Emotional Intelligence: How Good Leaders Become Great -- UC Davis Executive Leadership Program

So in preparing for this talk, I was actually talking to my daughter just the other day. And she said, so Daddy, what are you going to talk about? And I said, I'm going to talk about emotional intelligence. She said, so how do you start these talks? I was like, you know, it's different every time. I always like to come up with something new. I said, how would you start the talk? So she said, have you ever felt unseen, unheard, not understood? Well, today that stops. And I was like, that's pretty good. It was pretty good for a few reasons. One is that I like the fact that my daughter even knows what emotional intelligence means, and she's 10 years old. And I also like that it actually demonstrates some of the emotional intelligence qualities, which is that people with good emotional intelligence are able to know what they're feeling. They're able to know what their experience is and know what they want to have be seen. They also know how to express it in a way that can engender getting seen. And then they can also receive it, that when they are actually being seen, they can take it in, which is a little bit more difficult than a lot of people might guess. So today, I'm going to talk to you for about a half hour about how we can be more emotionally intelligent, more aware of ourselves, and more curious about who we are so that we can be seen, be understood, and be heard. Now, whenever I do talks, I like to start with intentions. Because I believe that by building an intentional contract with people, we are much better at being able to have a meaningful relationship that can move forward. So I want to have that with all of you. And even though we're a large group, we're going to get intimate together. So we're going to start by all agreeing to do these. Let me tell you what I'm asking you to do. So we'll start with showing up. You're showing up, you're bringing yourself. You're bringing your body. And I want you to do that. I want you to bring all of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your physiology, your behaviors, and your values and beliefs. The paying attention part is about being able to be aware of what's happening inside of you. Now, as a speaker, it's always very nice if you pay attention to me, because I'm speaking. But what I'm more interested in is for you to pay attention to yourselves. I want you to pay attention to all of your thoughts, and your feelings, and what's happening to you as we go through the day. So as you might even notice, like right now, I'm walking around. And you might notice that as I make eye contact, you might be like, oh, he's looking at me. What does he want from me? And maybe you'll notice you'll have a different thought. Maybe you'll notice that you're having a physical reaction. Maybe your heart rate goes up. Maybe you avoid eye contact, because you don't want me to maybe look at you. Just pay attention to what happens to you as we go through the day. The third thing we're going to do is we're going to tell the truth. Now, I will be asking you a few questions, but nothing that you're going to have to reveal. You don't have to reveal anything you don't want to reveal in here. The telling the truth is about when you go home tonight, can you say to yourself, when you look yourself in the mirror and say, I am being honest with myself, and I was honest with myself today. So I'm going to challenge you to be telling the truth to yourself. The last thing, which I think is actually the most difficult, is I'm going to ask you to be curious about your judgments, rather than just attached to them. So many of you are going to have judgments all the time. We are judgment-making creatures. We have a lot of factors to us. One of them is that we make judgments and assessments. Now, some people say, I don't judge. I don't judge. But that can't be possible, because you have to make assessments and judgments in order to make informed choices. So all I want you to do today is, when you notice a judgment arise, just get curious about it. What's that judgment about? Why am I thinking that? Because that might inform something you hadn't thought about before. Now, can I ask all of you to join me? How many of you will agree that we will stick with these contracts? I'm going to do the same. I am going to also show up, pay attention, tell the truth. And I'm going to be curious about it, and I'm going to try to do them in the right order this time. So let me see. I want to see hands. Everyone's hands? Excellent. All right, so we're all in agreement. Very good. All right, we're off to a good start, then. This is what we're going to do today. We're going to explore our openness to change and growth. Because if people aren't open and ready to change, they're not going to. If your mind is closed, and you have inside of you a part of you that's going to sort of reject whatever comes your way, if you're a resistant learner, you can't learn. So we're going to talk about how to open ourselves up for change. Because all of you are going to be leaders, and you are leaders now, and we want to figure out, how do we help people to change? We open them up. We create a space that engenders change. Then we're going to talk about how our emotions and our perception affect our decision making. So by the end of this, you're going to understand that more effectively. We're going to discover three secrets to managing our emotions. You're going to learn a lot about what feelings are. We'll be defining them. And then finally, you're going to understand the importance of how self-awareness impacts your performance as a leader. Sound good? All right. So I usually ask if anyone here has ever heard of Daniel Boorstin, because I like to find out. Some of you must have heard of him, because I think some of you were here before. So Daniel Boorstin, I used to say, was a famous historian. But the only people who have heard of him are the people who've been to my talks, it seems. He was the director of the Library of Congress and is a historian. And he has one of my favorite quotes. I'm going to give you my favorite quote at the end of the talk. He says that the greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge. It's not that we don't know that keeps us from growing and learning. It's that we think we know, and we close our mind to what's possible. Because human beings have a very particular need. We need to know. We like to have answers. And when we don't know something that's going to happen, or we don't know what's happening to us, we can get scared. And when we get scared, we want to get secure again. And one of the ways that we get secure is that we build stories. We build stories and erect bridges of knowledge to take us from the edge of not knowing to a place where we're solid and know again. And sometimes in the process of building that knowledge to protect ourselves, we're actually not paying attention to our surroundings. And we're losing out on very important information that can again help us make more informed choices. So by being open and by being curious, by standing at the edge of not knowing, we can learn more, and we can grow more. But it's a little bit scary. It can be very vulnerable. So I'm going to challenge all of you today to be thinking about moments when you think you're going to start creating the answer before you've heard it, when you go back to just an automatic response to get curious. Sound nice? Because this is related to our perception. Because in general, and I'm going to read this for you, in general, how we perceive and interpret the world determines how we adapt and cope rather than the world itself. Now, I suggest this generally. I think this generally is true. And I'll give you an example. How many of you have ever been angry from seeing a movie or reading an email? Let's say reading an email. Have you ever read an email, and as a result of the email, you were angry? That makes sense, right? Everyone can agree for the most part. Now, I'm going to suggest that what made you angry are pixels on a screen. They're photons emitting from a light source hitting your retina, being interpreted by your middle prefrontal cortex and your limbic area, in particular your amygdala, which causes an appraisal of information based on a perception that you have that is about your own history, your own life experience, your own genetic predispositions, and in particular, your own perception. Because if you take someone who doesn't speak the same language that you speak or someone who doesn't know how to read, and you put them in front of that same stimulus, that computer screen, and ask them, look at this thing, look at this thing, they're not going to have the same response that you have. Because it is our perception that creates the experience that we're having. Now, if a lion came in the room, my guess is everyone here is going to be scared, right? We're all going to perceive that relatively similarly. But if you were like a really great lion tamer, you grew up with lions, you might not be as scared as me. Because I would be very scared if a lion came in the room. Because you might know, look, I just move very slowly, I don't look at the lion, and I push the other person in front of me, and I'll be fine. So the reality is that we have to watch what we're perceiving and recognize that our perceptions are impacting how we're making choices and who's in front of us. Because the key today is about how we're going to be making choices based on the data that we're gleaning. So I like to define my terms. So I like to define emotional intelligence just to start. So emotional intelligence is a, I mean, emotions are a mental state that arises spontaneously, rather than through conscious effort. And it's oftentimes associated with some kind of physiological response. Emotions just happen to us. They occur naturally. And they occur because of an evolutionary function of the human experience, that we have developed this skill. This ability to perceive the world in a different way than a lot of other mammals, and certainly other reptiles. Because reptiles don't even have limbic systems. Limbic systems are where we have this emotional part of our brain. Now, the important thing about emotions is that they're also very subjective. Now, there are general emotions, and we're going to talk about that in a moment. But what triggers your emotions is going to be different than what triggers someone else's emotions, particularly because of things like our perception of them. But emotions are going to happen to you no matter what. And for us to create this sense of, like, emotions don't matter, is actually missing out on our perceptual experience. So you're going to have emotions no matter what. Does anybody know what our four basic emotions are? I want to see if anybody remembers. Anybody? Yeah, let's hear it. Happy, sad, mad, and scared. That's right. Mad, sad, glad, and scared. So just like there are three primary colors, which, by the way, I didn't even know there were three primary colors until I was about 35, when my daughter came home from preschool and said, I know my primary colors. I was like, wow, what do you mean? She's like, well, there are only three colors, and they make up all of the colors, which I know that there are different hues and things like that, but for what she was talking about, this is pretty much it. And I had no idea. I didn't realize that is yellow, blue, and red. Yeah? All right, good. So yellow, blue, and red make up all of the colors, basically, that we use. And I had no idea. But what I did know, which I felt kind of good about, is that we do have primary emotions, that there are four basic emotions. And there is some debate in the research, I want to be clear about it, that some say that there are six, and I'll tell you what the other two are. It's surprise and disgust. Those are the other two that some research says are also primary emotions. But for the heuristic purpose of what we're talking about, and a lot of other research will support, these four primary emotions are much of what you need for all of that you're doing, that these emotions make up all of the emotional experience that we have. When you feel jealous, what do you think is involved in jealousy? What do you think? I'm interested in people's opinions. What? Scared, right? You're afraid that maybe your partner is going to leave you or something like that? Sad, because sad is about loss. And so if someone leaves us, we feel sad. Yes? Anything else? I think I might be a little bit mad, right? Because maybe this person will betray me. So let's talk about what these emotions are. So mad is the experience of feeling like something is unfair or unjust. Now, I've heard people say, oh, I don't get angry, just like the judgment thing. I don't judge. I don't get angry. And my first reaction is, so you never feel like anything is unfair or unjust in the world, which to me seems crazy. Because I think a lot of folks who, when they hear the word angry or anger, they're confusing a feeling and an action. And we're going to talk about that in just a moment. But anger is the experience that something is unfair or unjust. And unfortunately, there's a lot of injustice in the world. And sometimes when it rains and you want it to be sunny out, you're going to feel angry because you wanted something different. And that can make you mad. Now, it might also make you sad. Because sad is the experience of loss. If we feel like we have lost something that matters to us, we will feel sad. If you were really excited about having a wedding on a certain day outside and it rains, you're going to also feel sad. You might be angry at the heavens because it feels unfair or unjust. But you will also feel sad at the loss of having this beautiful day you were expecting. Anytime you experience a loss, you're going to probably experience some kind of sadness. Glad is when we get the things that we're looking for, when we achieve things, when we accumulate the things we want, when we have warm embraces, love. These are all experiences of joy and gladness. And then scared is when we have a perception that something that we do not want to have happen is going to happen to us at some point in the future. It could be one second from now, or it could be 1,000 years from now. But the experience of fear is an expectation that something bad is going to happen to us at some point in the future. And those are your four basic emotions. Irritation, that is on a continuum of anger. Frustration, I'm not mad, I'm just irritated. OK, I mean, that's on the continuum of anger. I'm disappointed, that's most likely some sadness, possibly some anger. So you want to hear the three secrets, I would imagine. OK, the three secrets work like this. The first one is we have to know what triggers our emotional world. What triggers things like mad, sad, glad, and scared? And I'd like, for just one moment, for all of you to think, as leaders, what is it that makes you angry? What makes you angry when you're leading? What are your buttons as a leader? And I'd like someone to just throw out a couple of ideas of what makes you angry when you're a leader. I'll give you one example for me. I think some of you may have heard this before. When I'm running a meeting and people come late to that meeting, I have a button that I will probably have an initial sense of irritation. What makes some of you angry? Just know what your buttons are. I'm going to give you all homework, by the way. Your homework is to write down a category in each of these four, I want you to write down at least five things that fit in this category of what triggers you have. So what makes you angry? So someone give me an example. Lack of openness to alternative possibilities. So a closed mind. If you experience someone who has a closed mind, that will irritate you. That's one of your buttons. Yes. Not taking responsibility or being. Excellent. So a lack of accountability will make you angry. Excellent. I'll take one more. Yes. Being untruthful. So dishonesty will make you angry as a leader. Do these all make sense? These feel kind of frustrating and irritating. OK. Your homework is to go home and write down at least five things in each of these. And it's important to know what you like. Maybe it's the opposite of these things. I really like people who are honest. I really like people who are accountable for themselves. But really think about what are the different buttons that you have that triggers to your emotional state. Because the more you are aware you are of them, the less control they have over you. So because I'm aware that I can get irritated by people being late, instead of acting on that irritation, I can notice it. And then I can slow myself down to recognize, you know what, maybe they're late for a reason that is very good. And before I start judging what their reason is without knowing, I'm going to create space to understand. But I'm going to honor the fact that I have a reaction so that I might have to make a choice about doing something about it, like saying, so would you mind just letting me know what made you late? And maybe they had a sick child. Maybe they were stuck in traffic. Maybe they had a car accident. But being aware of what those triggers are will help. The second secret is how do your feelings manifest in you? How do they emerge in you? Now when I give a three-hour workshop, I usually have enough time to create a whole scenario, and I ask for volunteers, and they come up and act it out. But today, instead of having you all volunteer to come up, I'm just going to do it really quick. I'm going to pick a bunch of you to come up here and act it out, and then we'll do that together, OK? OK, I'm not going to actually ask anyone to come up here, which some of you may have known. Because I just wanted to stimulate you for a moment to feel what it's like to have some kind of stressor on you. So I apologize if any of you freaked out. Because some people say that the fear of public speaking or being in front of people is worse than death. So I apologize if anyone feels like they'd rather be dead right now than here. You notice anything physically happen in you? Anybody's heart rate go up a little bit? Anybody notice that they might avert their eyes? Because they realize, oh, if he doesn't know my name and I don't look at him, he can't pick on me. That's a behavioral manifestation. If maybe you had thoughts, and maybe at first you were liking me, you think he's a nice enough guy. But then suddenly it's like, he's going to make me, oh, this guy, I don't really like him anymore. So you might have some anger. You might have a thought. You might have a changed belief, one where you were like, I like this guy, to like, I don't really like this guy anymore. Being able to know how your emotions manifest in you will help you to recognize what you're feeling. Because a lot of times, our emotions will happen to us faster than we cognitively are aware of it. Our limbic area, and the amygdala in particular, acts so quickly that we will have emotional experiences before we're cognitively, our middle prefrontal cortex, can pick up on it. I will talk about that a little bit more in a moment. Your homework is to get really clear about how your emotions manifest in you. For me, when I get scared or anxious, it goes right to my chest and to my stomach. I can feel a tightness here, and I can feel a queasiness in my stomach. And I know that I'm feeling anxious oftentimes faster by checking in with my body than I do when I check in with my head. So just pay attention to how that all plays out for you. Finally, the last piece of the secret is to know how to cope with your stress, how to manage your emotions. What are the ways in which you manage your emotions? So when you become angry, do you withdraw? Do you become aggressive? Do you assert yourself? How do you play it out? When you feel overwhelmed, do you go exercise? Or do you have a drink? What is your repertoire of self-care skills and the ways in which you manage yourself? This is your other homework assignment. I would encourage each of you to have at least a list of 10 things that you do when you get activated emotionally and what you do to take care of yourself in those moments, whether it's exercise, eating well, breathing, which is probably the best thing you can do to regulate yourself, is to have a very good relationship with your breath. And abdominal breathing is one of the best ways to do it. And if you don't know what abdominal breathing is, I encourage you to YouTube it. You can find it anywhere. And come to another workshop, and I'll teach it to you right there. Now, you have your three secrets, so let's find out what emotional intelligence is, because I think you're ready for it. It's very simple, and it's very complex. So when I was in graduate school, I was lucky enough to work for the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. And I was co-author of a book called Promoting Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. And we looked at emotional intelligence training programs that were implemented in organizations throughout the country. And they used control studies to look at if someone goes through an emotional intelligence training program and they go through a control group, will they actually show any kind of bottom line benefits? And the results were that when people were trained properly, they did show bottom line changes in increased productivity, decreased absenteeism, decreased workers compensation grievances, that these were bottom line effects, and this is the key to it. The ability to make healthy choices based on the ability to identify, understand, and manage your own feelings and the feelings of others. So it's really being able to understand what your emotional experience is, to be able to understand other people's emotional experience, and then to be able to use that information to inform choices. Now there's a more complex definition, which is that there are four domains of emotional intelligence. That encompasses 19 competencies. Now there are a number of different models, and I'm using the model that we were using for this book. And you can basically, I'll tell you the four domains. The first domain is self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to know your own internal resources, to be aware of your emotional states, like your four basic emotions, your ability to know your strengths and your limitations, and to know your own self-worth and self-capabilities. Self-management is another domain. This is the ability to control impulses and to manage your internal resources. This is things like impulse control, adaptability, flexibility, accountability. Then we have social awareness. Social awareness is the ability to read social cues in others. Things like empathy, things like service orientation, or in mentoring. So if you have someone that you're leading, and that you pay attention with concern and interest in what their developmental needs are. These are people high in these competencies around social awareness. And then finally, relationship management. Bless you. Relationship management is really about how we induce desirable behaviors in others. This is around conflict management and leadership. So the ability to collectively create bonds and collaboration. So clearly, emotional intelligence is both a simple thing, and it's also a very complex thing. And for today, if you leave here knowing that emotional intelligence is the ability to use your own emotional knowledge of yourself and others to inform healthy choices, you've got it. Because I said that self-awareness is the most important thing, I just wanted to go through four primary points. The first is that we want to know that the difference between a thought and a feeling versus an action. I'm going to say something somewhat controversial. I believe it is OK to have murderous rage towards your children. How many of you think that is a horrible thing to think is OK to have? Nobody does, because you've all had it. If you've had it, you've never had kids. So thank you. You're all with me then. If you've had a child, most likely there are some weird people who haven't had this experience. But that there are times where we are going to feel furious at our children. But I have never, ever killed one of my kids. I've never acted on any of these kinds of anger, rage, in any way that has physically harmed my kids, thankfully. I get how it's difficult, though, because it takes impulse control, because we have emotions. But there is a difference between having a feeling and having an action. When we get sad, we can feel sad. But withdrawing is an action. When we are angry, we can feel angry. But aggression is a behavior. That's an action. And there's a difference between yelling and screaming at someone when you're angry than telling them in an assertive way how you feel, and how it's bothering you, and what you would like the behavior to be different in the other person. So there are difference between feelings and actions. And being able to be aware of your feelings and owning the fact that you could possibly have murderous rage towards someone you love more than anybody else in the world helps, because when you own that, you're less likely to be controlled by it, because you can start making choices when you start realizing, oh, I'm having that rage again. You know what? I need to take a step back. I need to breathe, because I know that this is just a feeling, and I don't have to act on this. It creates more freedom for us to live. Second thing is recognizing that others are mirrors for ourselves. What I want to encourage all of you to do is to think about what is your role in any reaction you have to another person. If you find someone irritating, what is it about you that is finding them irritating? You have a role in every perception you have about other people. And the challenge is, what is going on inside of you that might be contributing? And I'm not suggesting that these other people aren't pains, or they aren't bothersome. What I want to challenge you on is what is your piece of it? Because you're perceiving them in some way that is adding to it. If you put 100 people in a room, and line them up, and ask them to have the same response to someone else, it's going to be very different, as we talked about before in perception. So what's your role in it? Neurobiology, the neurobiology of authenticity. So there is a field of research called interpersonal neurobiology. Danny Siegel out of the University of UCLA has done some research, and has synthesized a lot here. What we've discovered is that humans and mammals, social mammals, have these parts of our brains called resonance circuits. Mirror neurons in our brains that pick up on subtle, nonverbal cues from other animals. And humans are animals. So we will pick up on emotional reactions of other people, sometimes faster than we can cognitively pick up. So when you experience someone who you feel like is saying all the right things, but something about you doesn't buy into what they're saying, you feel like, ah, there's something about this that doesn't feel authentic. It is most likely you picking up on their subtle nonverbal cues that are incongruent and inconsistent with what they're saying. And you can actually feel that by paying attention to our own emotional reactions to other people, we can glean data that we can't pick up on just cognitively and intellectually, because people can really say good things. But you can sometimes feel when it's really not right. And sometimes we need to trust those guts. And sometimes we need to check what's our role in this? Is this person just reminding me of my father, who is an unfaithful, uncaring kind of person? It depends on your own history and your own perceptions. And the challenge of today is to build that self-awareness and that curiosity so that you can hone your own tool as a leader to be able to manage this most effectively. Finally, it's to develop a personal mission statement. Now, some of you have been in my talk before, so some of you have done it. But how many of you here have a personal mission statement, and in particular, a mission statement as a leader? How many of you have a mission statement as a leader? OK, great. I am on a mission to have every leader, every real leader, have a leadership mission statement, and every person to have a personal mission statement. Now, let me tell you what this is. This is a set of guiding principles of why you do what you do. What are the reasons why you are a leader? What are the values and beliefs and your sense of purpose and meaning that drive you to do what you do? Because when we're leaders, we are inspiring others with a vision that we have based on our task at hand. And the more clear you are about your vision and your mission, the more authentic you're going to be in your delivery, and the more people are going to naturally feel connected to your message and connected to what you want of them. So I want to challenge all of you, if you haven't already done it, to write a leadership personal mission statement, either one. Preferably leadership, this is a leadership talk. And if you do it, I'd like you to do it and email me you did it. And if you do, I will send you back a very encouraging and supportive email. It will be personalized, it will not be generic. You do not have to give me your mission statement, you just have to say that you did it. And I encourage you to do it by 12 o'clock tonight, because you're about to go either on vacation or it's the weekend, and if you don't do it tonight, the chances are going to drop dramatically that you're not going to do it. So by 12 o'clock tonight, I'd like you to do it. How many of you are going to do it? Raise your hand. You promised to be authentic, so don't say you're going to do it if you're not going to do it. Raise your hand. I just want to see your hands for a second, just so I have a sense. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I expect 11 emails by 10 o'clock tonight. That would be your accountability factor, otherwise we're going to have some people who are going to be angry. OK. By 12, did I say 11? 12, 12 o'clock tonight, 12 o'clock tonight. All right, very good. So what have we done today in this wonderful half hour? We've talked about keeping an open mind. We can't do anything unless we have an open mind. So we're going to keep an open mind. We're going to pay attention to our perceptions. How are we perceiving the world, and what impact is that having on us? We learned today that emotions inform healthy choices. If we pay attention to them, that's what emotional intelligence is, is we use our emotions as data to inform choices. You know your four basic emotions. They're so easy, mad, sad, glad, and scared. It's almost like it rhymes. Mad, sad, glad, and scared. If you remember this, you will never not know what to say when someone says, how do you feel? You can just stop and go, I think I feel sad. Right now I feel glad, but I think you can do it. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Self-awareness is the foundation because that's where we get empathy from. It's by paying attention to ourselves that we can understand others. We're the primary tool. As leaders, you are the primary tool, just like a therapist. I'm a psychologist. I am my own most important tool in working with people. And as a leader, you are your most important tool. We want to learn how to have a personal mission statement, and in this case, a leadership mission statement. So you're going to lead from that. When you do, you're going to be more authentic. Modeling emotional intelligence in yourself will affect other people. It will model for them, and they will have someone to live by, and that has an impact on other people. The research shows this. And I also encourage you to take breaks, to manage your stress, and to have fun. I'm going to leave you with my favorite quote. When we feel good about ourselves, we have more to give to others. Now, despite the fact that it's my quote, I actually really like this quote because it feels just so true and important for us, and especially for people who are leaders and really high-functioning folks like yourselves. We can work so hard to take care of other people as leaders, and all of you work so hard to take care of your company, your families, yourselves, but if we don't take care of ourselves first, we can't be there for other people, to do it in a sustainable way. So I want to challenge all of you to rethink what it means to take care of yourselves, and to have self-care, and to consider how important that is so that you can give so much more to others. You've been great. Thank you so much.