The Mindset Mentor - What is Emotional Intelligence?

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Are your emotions running your life? In this episode, I walk you through how to develop emotional intelligence by mastering self-awareness, self-regulation, and adaptability. If you’ve ever struggled with emotional overwhelm or felt stuck in reactive cycles, this episode gives you a step-by-step process to take back control. Reveal the hidden patterns shaping your choices, habits, and success. Take my FREE Identity Quiz to discover who you really are and how to break through to the next level.Join here 👉 https://www.identityunlockquiz.com/ My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the mindset mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a favor, pull out your phone real quick, however you're listening to us go to Spotify or Apple podcasts, whatever it might be, and give this podcast a rating and review. The reason why I asked for that is because the more positive rating and reviews this podcast gets, the more that those platforms actually show this podcast and presented to people who have never listened to it before, which allows this podcast to grow, but also for us to impact more people. So it'll take you five seconds. Just do me that favor. I appreciate it. Today, we're going to be talking about your emotional intelligence and how to develop

your emotional intelligence. And what makes us human and makes us different than almost all other animals is the depth of our emotions. Animals do have emotions, but the difference between us and them is the level and the depth at which ours can go. And another really big difference between us and animals is how we can imagine a fake scenario, a fake future, good or bad, and we can get an emotional reaction from that fake future right now, good or bad. So like we can imagine starting a business and it's our first day starting this business and we can start to think about, oh my God, what if this business fails? What if this happens to me?

What if this doesn't happen to me? And we can start to imagine a future where the business fails and we will feel those feelings right now in this moment. But we could also imagine, you know, you guys have probably, if you're out there listening to me and you're human, you've probably imagined some sort of Sexual thought or sexual scenario, right? And you also notice from imagining that future your body still does something, right? So no matter what it is that you're actually imagining good bad sexual Your body is going to have some sort of reaction to it and that's just internally now

You also think about externally all the people that are around you that you deal with, work, everything. All of that stuff is going to cause some sort of emotion inside of you. What it really comes down to is how do we actually regulate, understand, regulate, and use our emotions for good? Because let's be real. Most people's parents were not psychologists that taught us exactly how to understand our mind, understand our emotions, and they probably didn't have really high emotional intelligence. Maybe they did. If they did, you're lucky, but most people didn't really have that. And so really it's something that's a skill that we need to develop. And we're going to talk about, like I said, something called emotional intelligence, which

is really just the ability to identify, understand, and manage your emotions. And those could be our emotions, but they can also be other people's emotions as well. Once you become more emotional and intelligent, you can actually start to help other people become more emotionally intelligent. If you have children or if you're a manager or if you have people that you surround yourself with, it is very important for you to understand your emotions and up regulate your emotions and your calmness and your emotional intelligence so that therefore you can help other people around you as well. I think that this is a skill set and the reason why I say it's a skill set is it's really something that you can improve at and it's really something I think everybody listening should want to be

better at. It helps you with better decision making, manage relationships that you have, conflict resolution. And it's also really a key factor to your personal success, but also your professional success. So you need to understand your emotions and not act like they don't exist. A lot of people like to just kind of not look at their emotions, they throw them off to the side and they're like, no, those aren't there. I'm just a robot.

You have to really understand your emotions. And some experts even say that emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence when it comes to overall success, happiness, and wellbeing. And the good thing for us, fortunately, is that unlike IQ, emotional intelligence can be developed and enhanced, which is why I called a skill set. And so today we're just going to basically go through a really simple three-step process to help you develop your emotional intelligence. Cool? So the first thing is self-awareness. You need to understand your emotions.

I feel like I talk about self-awareness almost every single episode. And it might be the most important skill for someone to have because you cannot change something if you are not aware of it. And so what you really want to do is start developing your own self-awareness. A lot of people think they know themself. Then they start reading books and they get into self-development and then they start where they go to a therapist and like, holy shit, I didn't know myself at all. There's all kinds of things happening in the background.

There's my 5% conscious mind. There's my 95% conscious mind that's kind of running a program that has so much conditioning that was making me act a certain way, that was making me feel a certain way, that was making me think a certain way. And I think that this is really something for us to think about is with all of the technology and the stimuli that we have all day every day. We have phones, we have TVs, we have social media on our phones, we have text messages, we have computers, we have emails, we have

other people in our lives, all of those things. Most people are really unaware of themselves because they are so busy doing things that they never take a step back and actually think they're too busy in the 3D realm of everything externally versus kind of taking the mirror and putting it on ourselves and saying, well, why am I this way? What is it about my relationship with my mom that made me this way? What is it about my relationship with my dad that made me this way? Are there any traumas that I haven't gotten past? Is there any people who died in my life that I didn't even actually grieve? And so therefore, because of the fact that I didn't

grieve, it's like this well of emotions that's stuck inside of me that comes out only when I drink or whatever it might be for whenever I get angry. And most people, because they're so busy, are really unaware of their deep unconscious reactions and the actions that we take and why we take them. And so you could take two people who have the exact same life, two twins, and they could be two completely different people based off of the thing that happened to them, but then also how they react based off of what happened to them.

And if you don't take a step back and actually start to look at this, you don't really know how it's affecting you. And when you don't know how it's affecting you, you also don't know how it's affecting other people. And that's why I always say in the podcast, when you're in the jar, you can't read the label. You've got to take yourself out of the jar to be able to read the label.

You've got to take yourself out of your own head and start asking yourself really deep questions. We've got to get out of the jar more. We've got to calm ourselves down a little bit and say, why did I act that way? Why did I have such an emotional reaction to what she said to me? Why did I freak out on that person? Oh, I just have a short fuse. No, you don't have a short fuse.

That is actually something that you've built up over years. You weren't born with a short fuse. And self-awareness is really the cornerstone of emotional intelligence. It's the capacity to really start to recognize and understand your own emotions, your motivations, your actions, your patterns of behavior, because we all have patterns. We're just literally people that just go and do patterns all day long, depending on what

happened to us in our past. You know, if you have a parent who's very calm, someone might cut you off in the road and you have no problem with it. You're like, oh, that guy must have to poop, so he's really in a hurry. So, all right, you cut me off. But if you have a parent who has a short fuse or someone who freaks out at people when they cut them off and then you freak out when people cut you off, that is a pattern. And you've developed that pattern from somebody else.

How aware are you of your patterns? And that really what it comes down to is being aware of what you're feeling, why you are feeling that way, and how those emotions can affect your decisions and your actions. And then also how your emotions affect other people around you as well. And so let's talk about how to develop more self-awareness in your life. So stress is an emotion and that is a pattern. Something that can happen to me could make me really stressed out. The exact same thing could happen to you and it doesn't stress you out at all.

And so stress generally helps with you identifying your triggers, understanding your emotional responses and eventually help you develop coping mechanisms. And the idea more than anything else is to learn yourself. I always say knowing yourself is based in the past. Learning yourself is based in the present. So you sit down, you ask yourself when you start to have a heightened emotion, what is it that's triggering you? Why do you feel that way?

How do you feel? What can you do about it? And you'll start to learn more about yourself than you ever have. You'll start to see triggers before they actually come up. You'll start to see, oh, okay come up. You'll start to see, oh, okay, I know that this thing right here really makes me anxious. Okay, I'm starting to see that this, starting to notice my feelings, starting to notice my emotions, starting to notice my chest get a little bit tighter. Okay, I'm about to get into a stressed, anxious state. Okay. Why? Because,

oh yeah, that's right, I've been here before. Okay. And what you do is you start to develop coping mechanisms to help you when you do get stressed. And one thing that I recommend is when you get triggered in some sort of way, whether that's, whether that's pissed off, whether that is sad, whether that is angry, whether that is you just have a full on breakdown or you disconnect or you bypass any of those things, when you get triggered in some sort of way, the point of this journal is to get curious and have it with no judgment. Instead, take really compassionate and curious approach. The same way that if your friend came up to you and said, hey, can I talk to you?

Like I'm really dealing with some stuff right now. You know, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, he said this to me and I just went off the rails and I don't like that I did that and I'm really trying to figure out, can you help me out? You wouldn't be like, oh, well this, and you wouldn't like throw judgment and shame and guilt at your friend, but you'll do it to yourself. So really what it is, is try to be able to journal through these things without emotion, without judgment, without guilt, without shame, because those things don't help.

And so journaling this way can help you understand yourself and it can also really be a great emotional release to dump all of your feelings onto a piece of paper and work through them. Because when it's in your head, it's really hard to figure out, like really hard to figure out. You're feeling, a lot of times people are like,

Rob, I don't know why I feel this way. And I'm like, yeah, because it's in your head, put it on paper, because when it's put on paper, it can be planned. It can be worked through. And you can start to figure yourself out. And so that's a big tip that I'll give you to start to develop more self-awareness is to have a stress journal. Have a journal that you put your emotions down and you start asking yourself, how am I reacting? Why do I feel this way? Then when you notice yourself in those moments, slow down in the moment. The subconscious brings up, there's something called automatic thoughts they talk

about in cognitive behavioral therapy where it's an automatic thought and it's so automatic that you don't even notice the thought. You don't even recognize it most of the time. Usually we don't recognize the thought, we recognize how we feel. We notice the emotion. And so what you want to start to do is slow down in the moment when you feel that way and what am I feeling? Why am I feeling this way? And you start to actually work through those things and you just kind of slow yourself down, chill out a little bit, stop being so go, go, go, go, go all the time. Another tip that I'll give you for being self-aware, which I know most people listen to this podcast, you're not going to do this because it scares the shit out of you, because it's a hard one. Go to people who you love, ask around what they notice about you. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. They will tell you things I 100% promise you

that you might not notice about yourself. You think that you know yourself a lot of times, but you don't know yourself until you get feedback from people who know you well. So you can sit down and ask your friends, you can ask your family, you can ask your spouse, you can ask your children if they're old enough to be able to talk to you about it. You can ask for colleagues for feedback about your behavior, about your reactions. And really, once again, I know most of you guys are not going to do this, but if you

do, it will absolutely change your view on yourself because there's a lot of things that are going to pop up and you're going to go, oh my God, they're so right, I didn't even realize that I do this. And so that's the first tip is to make sure that you become self-aware of yourself. The second thing, once you become aware of your emotions is self-regulation. So now that you're aware of your emotions, now we've got to figure out how to manage those emotions. When I say manage your emotions, I don't mean push them away, act like they don't exist, any of that stuff. I mean manage

them as far as how to start to work through them because an emotion is something that's coming up in your body. Your body wants to release this emotion. If you just push it away, it's like throwing something on the carpet. You could throw it on the carpet eventually, you're going to get to a point where you've thrown too many things on the carpet, you trip over it, you hurt yourself. You say something that you don't want to say, you react a certain way. And so really with self-regulation, a thing I've been thinking a lot about recently is self-soothing.

Self-soothing is something that is naturally built into the human system. When you look at a baby, they know how to self-soothe. something that is naturally built into the human system. When you look at a baby, they know how to self-soothe. It's pretty wild. They know to suck on their thumbs or they suck on a pacifier or they will cry until their mother picks them up because they want to be soothed in some sort of way. They have a heightened state and they're trying to bring themselves back to homeostasis, just normal. Young children do the same thing as well. Young children will have a stuffed animal that makes them feel like they're soothing or they'll have a blanket that

they carry around that makes them feel safe. As adults, most adults that I know don't, number one, they don't know what self-soothing is. Number two, they definitely don't have any form of self-soothing that they do for themselves. And we're not taught how to do so because frankly, most of our parents are not good at self-soothing on their own and they don not taught how to do so because frankly, most of our parents are not good at self-soothing on their own and they don't know how to do it in their own life. So it probably wasn't taught to you. Self-soothing is really just a practice to be able to get yourself from a heightened state to a calm, relaxed state, back to homeostasis.

And it's the ability to be able to regulate your emotional state regardless of your circumstances. So how do you do it? Okay, the first thing is this. When you feel a heightened state bubbling up inside of you, we all know the feeling of it just kind of coming up, right? What you want to do is you want to pause. Pause before you do any sort of reaction. When you feel a real strong emotion, especially a negative one, don't immediately react. Victor Frankl, who you've heard me quote many times in this podcast, wrote an incredible book called Man's Search for Meaning. He was in Auschwitz as a prisoner in the Nazi camps, and he was a psychologist before, and he has this quote of saying between stimulus and response, between

something happening and you reacting. So between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. So if you want to be free, what you want to do is be able to emotionally regulate, to choose your response. That is where you're really trying to master yourself, to pause and to notice your state changing and then make a conscious decision of what you want your next

action to be. And then what you want to do is you want to breathe. Our breath rate, the depth and the pattern of it is the first thing to change when your emotional state changes. There's been many studies on this. There's a Japanese study that was done at Showa University in Yokohama. I hope I said that correctly. It indicates that six deep breaths in a 30 second period can help lower your heart rate and your blood pressure. Dr. Hubert, Hubert Benson at Harvard Medical School coined something that was called the relaxation response.

And the relaxation response is stimulated through deep conscious breathing. And so usually the very first thing to change is as soon as you start to feel the emotions bubble up is your heart rate goes up, your breath rate goes up. So you're trying to calm yourself back down. Deep conscious breaths to allow yourself to go from a heightened state to a calmer state. Why? Because when your emotions are high, your logic is low. When you get really emotional, your brain actually starts to react differently. You stop sending as much blood to your prefrontal cortex, which is the executive

functioning thinking part of your brain, because you're thinking that it's actually fight or flight. Like, it's hitting the fan. I got to do something. There's no reason to be able to think through things like a math problem. Right? So that's why you can say something when you're really pissed off and then you're like, yeah, I probably shouldn't have said that to her. So when your emotions are high, your logic is low. Breathe, get yourself back to a calm state. One way that's really good to train this muscle, quote unquote muscle of going from heightened state to calm state and allowing yourself to self-soothe is actually something that I do a lot when I work out. So I work out at home, we have one in our gym.

I'm sorry, we have a gym in our garage. And when I work out at home, I'll work out really hard for the sets and get into a heightened state. And then what I'll do is I'll set a timer for my 60 seconds or 90 second rest and I'll close my eyes and I'll go from, I will try to breathe and slow myself down as much as possible. So I'm training my body and my brain to go from, I will try to breathe and slow myself down as much as possible. So I'm training my body and my brain to go from heightened state to calm state, from heightened state to calm state, from heightened state to calm state. I'm trying to train myself to calm as much as

possible. This is not, I want to say this one more time. This is not bypassing emotions. What it is, is learning how to work with your emotions. And working out is a really good strategy for emotional training. So if you go for a run and you like running, do a really quick sprint, a hundred yard sprint. Get your breath up, get your heart rate up, close your eyes, and then try to calm yourself down as quick as possible through deep conscious breaths. That is actually training for your emotions. So that's the thing that you want to make sure to do. How can you develop some form of self-soothing? Self-soothing to get

shown from a heightened state down to a calm state. And then last part of that is adaptability and being more flexible in your emotional responses. Emotional training is just like training a muscle. The more that you train it, the stronger that it's going to get. You are not going to be able to change the world around you. I think that a lot of people's stress and anxiety comes from them wanting the world to be different, but the world is not different and they're not going to change the world. And so we need to get better

at reacting to the world around you. You're not gonna be able to train your mom into being different. She's been that way for 70 years or 60 years or whatever it might be, 80 years. And so instead of trying to change somebody, what I wanna do is change myself around that person.

I got to get better at adapting instead of being like, oh, well, she's not that way. Now I'm pissed off. I bet you can think of someone that you know that no matter what happens to them, cool as a cucumber, right? They're always just calm. That right there is a skill and it's a muscle that's been developed over years and years and years. And how to really start to develop it

is to start being okay with change. Start being okay with the world not being the way that you want it to be. The only thing constant in this world is change. So instead of resisting changes and just white-knuckling your way through life and holding on as tight as you can, try to view that as an opportunity for growth and see it as, okay, this is the way that it is.

I remember I had a coaching client like seven years ago and she had this boss that was just terrible. She used to tell me stories about how she would come in and yell at her and the stuff that she would say. And she's like, Rob, I don't know what to do. Like she's just insane. I was like, okay, well you could quit. And she's like, I can't really quit right now. And I was like, well, if you can't change your circumstances, the only thing you could change is you. And so you want to get better at your emotional responses. Why don't you see it as like a challenge?

Every time you walk in the door, you're going to have this boss that's going to do some crazy stuff. She's going to say some crazy stuff. Why don't you view this as like walking into the dojo for your emotional intelligence, for calming yourself, for remaining calm and keeping homeostasis no matter how crazy it gets. And so what she did is she started going into work and her boss was just a complete nut bag and she was just trying to, no matter what happens, she's not going to

disturb my peace because your peace is something you can, your peace is yours. That's something that you decide that you're going to be in. If somebody, quote unquote, somebody gets you out of your peace, you chose to get out of your peace. So how can you actually use it as training? Some of you guys hate going home, holidays, things coming up. You're like, I don't know if I can do it. My parents are crazy. Okay. Why don't you see it as a challenge? Another thing you do besides embracing changes, learn from your mistakes because you are human.

You are going to f**k this up over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. You will not be perfect. So when you blow up at somebody and you say something you didn't mean, or you react in a defensive way, and you're like, man, I really screwed that one up. How can you learn from it? How can you learn to adapt and go, you know what? Yeah, I need to adapt myself. I need to change. How can I react better next time? Don't guilt and shame yourself. Use it as a lesson and a chance to get better next time? Don't guilt and shame yourself. Use it as a lesson and a chance to get better next time. Rather than dwelling on all of your mistakes and then make yourself feel worse about this thing,

use all of them as learning opportunities. Analyze what went wrong, what you could do differently, adapt, and then move forward. Because really what it comes down to is we're all in community with other people. And especially if you're a parent, this is something that you should definitely try to work at. You know, your children have, you're in Walmart, your children has just a, your child has a meltdown in the middle of the ice cream aisle. Okay, this is my chance to calm myself. This is my chance to try to center myself. And from there, what you're realizing is that you're not just helping yourself, you're also helping your children

around you, the people around you understand themselves. And a lot of times this is what tends to happen with people. I hear this all the time is when you start to work on yourself and you start to get closer and closer and closer to mastery of yourself, the people who are around you start asking questions. Hey, I noticed you're getting really calm. Like, what are you doing? I'm starting to get really anxious recently. And that's when you can really start to help people. You can't change them. You can change yourself and be an example of what they could be. And then hopefully they can come to you and start to ask you questions. You can help your children through this. You can help your friends through this. You can help your family members through this. You can help your spouse

through this. But really what it comes down to is you realizing that your emotions are what make you human. How can we master them? How can we not bypass and deflect them off somewhere else? How can we master them? How can we work with them? And how can we use them to our benefit in our lifetime? So that's all I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram stories and tag

me in at RobDalJr. And with that, I'm going to leave it the same way I leave you every's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in at RobDowellJr. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode, making it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.