And those are the ones that really burn the calories.

So that's when you're – That's right. That's how you start burning off the fat. The thing that I kind of came to grips with is that I love food, dude. I love to cook. I love, I love to eat. And so I'm like, listen, I have to make a decision. Either I'm going to eat grilled chicken and broccoli and, uh, you know, not work out, or I'm going to have to get to the gym every day and like work out and then enjoy some creme brulee and Mongolian beef and things

like that. You got to make choices and Mongolian beef and things like that. You got to make choices. There you go. I appreciate that. That's a solid attitude right there. I love it. So anyways, we're not talking about any of that stuff. Today, we're talking about emotional intelligence.

We are. I mean, it's fascinating. I get to spend a lot of time on the stage, giving keynotes, things like that. And in the process, I get to ask a lot of time on the stage, giving keynotes, things like that. And in the process, I get to ask a lot of questions of people. How are you doing? And it's fascinating because you don't hear people. Well, there's two things that people come at you with. The first one is when they want you to give a keynote, when they want you to talk to their company, their business, they're like, how do I make more sales? How do I get more leads? Whatever it might be. But it's funny because we go down that road for a little while

and then I stop and I go, how are you doing? Are you happy? How are your emotions? Are you treating your people? Well, do you feel like you're treating your people? Well, you feel like you're leading from the heart or do you feel like you're leading from the spreadsheet? And it's, it's fascinating because it's like that record scratch, you know, like I wanted the silver bullet. Why are you asking me these personal questions? Totally. Yeah. I mean, that'd be a good sound effect to throw in here, but we, what we end up doing is we, we get broken down internally in our own emotions as people, as humans, and that translates over to other people. And then we lose track.

We lose capability of emotionally dealing with a situation. And when you lose emotional control, nothing ends up well. It's horrible because you just look around and you watch people that have emotional breakdowns. They might be your kids, your teenagers, your spouse, yourself. I'll tell you, a lot of people had some emotional breakdowns and continue to do so during the pandemic. And it's fascinating. But when you take a step back and analyze that and go, okay, how do I be okay emotionally? How do I find a happy place for my heart and my head in order to have greater relationships, greater business? We come down to essentially emotional mastery. How do we master our emotions? I've also

heard it put emotional brilliance, things like that. But ultimately what this is, is a combination of two things I want to break down here real quick. One is emotional intelligence and the other one is emotional maturity. So you down with that, Mark? Should we get into those? Yeah, I'm so down. I'm so down. Let's do this. Okay. Let's talk about emotional intelligence first. Emotional intelligence has a whole bunch of different definitions. You can go into psychology and read about it and things like that, but ultimately it is, it it's empathy. It is you recognizing other people's feelings and recognizing your own feelings and how those two things fit together. What emotional position are you in? And in order to figure out truly what emotional position you're in, you have to figure out, okay, what emotion am I functioning from? And we only have really two emotions in our, in our life. And we've,

we've heard this before from other speakers on the show. My coach, John talks about it as well. The two emotions that you function from are fear, which is our default emotion and love, which is our intentional emotion. Okay. So fear default love, intentional fear is fight, flight, or freeze. Fear is us as human beings naturally trying to stay alive. We've seen something we don't know about or, um, you know, unaware of it surprises us. We're, we're in intrigued by, but we don't have an answer to, we don't know what's going to happen around us or to other people or whatever. So we go to fear, which is fight, flight, freeze. And that's typically where people go. So watch for this. All your listeners out there,

watch for people coming at you in a fear response. They give you excuses. They tell you why they can't. They use the word, but, but B-U-T. It's a bridge to an excuse. Okay. I'd love to do that, but I don't have time today. That was fear right there. I, somebody's at the front door, but I'm too busy to answer it. You know, and by the way, saying I'm busy is fear as well, because that means you just don't want to take on something that somebody else is trying to give you that is unknown. It might be something spectacular. It might be a pile of cash, but you give them a reason not to. So you think about that.

Are you operating from fear? If you're operating from fear, you're not able to master your emotions, period. End of discussion. Stop operating from fear. Just, I mean, write it on the wall. Stop operating from fear. We've seen it. There are fear mongers. There are fear brokers. There are drug dealers that deal this drug of fear every day. Turn off the TV. Stop listening to the news on whatever radio station you're on or anything like that. go find something pleasant to listen to because none of that stuff is going to change your life ever. And all it's doing is

fear mongering. Why? Because when we're in a fear mode, somebody else can control us with opportunities. Somebody else can control us by throwing things our way for us to go seek the solutions and stop the loss. Number one thing people want to do is they want to stop loss in their lives. Right. It's been proven time and time again in studies. If you're an investor in stock and at two in the morning, your stockbroker calls you and says, Hey, I think we might want to buy this. It might be good for you. You'll get angry at them.

But at the same time, if they called you at two in the morning and says, Hey, we need to sell this. Otherwise we're going to lose our rear in this. You're like, sell. Thank you for calling me. Because we want to, we want to stop loss. That's just what it is. It's fear. It's a fear response. Okay. Natural. Can't fight it. You can't fight it, especially with fear because what happens when you attack fear with fear, you get a fight friction, right? Friction happens and we don't want friction. We want progress. So how do we create progress? Well, we said we have fear. The other one is love. Love is unconditional giving. I love your passion for this mark. You call me and say, Adam, Hey, I think we should buy this stock. I'm like, Mark, I love your

passion for this. Tell me why. Help me understand. And so it's a give back and forth. You're giving, somebody's giving back. You're giving, somebody's giving back. Approach with love. So what we need to do is we need to take a look at where we're at emotionally and utilize that in our empathetic approach. So smile and give to that relationship.

Smile and give instead of giving excuses. Because excuses and excuses get no one anywhere and everybody gets frustrated and nothing happens. So if you've ever seen people negotiate, if they negotiate from a position of fear, if they're only taking away and fighting, it never ends up happening. But if there's giving on both sides and everybody, you know, it's clear, hey, let's both give so that

we're equally happy in this negotiation. Stuff happens. It's great. So that's emotional intelligence is empathy, empathy, giving unconditionally and caring about the other people, caring about their results. And that's the foundation for leadership there. Now let's talk about emotional maturity here. Emotional maturity. Best way to put that as choice management, choice management. What the heck does that mean, Adam? How do I manage my choices? Well, first of all, take a look at what your choices are. You have choices every day, just like our roll in music and start with a win. Okay. Choices every day, every day. Yeah. That voice sounds familiar. So think about that.

You open your eyes in the morning. It's either the alarm going off, your dog's waking you up. Maybe you have to go to the bathroom. Who knows what, but you open your eyes in the morning. You have a choice to make. What is that choice? Oh my gosh. Do I push back, fight against the things that I, I know are, are sitting there waiting for me? Or do I get excited about going and knocking them out and doing them? First choice you have really is, do I make my bed when I get out of it? Do I brush my teeth? Do I take my vitamins? Do I let the dog out? Whatever I do, do I get dressed? Do I go sit down and write or journal for a few?

Do I send a couple of loving emails or messages to people? What are your choices? Or do you go turn on the TV and watch the news and let that infect your brain? With fear. With fear. Exactly. Or do you go eat something that's not good for you? For crying out loud. What are your choices? Your choices determine your results. Okay. Guess what? You're in control of what happens to you during the day. People are like, what if I get hit by a bus? Okay. I'm sorry. Some things happen. What if I get cancer? I'm sorry. Some things happen, but have you done everything you possibly can in life to create good choices? So I think it's interesting because I think what's difficult

about that for the average person, right, is that when you say that, well, then that puts all responsibility back on me, right? Like all of a sudden now I can't make an excuse of, well, my partner likes to go to bed late and watch shows. And so I was up till midnight, one o'clock, you know, and so that's why I couldn't get up early or, um, you know, my boss is, is, um, you know, setting unrealistic deadlines or, or whatever it may be. All of a sudden, the things you're telling me here are, are things that has nothing to do with those external sources. It has everything to do with what I am choosing and, and what I'm deciding to do with those external sources. It has everything to do with what I am choosing and what I'm deciding to do, which is hard because then that sucks because it's like, dang it,

it's my responsibility. It's my fault if I don't succeed or it's my fault if I don't achieve this particular goal. It's no one else's. But what if we own our choices? What if we own those? Because then what you're doing is you're de-risking your ego by owning your choices, right? Your ego is what fights back against those things, not your reality. Your reality is it's going to happen regardless. But own your choices and try and make it a positive outcome.

There's going to be a result either way. You can't run from decisions in life. You have to make them. But what prevents us from making those? Fear. Fear of failure. It's okay to have things fail, but it's not okay to not try. But it's also not okay to sit and watch and hope something different happens because ultimately guess what? You get the results either way. They're your results. Own them. Hey, you know what? That didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to the way I was hoping, but I certainly learned something from it. Right. And I'm okay with that. I don't have an ego in this. Convince yourself. You don't have an ego in the game. Stay humble. I mean, it's right here behind me on the wall in my office. Stay hungry, stay humble. If you're hungry to own those choices, to own those decisions, and you're not condemning yourself

for that. You know, we're talking about accountability here. You're accountable for them. But what is accountability not? It's not condemnation. It's observation. And if we observe these things, our ego is okay with it. And it's funny. You asked me on the last episode we recorded, you asked me about the Super Bowl. It was a couple months ago now probably. And we talked about Tom Brady and how he went through the game without an ego.

Now, I got to say, Mahomes, no ego either. He tried his hardest. He did really well. But there were egos on the field that got in the way of success. There truly were. There were people getting frustrated, getting angry at each other, people causing mistakes to happen because they were so tied up in their emotion. And that never wins. Egos never win. Taunting never wins. Getting in other people's

faces never wins. The reality is if you de-risk your ego, there's no risk to it at all. And when you, as a leader, if you de-risk the egos of those that you lead, your job as a leader is to build leaders, by the way. Your job as a leader is to teach other people to recognize emotional intelligence and emotional maturity and function properly without an ego so that they de-risk how hard that is for somebody that fails and let them learn from that failure. So that's what we have to think about with our emotions. And the number one thing that you can tell a leader based on all this, and I'll wrap it up with this mark is this leaders control your emotions,

your emotional intelligence and your emotional maturity. That's what I got for you. I love that. That is just some action items right there, you know, for us each day to, to make those choices, manage those choices and don't allow fear to control us. So I love it. That's right. Hey guys, thanks so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask us a question and potentially get that question played on the episode, leave us a message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe. If you're listening to this audio right now, click that subscribe button, go go in there give us a five-star review and uh it's just let us know you're out there um and then if you want more great content you can head over to start

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