Daniel Goleman

[0] Welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert.

[1] I'm Dan Shepard.

[2] I'm joined by Monica Monsoon.

[3] And that's it.

[4] What were you going to say?

[5] Well, there's just, we're interviewing a Dan, another Dan, Daniel Goldman.

[6] Daniel Goldman, yes, not unlike Daniel Shepard.

[7] That's right.

[8] Now, Daniel Goldman is a PhD and an author and science journalist that wrote for the New York Times reporting on the Brain and Behavioral Sciences, where he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

[9] He also went to Harvard.

[10] So was deemed.

[11] Oh, my unophile.

[12] Now, of course, everyone has heard the term emotional intelligence, and Daniel is largely responsible for making that a popular word in the zeitgeist because he wrote the book, Emotional Intelligence.

[13] Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research, Goldman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well.

[14] These factors, which include self -awareness, self -management, and empathy add up to a different way of being smart.

[15] and they aren't fixed at birth.

[16] This was so fun to talk about because...

[17] So fun.

[18] I'm really glad that EQ is being finally like...

[19] Recognized as important.

[20] Yes, valued.

[21] Yeah.

[22] You have a high EQ.

[23] Why, thank you.

[24] I mean...

[25] You guess.

[26] Yeah, that's my guess.

[27] So please enjoy Daniel Goldman.

[28] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

[29] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[30] You can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[31] Hello, Dr. Goldman.

[32] Well, hello there.

[33] Hi, Dax.

[34] Hi, Monica.

[35] Sorry for our tardiness.

[36] I'm going to blame my children.

[37] They're zooming from home, and they just crashed our space, and it took me a minute to get rid of them.

[38] Do you have children?

[39] I have grandchildren, you know.

[40] Oh, my goodness.

[41] In ages from three to 21.

[42] Wow.

[43] Wow.

[44] There's six of them, which is nice, but they're not here.

[45] Okay, so we could speak the same language about the emotional wave of having children, which has been the most profound experience of my life.

[46] What is the experience of grandchildren?

[47] Well, it turns out there's a latent grandparent gene that activates when you first hold your first grandchild.

[48] And it just floods you with oxytocin.

[49] Monica, do you have kids?

[50] I don't.

[51] This makes me want to give my parents.

[52] grandparents, grandkids so bad.

[53] Yeah.

[54] Well, that's the nice thing of being a grandparent.

[55] So this gene just floods you with feel -good hormones.

[56] And so you just love your kids.

[57] Yeah.

[58] It helps a lot.

[59] Well, I used to say to my wife when the kids were screaming and crying, you know, were their babies.

[60] And mom gets oxytocin a lot longer than dad.

[61] And I said, you know, this does sound differently to me because I don't have as much oxytocin as you.

[62] Oxytocin helps a lot.

[63] It does.

[64] I'm surprised they've even figured out how to synthesize it and use it as a drug.

[65] It's coming, I'm sure.

[66] Yeah, I'm sure.

[67] But when you have the grandkids, I have a fantasy that goes like this.

[68] Oh, my gosh, I'll hold them, and I'll just be able to have all the love without the panic that I have to do this right, because it's not my job.

[69] Well, no, the great advantage of grandchildren is that when you hold them and love them, you feel really great and they do.

[70] And then when they start doing something that's a problem, you hand them back.

[71] Yeah, not your responsibility.

[72] That sounds nice.

[73] No, it's a perfect arrangement, yeah.

[74] I heard an interesting debate once between, do you know who Sam Harris is?

[75] I've known Sam for years.

[76] I know him well.

[77] He was debating.

[78] I want to say it was Paul Bloom.

[79] That makes the most sense to me. But maybe it wasn't Paul.

[80] But they were talking about empathy and they were talking about this biological predisposition to care most about your immediate family.

[81] And it was Paul, right?

[82] Someone was making the argument, what if you could extend that out to everybody?

[83] And the other person was saying, well, no, you have to prioritize who needs your time and attention in your investment, or the whole thing would collapse.

[84] And I found that kind of a compelling argument.

[85] Well, Sam and I actually met in a meditation context.

[86] Oh, that makes sense.

[87] Yeah, and he's talking about loving kindness meditation, where you teach your brain to extend love you feel naturally for people close to you beyond that circle to people who are just friends or strangers or people you bump into or everybody everywhere.

[88] And the Dalai Lama, who I've also known for a long time, says, you know, the hardest part is that jump from people you love naturally to people that you just know.

[89] That's the big challenge.

[90] Yeah.

[91] Now, can I just tell you anecdotally an experience that we've had and it's something we do it's not that meditation but i was acting like a really deplorable jerk one day at work to some people and monica said later what if those people were arm cherries meaning people that listened to this show who i value so greatly it's insane and i was mortified to think that i would have been treating some arm cherries that way and that's so weird because that's some mental construct i've oh that's really interesting So you have some mental line.

[92] People who are okay to treat as a jerk versus people who it's not okay to treat as a jerk.

[93] I think we all have that line.

[94] Yeah.

[95] I think intellectually I know no one should be treated like a jerk.

[96] And then quite often emotionally, I am unable to get out of the reptilian brain per se.

[97] Well, yeah, it's nice to strive for, I think it's aspirational that we should treat everybody like not a jerk.

[98] But actually, that's not the way our brains are designed.

[99] we have to do some rearrangement.

[100] Luckily, that can happen.

[101] But I've employed that trick, really, since Monica said it, I'll be behind someone in traffic, and I'm growing more and more agitated.

[102] They're not doing it my way.

[103] My way is the only way.

[104] And I'm building this whole story about them and while they're a terrible person, all these things.

[105] And then I imagine they're inside listening to this show, and then I'm completely embarrassed and I'm humiliated.

[106] And then it becomes this way for me to not be that way.

[107] Interesting, yeah.

[108] Yeah.

[109] So you have empathy for the people that you like and other people you don't bother with.

[110] Wow.

[111] That's probably true.

[112] It's probably true.

[113] That's hard to hear.

[114] It's not just you, Dax.

[115] It's all of us.

[116] Oh.

[117] Oh.

[118] Okay.

[119] I'm not saying you, you.

[120] Okay.

[121] Well, you were accurate when you said me, though.

[122] Yeah, all of us.

[123] We have limits.

[124] All of us, yeah.

[125] But you know, there are three kinds of empathy.

[126] There's really important, understand.

[127] And I know you've heard this before, but let me review it again.

[128] There's cognitive empathy.

[129] You know how people.

[130] people think.

[131] You can be a really good communicator because you know the language that will make sense to them.

[132] It's really important for a podcaster, for example.

[133] When I was at the New York Times as a journalist, this is astonishing.

[134] We wrote for the eighth grade level of understanding.

[135] Oh, really?

[136] Yeah.

[137] It's surprising, isn't it?

[138] But that's the level at which everybody gets it.

[139] Eighth grade.

[140] So that's cognitive empathy.

[141] And then emotional empathy, you know how people feel because you sense it yourself.

[142] And those two are important and helpful, but they can be used to manipulate.

[143] The third kind of empathy is the most important one, what's called technically empathic concern.

[144] You care about the other person.

[145] In the first two, you can get them.

[146] You know what's going to move them, but you don't care.

[147] So you want a spouse, you want a parent, you want a teacher, you want a boss who has that third.

[148] kind of empathy.

[149] Yeah, because it's been pointed out that sociopaths are often the most empathetic in the first two categories you listed, where they're quite good at knowing exactly what you'd like to hear and how to manipulate you.

[150] That's exactly right.

[151] That's the diagnosis of sociopath, is that they have none of the third kind.

[152] They don't care about you at all.

[153] How do you nurture the third category?

[154] Like, how do you expand it?

[155] How do you exercise it?

[156] I think aspirational and morally we would all hope to have a lot of the third category, which is not to say we do.

[157] I think the kids probably get it osmotically by having a parent or caretakers or family who really love and care for them.

[158] And so it's part of their emotional repertoire.

[159] And I'm a big advocate of teaching all of these things in school.

[160] It's called social emotional learning.

[161] It's a big movement now.

[162] Yeah, my kids are deeply embroiled in.

[163] And they go to a charter school and there's whole days that are dedicated to these topics.

[164] Yeah, it's like in their curriculum.

[165] Yeah.

[166] And there's an abbreviation for it.

[167] They always.

[168] SEL.

[169] Social emotional learning.

[170] They're very lucky because it's quite spotty.

[171] It's a big movement globally, but it's idiosyncratic where it is.

[172] So if your kids have it in school, that's great.

[173] The nice thing about SEL is it's designed so it doesn't take any time from academic learning.

[174] But it adds, how am I going to manage myself?

[175] Am I aware of my feelings and what they're doing to me?

[176] Can I manage them well?

[177] Can I tune in to other people and know what they're feeling?

[178] Can I get along with them, harmonize, collaborate?

[179] These are skills for life.

[180] And, you know, kids need.

[181] We don't need people who are only good at cognitive abilities, but suck at emotional intelligence because they are the jokes of the world.

[182] Yeah.

[183] You want to be working with, married to, involve with people.

[184] who have the full emotional repertoire.

[185] So I think it's really important kids get this in school, particularly because of the decimation of the American family.

[186] I mean, you're lucky, your kids are lucky.

[187] If there's a mom and a dad and a home, more and more kids don't have that.

[188] And so this is a way to kind of ensure that kids will get it right.

[189] And there's this window of opportunity neurologically into the mid -20s, actually, where the brain, the emotional social circuit with the brain, is taking shape.

[190] So I want to give what I believe to be an example and you tell me if I'm wrong, but a cool thing I heard not too long ago as we hear stuff nonstop because we're parents of young kids is when two little kids are having it out on the playground about some situation, and the parents go in or the teacher goes in and they intervene and they stop it and they say, you know, you got to share and you should do this and blank, blank, blank.

[191] What you've robbed them of is the moment where they steal the toy, the other kid cries, they see that the kids cry, they themselves internalize that they've just hurt somebody, and they go, oh, that doesn't feel good.

[192] Would you say that's part of this emotional learning?

[193] I would say that a lot of emotional learning is from other kids, from working things out, and from maybe feeling bad that you made that kid cry or feeling good that you're having fun playing with the kid.

[194] That's part of normal learning.

[195] When parents intervene or teachers intervene and just direct kids at what to do, then the kids lose the learning opportunity.

[196] A better intervention might be, oh, how do you think you made Sammy feel?

[197] He's crying now.

[198] That is, encourage the child to empathize to tune in and to let them work it out themselves.

[199] I got to say, and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but I think Monaco attest to this as well.

[200] My kids will come in like they're crying, I'm embarrassed.

[201] And I'm like, oh, my God.

[202] I'm so delighted to hear you say that.

[203] I couldn't say I was embarrassed.

[204] I was like 40 years old.

[205] Yeah.

[206] I do remember Delta, the youngest, like accidentally hurt Lincoln or something.

[207] And Lincoln was crying really hard.

[208] And Delta was just kind of standing there.

[209] And then she was like, I'm really embarrassed.

[210] I'm sorry.

[211] And I was like, oh, my God, what a beautiful thing to say right now as opposed to running a ray or being defensive.

[212] And actually, the first part of emotional talent, is being able to name your feelings.

[213] Yeah.

[214] You know, a lot of people actually are so out of touch with their feelings that they don't know what they're feeling at the time.

[215] And the basis of this all is self -awareness, emotional self -awareness.

[216] Oh, yeah, and I want you to tell us about this, because I think we're all very familiar with this term, emotional intelligence, which you coined and wrote a book about 25 years ago.

[217] We're on the anniversary, and I don't know that people actually know all the mechanics of that.

[218] Well, here's the model.

[219] And by the way, I didn't coin the term.

[220] My friend Peter Salivay, who then was an assistant professor at Yale, wrote a little article called emotional intelligence in a very obscure journal.

[221] It doesn't exist today.

[222] I was a journalist at the New York Times reading these obscure journals.

[223] And I thought, that is dynamite.

[224] It's so counterintuitive.

[225] Putting emotion together with intelligence.

[226] But it means being intelligent about emotions.

[227] Anyway, Peter's now the president of Yale.

[228] I think there's a little bit of a knee jerk sometimes with this time.

[229] which is like, oh, you just want to be so indulgent with all these kids.

[230] My feelings, I didn't, you know, but I don't think that's what anyone's proposing, right?

[231] No, that's a common error about emotional intelligence.

[232] The other common error is it just means being nice, which is also not right.

[233] You can be very firm in what you feel and what you want.

[234] So there are four parts.

[235] Self -awareness, knowing what you're feeling, using that information to manage your disruptive emotions and marshal your better emotions, positivity, enthusiasm, knowing what other people feel, empathy, tuning into them, and then using that all to have effective relationships.

[236] So basically it means being a successful human being as a human being.

[237] And one of the most important parts of it, Dax, is what you alluded to.

[238] It's technically, it's called cognitive control.

[239] It means you're getting really pissed off at someone.

[240] You're really angry.

[241] or you're getting really scared.

[242] When this COVID lockdown, it's easier for people to exaggerate risk and to freak themselves out.

[243] And cognitive control means you know that you're getting out of control.

[244] And instead of doing something unhelpful, like, okay, I'm going to have a lot to drink, for example.

[245] This is a basis of alcoholism for a lot of people is self -medication or drug use or yelling at someone.

[246] I am going to manage my feelings.

[247] cognitive control and kind of control from a neuroscience point of view is very simple it means that a strip of circuitry in the left prefrontal cortex just behind the forehead is able to manage your emotional centers so they don't take over your thinking brain and make you do something you're going to really regret later yeah i think it'd be helpful to just say a reader's digest version of the brain is you know it developed in stages as we evolved and the center of your brain is the reptilian part so it's very instinctual, it's reactionary, and then your impulse control, all these things are kind of mid -brains.

[248] And then the last thing to develop is this prefrontal cortex, and it is in charge of forecasting into the future and monitoring who do I really want to be, all those kind of elevated, I guess, thoughts we have.

[249] Taking in information, making good decisions, that's all prefrontal.

[250] It's the brain's the brain's the good boss of the brain.

[251] The bad boss of the brain is the emotional centers in the mid -brain, actually.

[252] You could call it reptilian.

[253] And It has all of our emotions.

[254] The pleasant ones, by the way, you don't want to get rid of those.

[255] But the ones that really screw us up, the anger, the anxiety, that comes from the midbrain, particularly a structure called the amygdala, which is the brain's radar for threat.

[256] The amygdala is always asking right now, am I safe?

[257] And if it thinks it's not, the brain is designed so that the amygdala can take over the prefrontal cortex.

[258] And that is bad news.

[259] It was good news, by the way, in early evolution, early prehistory helped us survive in the savanna in the jungle, wherever.

[260] You have to do something very quickly if you hear that rustling the bushes, if you're going to survive, and pass your genes and structure the brain on to us, which happened, presumably.

[261] But today, it's facing symbolic challenges, symbolic threats.

[262] That guy's not treating me fairly.

[263] And you can overreact to that.

[264] This guy's pissing me off so much, I'm going to slug him.

[265] That's the way the amygdala thinks.

[266] It's very childlike.

[267] So when the brain develops, like your kids are right now going through a five to seven shift.

[268] What are their ages?

[269] Six and seven.

[270] Six and seven, yeah.

[271] So there's a real difference in every teacher knows it's between kindergartners.

[272] You have to spend a lot of energy getting them just to focus and pay attention.

[273] And third graders or fourth graders, because the prefrontal areas are growing.

[274] Every parent sees the external signs of a child becoming more mature.

[275] But what you're seeing is the outer face of what's going on in that kid's brain, which is growth and development.

[276] And every parent and hopefully every teacher will help kids get it right in the first place.

[277] For example, I was in a school in Spanish Harlem, very poor section of Manhattan.

[278] The kids there mostly came from a housing prime.

[279] next to the school.

[280] Very traumatizing childhood.

[281] The teacher told me, a kid came in upset.

[282] She said, what's wrong?

[283] She said, I just saw someone who was shot.

[284] She asked her class, how many people do you know someone who's been shot?

[285] Every hand went up.

[286] And I thought, okay, this is going to be really chaotic classroom.

[287] They're very quiet and very focused.

[288] And the teacher said, here's why.

[289] Every day, they do something they call belly buddies.

[290] They get their favorite stuffed animal.

[291] They lie down on the floor.

[292] They put it on their belly, and they watch it, rise on the in -breath, fall on the out -breath, rise on the in -breath, fall on the out -breath.

[293] When they get distracted, their mind wanders, they notice it one, they bring it back to the breath.

[294] To the mantra?

[295] Well, it's very similar to what goes on.

[296] But, you know, it's basically mind training.

[297] It's like when you go to the gym and you lift a weight with every rep, that muscle gets that much stronger.

[298] Every time you bring your mind back, like those kids are doing, it makes the neural circuitry for focus that much.

[299] stronger.

[300] And here's the two -fer.

[301] The same circuitry that helps you focus and pay attention calms you down.

[302] The biggest distractions for anyone are our emotions.

[303] What that guy said to me, why didn't she answer my, you know, all of those kinds of thoughts are emotional distractors.

[304] And they take our focus away from what it is we have to do right now.

[305] If you help children strengthen the circuitry early on, then that's a gift of giving them for the rest of the Oh, wow.

[306] When you were saying that, it reminded me of this thing I read, which was if kids are having a really bad emotional tantrum, that if you put them on a swing and you swing them, the part of your brain required to equalize your equilibrium requires so much focus that it actually will do that.

[307] It'll interrupt that circuit.

[308] Well, that's interesting.

[309] I never heard that one.

[310] I'll tell you a different one.

[311] Every time you have an emotion, you know you're getting out of hand, and you can tell yourself, I'm getting angry now.

[312] You just shifted the energy from your emotional center to your verbal cortex, and it starts to change the heft of the negative emotion.

[313] So naming an emotion is a very powerful control mechanism, too.

[314] And the principle is the same as what you're just saying.

[315] you're shifting the energy from the part of the circuitry of the brain, which is manifesting the emotion to some other part of the brain.

[316] It's a kind of a distraction strategy.

[317] My wife and I, when we would have an argument, it didn't matter what it was supposedly about.

[318] It was actually the same argument at this deeper level.

[319] Because she wrote a book about this.

[320] I have to recommend.

[321] It's called Emotional Alchemy.

[322] And she talks about 10 of the most common patterns like unloavability, feeling that you're never going to have someone tune into you, nobody cares, fear of being abandoned, things like that.

[323] These are like the primal patterns that are getting triggered.

[324] And you know the way a habit gets formed.

[325] You have a trigger, you go through the same sequence, like whatever happened to you that you now recognize.

[326] And then there's a kind of reward.

[327] The reward is that you don't have to face the deeper feeling, like total like I'm wiped out because someone abandoned me. I'm helpless if I'm alone.

[328] You don't have to feel that.

[329] And so you might cling or you might preemptively abandon.

[330] She writes about this.

[331] So I cling and then when it's not reciprocated, I abandon.

[332] There you go.

[333] But basically what's going on is an underlying fear of abandonment.

[334] And at the core of that fear is a very deep terror actually that you don't want to feel.

[335] So anyway, once she recognized and I recognized, then we'd have our fight and then we'd separate and then we'd think about it.

[336] We'd come back and say, you know, when I was a kid, we would identify the childhood source to each other.

[337] And then all of a sudden we had great affection for each other as this like wounded other kid.

[338] But it's because we could see the pattern.

[339] So if you want to change a habit like that, you have to become familiar with the pattern.

[340] You have to know what the triggers are.

[341] so you can recognize it as it's happening and then change what you do and get a better reward.

[342] Man, you're so right, too, the empathy part.

[343] So I think when couples get in a fight, I'll just speak for myself.

[344] Sometimes when my wife and I get in a fight, she's fighting her mother and I'm fighting my dad, right?

[345] But we're both taking it so personal.

[346] And then to your point, the times I can recognize like, oh, yeah, when she was vulnerable, this person exploited that.

[347] Well, I'm not going to do that.

[348] But boy, I feel so bad that that's why this is the reaction, that this poor person had their vulnerability exploited.

[349] And through that, I can find compassion like you're saying.

[350] But let's go back to how it began.

[351] Usually what happens is that you or she does something that triggers that primal pattern in you.

[352] And when you're triggered, it triggers something in her.

[353] It's a primal pattern.

[354] So basically it's two of them.

[355] amygdala is having simultaneous hijacks, and you can never settle things well when you're having amygdala hijacks.

[356] I have a friend, John Gottman.

[357] Oh, we love John.

[358] We love him.

[359] You know, John?

[360] You talk to John.

[361] Yeah.

[362] So John has the Love Lab at University of Seattle, and he advises a couple separate for about 20 minutes so their amygdala can calm down and then come back and talk it over.

[363] That makes sense.

[364] I was going to bring that up, actually, when you talk about the different areas of your brain is I remember reading this book on killing and it talked about in World War I in the trench warfare, something like 40 % of the guys that had been killed, they didn't fire their weapon.

[365] And they're like, well, what happened?

[366] Why wouldn't they have shot as someone was running out?

[367] It seems like common sense.

[368] And then they come to find out, well, once your heart rate gets above a certain level, you actually can't use your frontal lobe, right?

[369] The survival instinct.

[370] Yeah.

[371] Your heart rate is an external monitor of what's happening.

[372] with your amygdala.

[373] So you're having an amygdala hijack as your heart rate increases, particularly when it gets really high.

[374] So you can't think very well.

[375] It is very easy to drop a bomb on a village from a plane or to use a drone to kill people because you're not anywhere near the person.

[376] When you're in trench warfare or hand -to -hand combat, it's much harder to kill the other person because it's a person.

[377] Yeah.

[378] Yeah.

[379] Well, and they were also saying is we've stupidly broken down what we think are responses is to fight or flight.

[380] It was a binary option.

[381] When they really study the animal kingdom, what you realize is that, like, 95 % of conflicts actually resolve with posture submit.

[382] So really, the bear goes up on its hind legs.

[383] Generally, the other bear looks down.

[384] They don't always fight or run.

[385] And so we do that, too.

[386] So they heard that charging person as a posture.

[387] A loud bang.

[388] Okay, I give up.

[389] I'm going to look down.

[390] I surrender.

[391] And so they hadn't even thought about that.

[392] And then so all the training for World War II and then Vietnam was training these guys out of letting their heart rate get that high and then making their instinct to be to fire and not submit, which is wild.

[393] You know, the military has really gone into the study of this physiology in an applied way.

[394] I'll share with you and your listeners a way to abort a miguel hijack.

[395] Oh, please.

[396] I need it so bad.

[397] Don't we all?

[398] So this is something I understand is being used by Navy SEALs, when they're going into an operation or something.

[399] It's very simple.

[400] You take a very deep breath so your belly expands.

[401] You hold it as long as it's comfortable.

[402] And then you exhale very slowly.

[403] And you do that like six to nine times.

[404] And the research shows that your physiology shifts from that fight or flight response you're talking about to a recovery relaxation response.

[405] technically sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic.

[406] And it's something you can do on the spot.

[407] I've been teaching this to frontline medical people these days who are really stressed out.

[408] And, you know, there are other things you can do that will help you be triggered less often or if you are triggered less intensely or recover more quickly.

[409] The definition of resilience is how long it takes you to recover.

[410] The quicker you recover, the better your resilience.

[411] Because you can't determine when you're going to be triggered.

[412] You can take some control.

[413] So that exercise of breath focus that the kids were doing, if you do that as an adult, you just watch your breath, every breath, in breath, and out breath and so on.

[414] That actually changes your physiology and your brain circuitry so that you handle hijack situations better.

[415] Seems too easy.

[416] I know.

[417] You're right.

[418] You're right.

[419] I think that's why people don't do it because they're like, oh, but it works.

[420] The thing is this, Monica, there's a dose response relationship.

[421] So the more you do it, the better benefit.

[422] It's like exercise.

[423] You have to make it a priority.

[424] It's very easy not to do it.

[425] I'm like an industrial strength meditator now.

[426] I wrote this book, Altered Traits, about the research on meditation.

[427] And now I'm a total believer because I see that it actually pays.

[428] And so basically the mind training with the breath is that, kind of exercise.

[429] It's shifting your brain circuitry and that takes time, just like building muscles takes time or endurance.

[430] Same thing.

[431] Okay.

[432] Now, when you wrote emotional intelligence, I think people traditionally thought an indicator of success, however you want to measure that educational, achievement, financial, whatever, that IQ would be a predictor of that.

[433] Sure.

[434] And that's not the case, is it?

[435] Well, it's a little counterintuitive.

[436] When you're in school, IQ is a predictor.

[437] The kids who get the best grades tend to have the higher IQ.

[438] When you get in life, then there's a funny thing that happens.

[439] There's what's called a floor effect.

[440] Let's say you're going to be an MBA or get a master's in something.

[441] To accomplish that, you need an IQ about a standard deviation above the norm, 114, 115, but everybody else has that high in IQ.

[442] So then, for example, an engineer.

[443] Engineers get hired, and now they're working with other engineers, have the same background.

[444] Their IQ is not an advantage.

[445] It's how they handle themselves and how they handle the relationships that makes them an outstanding performer.

[446] And that is something we're never taught in school, but everybody knows it from life.

[447] I've gone around the world asking people all over, tell me about the worst boss you ever had and the best boss you ever had.

[448] And the best boss invariably defines emotional intelligence, and the worst boss is some kind of jerk, or pardon me on your podcast, an asshole.

[449] Sure, you can say asshole as much as you'd like.

[450] Okay, thank you very much.

[451] We're free of the FCC's.

[452] Okay.

[453] Oh, it's a podcast.

[454] Stranglehold.

[455] Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do absolutely anything.

[456] We can play juree, you name it.

[457] Anyway, so basically to your point, I think that success in school has a lot to do with IQ, and after school it doesn't have that much to do.

[458] There was a study a friend of mine did of engineers.

[459] Get this.

[460] They rated each other.

[461] Who's the most effective engineer?

[462] And it turned out there was zero correlation with IQ, very high correlation with emotional intelligence.

[463] They were the team leaders.

[464] They were the people that were very persuasive, the people who tuned in, who got along with everyone and who managed themselves well.

[465] Well, I got to say anecdotally, I have several different friendship circles, but within that friendship circle, there's no correlation between book smarts or IQ or spatial relation ability and their achievement.

[466] In fact, more often than not, it's the opposite of that.

[467] It's people that people want to be around, that they enjoy interacting with, that get hired over and over again, you know?

[468] I realized this when I went to my 20th high school reunion and I saw who the most successful kid in my class, I grew up in the Central Valley of California, like a big farm town.

[469] So this 20th high school reunion, the kid who was most successful 20 years out was not the valeditorian, not a kid who had great test scores.

[470] There's someone who you really enjoyed being with, great human being.

[471] I think that's the story of our lives.

[472] You want to be friends with people who tune in to you, who care about you, who you get along with.

[473] That's emotional intelligence, not IQ.

[474] or armchair expert, if you dare.

[475] We've all been there, turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[476] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[477] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[478] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[479] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[480] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[481] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[482] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[483] What's up guys?

[484] It's your girl Kiki and my podcast is It's back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good.

[485] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[486] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[487] And I don't mean just friends.

[488] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[489] The list goes on.

[490] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[491] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[492] And I think the encouraging thing about focusing on emotional intelligence is it is flexible.

[493] It's not like, you're born with an IQ.

[494] Now, you could make an argument.

[495] Obviously, they've shown that whether you're in dirty diapers or not are just going to have an impact.

[496] But at a certain point, your IQ's pretty locked in.

[497] I don't know what age that is, if we would say it's 10 or something.

[498] But your emotional IQ, I imagine, has a lot more room to expand.

[499] So if you're hearing this and you're going, oh, I'd like to succeed in life, oh, it doesn't have to be IQ.

[500] Emotional intelligence is just as relevant.

[501] I can expand that, right?

[502] Well, this is the nice thing about emotional intelligence.

[503] IQ essentially is a metric for how quickly your brain acquires new information.

[504] It doesn't change much through life, actually.

[505] Emotional intelligence, the good news is it's learned and learnable.

[506] So if you got it right in the first place, say SEL, you got it in school or your family gave it to.

[507] Great.

[508] But, you know, it's like going to the doctor.

[509] There's a profile of strength and weaknesses across self -awareness, self -management, empathy, and how you get along with other people in your relationships.

[510] And I subdivided that.

[511] I have a thing called the emotional social competence inventory for people who know you well, rate you on obvious indicators of that.

[512] And then you get it fed back hopefully in a way it's news to use by a...

[513] Oh, my gosh.

[514] Okay, so you would advocate that you hand out this questionnaire to people that are in your life, or how would you do it?

[515] No, it's used in businesses, really, for leadership development, particularly.

[516] Okay.

[517] But I think we could all benefit from this.

[518] Anybody could, but you can just ask your friends, someone you trust.

[519] What do you think are my strengths?

[520] What could I get better at?

[521] You know, and ask like three people and see if they converge.

[522] So self -awareness, I think we all have an idea of what that is, but how does one evaluate whether they're very self -aware or not?

[523] What kind of questions could they ask?

[524] Well, the easiest index of that is how you see yourself versus how other people see you.

[525] Robert Burns said, well, that the gods, the gift would give us to see ourselves as others see us.

[526] He was Irish, so he could rhyme give and see it.

[527] But what he's saying is that this is a real unusual information to get.

[528] It's kind of precious, really.

[529] To get someone to be candid with you, like, what am I really good at and what I'm not so good at?

[530] Yeah.

[531] And then to compare that with how you see yourself, the bigger the gap, the more work you can do in self -awareness, I would say.

[532] Self -management, you can do a rough index because it's on the one hand damping down or not being taken over for so long by your disturbing feelings, my anger and my fear or whatever, my self -doubt, marshalling enthusiasm, passion toward your goals or staying positive when things turn bad.

[533] Can you do that?

[534] That's part of self -management.

[535] And then empathy, there is a little tricky because people may think they're really good at empathy, but people around them may not agree.

[536] That's why you want to ask someone else.

[537] Yeah.

[538] I imagine it'd be hard to tell somebody that they are lacking in one of these.

[539] You know, I feel like if someone asks me, I'd be very nervous to tell them the truth.

[540] Yes and no. It depends on the strength in the kind of your relationship.

[541] If you trust each other and you can be candid with each other, then you can have this conversation.

[542] Yeah.

[543] You look at your friendship network and then you think, well, who are really the people I can be honest with and who are honest with me?

[544] That's a smaller subset, always.

[545] Yeah.

[546] Now, what kind of impact does your emotional intelligence have on your health, per se?

[547] Oh, there's a very strong correlation because of the, relationship between your emotional state and your health.

[548] If you're very positive, it's good for your immune system, your cardiovascular system.

[549] The body likes positive emotions.

[550] And if you're stressed out, then all of that suffers.

[551] So being able to manage stress, which basically comes down to how do you handle your anxiety, is really important for your health.

[552] And that's been shown in a zillion ways now.

[553] Very strong relationship.

[554] People who get angry easily from childhood on are more likely to die early.

[555] Uh -huh.

[556] And it's been found with all kinds of emotions.

[557] So you said you're 12 years in A .A. So one of the classics there is people use a substance, alcohol, to manage their emotions instead of finding a way to do it without that substance, which is what A is all about.

[558] It's brilliant.

[559] Yeah.

[560] Really brilliant.

[561] And I do think everything's so buying, in the way people think, but I think people can identify what an alcoholic's doing.

[562] We're trying to regulate our emotions with this pill, this drink, this powder, and yet they miss the fact that they're regulating it through relationships, through foods.

[563] Many of us are attempting to regulate our emotional state with something external.

[564] Well, I would say that the more you can do it internally, the better.

[565] But if you have a spouse, it turns out that each of you, is a biological part of the other system.

[566] One of the great sadnesses and sources of grief when a spouse dies is that you lose that capacity.

[567] My wife and I hug each other every morning.

[568] It feels great.

[569] But that's part of my managing my own internal state and probably the same for her.

[570] And there's a hundred ways in which a romantic partner or a life partner does this for each other.

[571] so part of the sadness of losing someone like that a divorce the same is that you have to recalibrate in a deep way how you handle yourself yeah oof did you read blink by chance the malcolm gladwell book yeah well the thing i liked in there was i also think we have this kind of flawed understanding of emotions versus logic and it's always been pitched to us in this kind of again, binary way where they're in opposition to one another or that logic is the thing to listen to, but...

[572] Men are logical, women are emotional.

[573] Yes, yes.

[574] That tends to be the party line.

[575] Yeah.

[576] But the thing that I really liked is he cites a study where they asked major league batters how they decide whether or not they're going to hit a pitch.

[577] And they all have an explanation, and it's a cognitive explanation.

[578] Well, I look at their shoulder and when it drops it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[579] blah.

[580] Well, then they figure out how long before the ball is wound up to when they have to make the decision.

[581] And what they immediately realize is they know how long it takes for all those things to happen in the brain.

[582] And so that can't be happening.

[583] So they couldn't possibly be noticing that, then thinking about that, then doing this.

[584] And then they hook up their brains to like a mini MRI or something.

[585] And they watch them take swings.

[586] And it's just the emotional core of their brain fires every time.

[587] There's no pre -funnel stuff going on.

[588] And you realize, oh, the best batters, are making a decision of what ball to hit based on an emotion.

[589] Yeah, and probably the basal ganglia is involved.

[590] Oh.

[591] The basal ganglia is a more primitive part of the brain than the emotional center.

[592] It's beneath it.

[593] It's just above the spinal cord.

[594] And our habits are housed in the basal ganglia.

[595] And so someone who's at the professional level in baseball has swung that bat hundreds of thousands of times.

[596] And the basal ganglia learns a lesson each time.

[597] When I did that, when I swung that way, I hit the ball, and when I did it that way, I missed.

[598] Basically, what Malcolm is saying is that primitive parts of the brain that are pre -verbal, that is that act before we can think in words, are making decision that I'm going to swing for that ball or not.

[599] And it's because of your lifetime of experience.

[600] And so much of what we do is automatic, automatized this way.

[601] Yeah.

[602] Oh, it's so fascinating.

[603] Can you either alleviate or tell me I'm on the right path to be panicking?

[604] I feel like with the increased communication between younger people and myself too, happening via social media, happening via text, happening, you know, almost never even a voice call anymore.

[605] What impact is that having on this generation's emotional intelligence?

[606] We're waiting to see, but I'm a little nervous about it.

[607] because I think that people are being deskilled.

[608] Kids who are sitting at home and going to school online aren't having a chance to hang out with other kids.

[609] And the brain is designed to learn from life when it comes to emotional intelligence.

[610] So not being able to be with your friends means you're missing some lessons.

[611] And I don't care how old you are.

[612] Two -year -old is one set of lessons, five -year -old another, 10 -year -old, another, 15 -year -old, another.

[613] but they're all from face -to -face interaction.

[614] That's what we're designed for.

[615] And the brain picks up the richest signals face -to -face in real life.

[616] There's a diminution.

[617] For example, on Zoom, you can't have eye contact because you either look at the face or you look at the camera.

[618] You can't do both.

[619] The camera should be in the middle.

[620] Yeah.

[621] It should be right over your face, wherever that is.

[622] Yeah, wherever the face is.

[623] You should be able to place it.

[624] Well, that would be great.

[625] Yeah, so we're reinventing the hardware here, but in a good way.

[626] But anyway, so there's a diminution.

[627] So the brain doesn't get the signals it would pick up in real life.

[628] If you're next to someone like at a meeting or at dinner, and you sense what that person is feeling because the social networks of the brain, which we didn't talk about, they're prefrontal, and they're designed to make an instantaneous, unconscious, brain -to -brain link that passes emotional messages back and forth and also synchronizes your movements and all that so you have a good rapport.

[629] That happens when you're in person.

[630] It doesn't happen as well online.

[631] But seeing a picture is better than a phone call, but a phone isn't bad because the voice carries a lot of emotional information.

[632] The worst is text alone.

[633] Yeah.

[634] Texting someone or emailing.

[635] The reason is this.

[636] particularly if you're having an amygdala hijack, you're really worked up and you're a little pissed off at this person, you furiously type a message, and you hit send, that's the amygdala.

[637] That's my favorite time to write an email.

[638] Yeah.

[639] I'm so inspired.

[640] Well, you know, I always recommend never send an email when you've been drinking a lot, not a problem for you, but late at night, don't do it.

[641] Wait till the next morning because the brain thinks all of the emotional nuance goes with the message, but it doesn't.

[642] It just is the words.

[643] That opens a door, lots of misunderstanding.

[644] It's basically called flaming, and it's been a problem on the Internet since it began.

[645] Will you tell me the science behind how your brain is communicating emotions with another person?

[646] Is it visual?

[647] Am I detecting, like, visual cues from your face?

[648] It's everything.

[649] So your facial expression, do you know the work of Paul Ekman?

[650] He came up with a map of facial muscle movement.

[651] As I recall, it was backwards.

[652] At first, they just set out to document all the different ways the muscles.

[653] could move.

[654] And then they realized just by doing the movements, it actually reversed, engineered, and gave them the emotions, that it worked both ways.

[655] Yeah, that did.

[656] But first, he had to spend one year in a mirror learning to control the more than 140 facial muscles voluntarily, a subset of which 12 or so usually can't be controlled, but he learned to do it.

[657] And then he put them together.

[658] And it's a brilliant system.

[659] But it's all to say, you pick up a motion from facial expression to a large extent and also from tone of voice, from body movements, you do it in dozens of ways, and you do it automatically when you're with a person.

[660] You don't think about it.

[661] In fact, if you thought about it, it'd probably get in the way.

[662] You'd pick it up unconsciously.

[663] You just said something, I'm wondering if it's the same thing.

[664] So I regularly notice, anytime I'm eating at a restaurant in a booth with another person, I start becoming aware of the fact that we mirror each other, so I put my hand on my chin and then I noticed they have it or maybe they did it and now I did it or then they leaned back and cross it and like, you get in this dance and mirroring each other and you don't even know you're doing it.

[665] Is that part of it?

[666] Well, there are three ingredients to report, the first is full mutual attention.

[667] So when you're with that person, you're paying attention to each other.

[668] The second happens spontaneously.

[669] It's what you talked about.

[670] If you made a video of two people who were really sympathetic and you turned off the sound and just watch their bodies.

[671] It's like they're choreographed.

[672] Right.

[673] Putting your hand under your chin and then the other person does it.

[674] That's just part of the dance.

[675] And the third thing is, by the way, it feels good.

[676] And that is a natural byproduct of rapport.

[677] The interactions you have in a day that make it a good day are the times you have rapport with people.

[678] You have a good interaction.

[679] And they say, too, the face -to -face interaction actually gives you the oxytocin as well, right?

[680] Like, you get something biochemically out of that that you can't get over text.

[681] You can't get it from text.

[682] You might get it from Zoom.

[683] If you have a really warm conversation, you might get it from a phone call.

[684] Yeah.

[685] You get it from a mutual warmth, essentially.

[686] Warmheartedness.

[687] I'm all for warmheartedness.

[688] I can feel your warm heartiness, by the way.

[689] From the second you said, hi, you've really, you've perfected that.

[690] It's really funny you bring up the face thing because just this morning, my daughter came into my room really early.

[691] I was up too early, and then so she got up.

[692] And then she came in, she's making all these faces.

[693] And I love when she does that.

[694] And I'm telling her like, oh, my God, when I was your age, is all I did.

[695] I looked in front of the mirror, made ugly faces, tried to make myself embarrassed.

[696] I'd laugh.

[697] It was this whole thing.

[698] And she goes, yeah, her face is moving so many ways.

[699] And I said, yeah, because we didn't always have this great language to communicate.

[700] So we know how to communicate with just this thing.

[701] This is how we have communicated always.

[702] Wonderful.

[703] You explained that to her.

[704] Yeah, that was just.

[705] this morning, like literally, I don't know, 10 hours ago.

[706] And while I was doing it, I was hoping that was correct.

[707] I don't know if you've ever had this with your kids where it's like, you're explaining something and then you're pretty sure you've got it.

[708] But then there is some part of you, it's like, I hope I have this right.

[709] Yeah, you know, the great realization in early adolescence is that your parents weren't always right.

[710] Well, at least our parents had the luxury if we couldn't find out on Google.

[711] That's right.

[712] It would take any one of these kids two seconds to realize we don't truly understand why the sky's blue.

[713] That's right.

[714] Now we're toast.

[715] Yeah.

[716] We have to transition into another role.

[717] We have to Google first.

[718] Yeah.

[719] I was going to go back to this other thing about how do you know what your emotional intelligence is by asking people.

[720] I recommend a primer at keystepmedia .com.

[721] Okay.

[722] Because it describes each of the elements of emotional intelligence.

[723] intelligence in detail.

[724] So you can reflect on it yourself.

[725] And then you can ask people how am I at staying positive when things go bad.

[726] You can really dig down to each of the aspects if you want to do it.

[727] Keystepmedia .com.

[728] I'm going to do that because I think I overestimate my emotional intelligence all the time.

[729] I think I overestimate everything about my intelligence.

[730] So it'd be nice to find out.

[731] A couple of things.

[732] One is they're called building blocks of emotional intelligence.

[733] It's a primer on each of the 12 subsets.

[734] The other is that, remember, Dax, everybody has a profile of strengths and limitations.

[735] In my model, there are 12 parts, the four main ones and then particular abilities within each.

[736] And you can be really good at, say, empathy, but not so good at emotional self -control, or really good at staying positive or keeping your eye and your goal, but not so good at working out differences.

[737] conflict management it depends it's like going to a doctor getting a physical you know how are your lipids what's your cholesterol good cholesterol on and on and on so look at each part and people who coach this and a lot of coaches do this in fact the one set of abilities that executives are coached for the most emotional intelligence because it's key to leadership and coaches will help someone identify something that they're not that good at but think they could benefit from getting better.

[738] That's a good attitude.

[739] It's not necessarily your worst thing.

[740] That may be hard for you to change, but something that could be better and that will help you a lot if you get better.

[741] I think for anyone listening, like the notion that it would impact your success professionally, it would impact your success in relationships, it will impact your health.

[742] I can't imagine that that doesn't now encompass everybody has at least one of those three goals, that it would be worth investing in your emotional intelligence.

[743] You would think so rationally.

[744] But think about how many people know what good nutrition is and how popular burgers are.

[745] Yeah.

[746] It's true.

[747] So, you know, this is interesting.

[748] When I talk to people about how to improve your emotional intelligence, I say the first thing you need to do is ask yourself this question.

[749] Do I really care?

[750] Oh, yeah.

[751] Because if you don't care, forget about it.

[752] You need to be motivated.

[753] I couldn't agree more.

[754] I'm going to let you in on one more a thing where there's a point where you've identified your character defects and then you kind of ask a higher power to help relieve you of these defects of character right yeah and throughout the years when I've done that prayer if I'm being dead honest I say you know I'm not willing they should have all me the good and the bad I pray that you take away every single defect of character it stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellow humans and I go don't really take away my perviness I kind of want I want to keep that I'm still getting a lot of joy out of that like I'm not fully honest about it.

[755] It's one thing to know my character defects, but there are certain ones I certainly am not ready to have taken away from me. Right, right.

[756] We're more attached to some of our qualities than other.

[757] There's a guy, by the way, a guy named David Smith in Peonia, Colorado, who has really put together the 12 steps with emotional intelligence, plus mindfulness in a good way.

[758] I recommend his stuff, although I don't know what he has.

[759] Yeah, I was just talking him the other day because I feel like emotional intelligence really supports the 12 -step approach.

[760] And I also would say that when you get to a higher power, I really think meditation can help a lot, too.

[761] Yeah, I'm an atheist, which is a big hurdle with the 12 steps.

[762] Why is it a hurdle?

[763] I have found many workarounds, but I'm just saying the 12 steps of AA, they say God more than once, let's just say that.

[764] Well, it's very interesting.

[765] So there are meditation approaches that don't have anything to do with God.

[766] Yeah.

[767] It's mind training, essentially.

[768] And it also is opening yourself to a larger awareness, which is what you want to do.

[769] I would like you to make a case for meditation.

[770] So years ago, I got trained in TM.

[771] My wife and I did it twice a day.

[772] We've never been happier.

[773] Then we had kids.

[774] It's all fucked up.

[775] We've not meditated in years.

[776] And I can't wait to the day I go back to it.

[777] But I do think for a lot of people, the thought of it is intimidating.

[778] They don't think they could do it.

[779] And I'd love for you to tell us as someone who's written an entire book about it, why everyone can do it and how they could maybe start.

[780] Anybody can do it.

[781] So I started with TM also.

[782] It's a good starter meditation.

[783] Then I went on to what's called insight meditation.

[784] Like mindfulness is a variety of insight.

[785] And now I am interested in Tibetan teachers because I was very impressed by their quality of being, the ones who are really adept, because they were very, you talk about warm -heartedness.

[786] I spent two years living in India and checking out a lot of different things.

[787] Oh, wow.

[788] Yeah, and I found that, like the Dalai Lama, that's who I'd like to be when I grow up because of his personal qualities.

[789] The word for Dalai Lama in Tibetan is not Dalai Lama, it's Kundun.

[790] It means presence.

[791] When you're in his presence, you feel a lot of wonderful things, including you are more loving to other people.

[792] It's really interesting.

[793] That's like a contact high.

[794] The question is, can you cultivate it yourself?

[795] that's what meditation does.

[796] So meditation basically, as I said before, it's just mind training.

[797] It's like if you can go to the gym, if you can prioritize physical fitness, you can prioritize mental fitness.

[798] That's what it is.

[799] But you have to make time for it.

[800] And you don't have to believe in a God or a higher power or deity.

[801] It's all what you can do for yourself.

[802] It's internal.

[803] I think it does open you to a greater good, to a greater awareness, which I think is very concordant with what you're saying about that step in A .A. And I know there's a lot of God talk around that, but God is code.

[804] They say that God's language is silence.

[805] That's the language of meditation.

[806] Can you get into a space of deep silence, of just being with yourself in a deep way?

[807] Here's a big one.

[808] Can you go of your thoughts.

[809] A lot of people who start meditation complain that my mind is nuts.

[810] I never had so many thoughts.

[811] Actually, that's a good sign, not a bad sign.

[812] It means you're actually paying attention to the mind's dream, which is like that.

[813] We just don't notice.

[814] We get carried by it, but we don't look at it.

[815] You're so right.

[816] It's not that this meditated state has introduced the racket in there.

[817] It's just you're paying attention to it for the first time.

[818] It's happening from the time your eyes open up until they close at night.

[819] Yeah.

[820] What gets you out of bed in the morning?

[821] Some thought or other propels you out of bed.

[822] I've got to do this.

[823] Or it's time to get up.

[824] But the interesting thing about meditation is it changes your relationship to your mind.

[825] So you can be more like an observer.

[826] And you can see, well, here comes that thought.

[827] Here comes that feeling, that anger or that, you know, I got triggered.

[828] You can see it more clearly.

[829] That gives you more internal degrees of freedom.

[830] You can decide, am I going to go with it or am I going to let it go?

[831] Usually we just go with it because we don't see it at a distance.

[832] We just think, oh, this is our reality right now.

[833] And it must be thought of right now because it's urgent.

[834] Exactly.

[835] But one of the greatest insights of cognitive therapy is you don't have to believe your thoughts.

[836] That's major.

[837] Oh, my God.

[838] Our thoughts, of course, are great often, but some of them really suck.

[839] And those are the ones you don't want to believe.

[840] those are the ones that get triggered like when you get in an argument with your wife and she gets an argument with you it's because of those thoughts the ones that you don't really want to believe but you do believe because you're so convincing because you've rehearsed that pattern so many times it's hard to differentiate which ones are worth keeping and which ones are not yeah sometimes it helps to work with it so my wife integrated mindfulness with cognitive therapy mindfulness is this method of changing your relationship to your thoughts and your feelings, so you have an internal degree of freedom.

[841] You can have a choice point you didn't have before.

[842] Then you can look at the thoughts.

[843] Some thoughts are perfectly fine.

[844] Most thoughts are probably perfectly fine.

[845] Some thoughts always get you in trouble.

[846] And they're very powerful thoughts.

[847] Very powerful thoughts.

[848] Going way back to social emotional learning, because I know a lot of our listeners have kids.

[849] And I wonder if you have like one example, besides the belly buddies, which I love, for kids to, like, practice, like, a tool that kids can use for social.

[850] Well, you know, I've observed some of these classes.

[851] One of the things I liked, I think second graders or first graders, they come into classroom and they say how they feel and why they feel it.

[852] You don't have to, if you don't want to share that, can keep it yourself.

[853] But that helps develop self -awareness.

[854] Or here's one I like for a second grader, let's imagine that someone stole your pencil or had your pencil.

[855] How could you get your pencil back?

[856] What would make it better?

[857] What would make it worse?

[858] And the kids brainstorm with the teacher.

[859] So what they're doing is learning conflict management.

[860] Or fourth grade, fifth grade, I have a part in a play and I'm too shy of stage fright.

[861] What can you do to manage that?

[862] What would make it better?

[863] What would make it worse?

[864] Or 12 -year -olds, my friends want me to try drugs and I don't want her, but I want to keep my friends.

[865] How can I do it?

[866] And they work with that.

[867] And you can see why kids love this because it helps them with the melodramas of their lives.

[868] Kids at a certain age care less about their family than they do about their friends, by the end of elementary school, basically.

[869] And that means that anything that helps them get along better with their friends, and that's what SEL does, is going to be something laid love.

[870] There's one I like.

[871] It's the stoplight.

[872] Remember, I mentioned cognitive control.

[873] being able to manage your impulses.

[874] The stoplight is a poster in every classroom, and it's a red light.

[875] When you feel you're upset, stop, calm down and think before you act.

[876] That's the red light.

[877] Yellow light, think of a range of ways you could respond and what the outcome would be.

[878] Green light, pick the best one and try it out.

[879] And I visited these schools, inner city in New Haven, where they were doing this, the stoplight.

[880] They do it on a lot of the SEL programs.

[881] And I asked kids around 11 and 12, I took them one by one, does this program make any difference in your lives?

[882] And they all had stories.

[883] One kid says, yeah, I was in a store.

[884] My friend was stealing stuff and wanted me to steal stuff.

[885] And then I thought about the stoplight and I walked out of the store.

[886] Wow.

[887] So it really helps kids with the challenges and dilemmas and predicaments of their lives.

[888] And it gives them skills that will last forever.

[889] And I feel like my generation, we didn't have it, didn't exist.

[890] I wish we had.

[891] Yeah, yeah.

[892] You have to do remedial work if you're older.

[893] Yeah, yeah.

[894] I also think there's so many layers, too, with conventional gender roles and what males were allowed to feel and what women were expected to feel.

[895] Like, I look forward to the day that all unravels as someone who has felt imprisoned by those expectations at times.

[896] But, you know, parents, because of the culture, I think, have a big role in that, in that parents tend to talk to girls about feelings and relationships and to boys about things, erector sets, whatever.

[897] Yeah.

[898] And so it starts there, and it's a very deep cultural pattern, at least in our culture.

[899] So it's going to take a lot of undoing to change.

[900] Yeah.

[901] We were both playing with our beard just now.

[902] That's right.

[903] The mirror I mean.

[904] That's because of rapport.

[905] It's repore.

[906] Yeah.

[907] Is there anything in 25 years that didn't age well?

[908] Is there any part that you're like, oh, new science came out or, hmm, that I didn't have that right?

[909] Luckily, nothing I know about.

[910] That's impressive.

[911] And I do make it my job to know about it.

[912] I'm just doing an article for the Harvard Business Review, for example, on making the case that emotional intelligence makes good leaders, but it also makes.

[913] very effective organizations.

[914] This is kind of a new frontier.

[915] There's a lot of data for that.

[916] So so far, the model holds up.

[917] That's impressive.

[918] I graduated college in 2000, and I'm regularly spouting off stuff I learned in anthropology that has since been either 180 or that's not how they first came to America.

[919] I mean, it's crazy how much is unraveled in 21 years.

[920] Yeah, especially in anthropology.

[921] Yeah, it's true.

[922] Yeah.

[923] So I applaud any book that's still relevant 25 years later.

[924] Thanks, Tex. Yeah, well, I think we all owe you, whether or not you invented that phrase, you certainly popularized it.

[925] It became something that people could express that they value and that it's something that it should be explored and promoted.

[926] And I think that's so wonderful.

[927] So I'm very grateful for your work.

[928] Thanks.

[929] It's very kind of you.

[930] And thank you for giving it a podium here on the podcast.

[931] Absolutely.

[932] I want to repeat one more time, the website.

[933] Oh, yeah, one other thing.

[934] I just remembered.

[935] I'm starting my own podcast.

[936] Get the fuck out of here.

[937] Yeah, really.

[938] It's called first person plural.

[939] And it's emotional intelligence and beyond.

[940] And it's just starting.

[941] It's just launched like this week.

[942] Oh, you're kidding.

[943] First person plural.

[944] I love that.

[945] First person plural.

[946] See, that's the kind of title I would have come up with and Monica would have shot me. No, I love that.

[947] I just said, I love that.

[948] Tell me of you like this title.

[949] We have a parenting show from Dr. Wendy Mogul.

[950] She's amazing.

[951] I assume you probably are aware of her.

[952] And I wanted to call the show Error Apparent.

[953] Error apparent?

[954] I guess it is.

[955] See, I just won.

[956] I just immediately won.

[957] Error apparent or error apparent?

[958] Error.

[959] It was a play on error.

[960] It's a play on error parent.

[961] But half the people don't even know what error apparent is.

[962] And then even if you do know what error apparent is, it just wasn't going to work out.

[963] Oh, you think everyone knows.

[964] about first -person plural?

[965] First -person plural is we, us.

[966] Exactly.

[967] It's all about us.

[968] I like it.

[969] I love it.

[970] I do too.

[971] Much better than error parents.

[972] Air appearance, so good.

[973] So clever.

[974] Here's the things.

[975] What I realized is I have a lot of things I want to say.

[976] And if I write a book, it takes two or three years.

[977] If I do a podcast, it's like almost instant gratification.

[978] Oh, I couldn't agree with you more.

[979] I had prior to this been directing movies, it takes two years.

[980] And then it comes out on a friend.

[981] Friday, and you're like, I hope everyone sees it.

[982] That was two years of my life.

[983] Exactly.

[984] Oh, no, they did it.

[985] Now what?

[986] Yeah.

[987] So I'm kind of really like in the form.

[988] I'm pretty in love with it, actually.

[989] I'm doing it with my son, too, which is fun.

[990] Oh, fun.

[991] Is he in the same line of work as you?

[992] No, he's more a media guy.

[993] Okay.

[994] He has a degree in audio engineering, but he did publishing for a while.

[995] Keystep media is his company.

[996] Oh, great.

[997] Yeah.

[998] Great.

[999] Keystepmedia .com Well, it's been such a great experience getting to know you and to talk to you, and I really hope we get to do it again.

[1000] I want everyone to go out and celebrate if they've not already read it and get emotional intelligence.

[1001] It started this whole conversation, which is so helpful to all of us.

[1002] Dr. Daniel Goldman, I appreciate your time so much.

[1003] So, you know, that guy coined the term, but it's ubiquitous.

[1004] Everyone knows emotional intelligence.

[1005] And that's because of you.

[1006] That must feel great.

[1007] In fact, so Peter, who I mentioned is not.

[1008] now the president of Yale, has acknowledged that he came up with the term, but I made it famous.

[1009] Yeah.

[1010] You're Ray Kroc.

[1011] Oh, that's interesting.

[1012] Does that make sense?

[1013] Yeah, I totally get it.

[1014] Yeah.

[1015] So Ray Kroc, McDonald's was McDonald's.

[1016] Ray Kroc came into the scene, and he made it McDonald's.

[1017] Yeah, it was like one little drive -in somewhere or the Santa Barbara.

[1018] I don't know where.

[1019] Yeah.

[1020] Yeah.

[1021] So EQ is now a word in languages around the world.

[1022] It's like a global phenomenon that.

[1023] Never would have.

[1024] Peter knows and his co -author, Jack Mayer.

[1025] They know they've written that nobody would have known about it if it hadn't been for me. Yeah.

[1026] That's powerful.

[1027] It's so wonderful.

[1028] I hope you're proud of it.

[1029] Yeah, I feel good about it.

[1030] Definitely.

[1031] Now go meditate to make sure your ego doesn't I want to thank you both.

[1032] This has been a real pleasure time with just like that.

[1033] It's amazing when you're having a good time.

[1034] Thank you.

[1035] Yeah, the flow state.

[1036] It always feels.

[1037] Yeah.

[1038] All right.

[1039] Well, be well.

[1040] Take care.

[1041] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[1042] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1043] Hello.

[1044] Hi.

[1045] We're not back from Hawaii yet.

[1046] But we are.

[1047] But we are.

[1048] Wait, this is Thursday?

[1049] No, I mean, we are back.

[1050] But me and you in real life are not back.

[1051] We still haven't left.

[1052] I think you needed a big, big dose of vitamin D from the sun.

[1053] I've been thinking that I'm just sad in this apartment.

[1054] Yeah.

[1055] I mean, I'm not.

[1056] It's a beautiful apartment.

[1057] But when I'm looking at my house, I just keep thinking about spending the whole day outside.

[1058] I can't wait.

[1059] Yeah.

[1060] Oh, my God.

[1061] I can't wait.

[1062] Ooh.

[1063] Okay.

[1064] So this is a fun episode because it's on emotional intelligence.

[1065] Really quick, though.

[1066] I want to know the answer to this.

[1067] I don't.

[1068] But, you know, white people became white because they moved from Africa to northern climates with way less sunshine.

[1069] And they still needed vitamin D. So their skin got whiter so that they could absorb more of the limited sun.

[1070] Okay.

[1071] You're designed to have 12 hours of sunlight every single day.

[1072] You're on the equator.

[1073] Mm -hmm.

[1074] And so.

[1075] So probably why I feel so deprived when I don't get it.

[1076] Well, it stands to the reason that you can't absorb nearly as much as I can in this northern climate and that you maybe would be predisposed to not get enough vitamin D. Because what happens was people who look like you who went north, they turned out looking like me. But you're here because of airplanes, not walking and evolving.

[1077] Wait, what?

[1078] I'm sorry.

[1079] Say it one more time.

[1080] Everyone started out brown.

[1081] In Africa.

[1082] Yeah.

[1083] Yeah.

[1084] And then people moved north.

[1085] And the people that moved north that had really dark skin didn't absorb enough vitamin D from the sun and they died.

[1086] Okay.

[1087] And the people that were abnormally light that were left over reproduced.

[1088] And of those, the lightest people thrive because they were absorbing more vitamin D from the sun and not getting sick and buying.

[1089] Why are they able to absorb more just because they're white?

[1090] Oh, because of the light.

[1091] Yeah, let's more of it end.

[1092] That's why we burn.

[1093] Right.

[1094] And you guys don't burn as much.

[1095] So that was a process that took thousands of years.

[1096] But then your dad took an airplane here.

[1097] So he's designed to live in a climate that has massive amounts of sun 12 hours a day.

[1098] But he finds himself in the winter months in the northern hemisphere.

[1099] Yeah.

[1100] Not getting enough sun.

[1101] I have to imagine you guys must run low on vitamin D. Maybe.

[1102] Maybe that's why I have sad.

[1103] Truly.

[1104] Oh, my God, do you think?

[1105] Does it rain a lot in India?

[1106] Oh, baby.

[1107] It's monsoons there.

[1108] Then that's not in line with my sad.

[1109] No, but in general, there's no month in India where the sun's only out eight hours a day.

[1110] Maybe I should go back there.

[1111] This is a side note.

[1112] Do you know acacia trees?

[1113] Mm -mm.

[1114] They're the ones that you see in Africa that look like umbrellas.

[1115] Yeah.

[1116] They don't have any side foliage.

[1117] Right.

[1118] And they don't have it because the sun never is going sideways across the horizon like it does in the northern climates or the southern climates.

[1119] Because it's the equator, it's always going directly overhead so it would be useless to have them on the sides.

[1120] What percentage of the audience, if you had to guess, likes these fun facts?

[1121] This is like me telling me, what was it when I fart and I don't know how it's reading if I'm pulling it off?

[1122] I just don't know.

[1123] Like, that's the kind of fact I'd love to pick up, but I don't know.

[1124] No, I like it.

[1125] Okay.

[1126] It's a fact check.

[1127] You might as well have some facts in there.

[1128] That's true.

[1129] You know, we're all about learning.

[1130] Yeah, that's incredibly proprietary to the acacia.

[1131] It is.

[1132] I like that.

[1133] I like that story.

[1134] I wonder if you planted acacia's up here, A, if they would even live.

[1135] But if, in fact, they did live, if they would somehow evolve and they have side foliage.

[1136] Yeah, there probably is some cousin to that tree that is here.

[1137] Okay.

[1138] That is just a normal tree, that what we call it normal tree.

[1139] Right.

[1140] Big bulbous shade.

[1141] Have you ever heard of normal trees?

[1142] Yeah.

[1143] Okay.

[1144] Well, I hope that explains my sad because I know people dismiss it, meaning you dismiss it as nothing.

[1145] I think I'm very indulgent of your sad.

[1146] In fact, just yesterday I asked you how your sad was doing because it was cloudy yesterday.

[1147] Do you not, do I need to read the text to you?

[1148] I think it's because you felt that I was in a mood.

[1149] or something.

[1150] I think you felt a mood change for me and then realized.

[1151] Nope.

[1152] No?

[1153] What it was?

[1154] I was walking somewhere yesterday.

[1155] And I was loving walking in that gloomy weather.

[1156] Ew, I hated it.

[1157] Because I'm from Michigan.

[1158] I don't know.

[1159] Something nostalgic about it.

[1160] And I was really like getting off on it.

[1161] And then I thought, oh, Monica hates this.

[1162] And then I text you, how's your sad doing today?

[1163] Yeah.

[1164] But it auto corrected to how's your dad doing today.

[1165] Yeah.

[1166] And I was like, he's fine, I think.

[1167] Yeah, just a weird question.

[1168] And you were like placated me like, Oh, I haven't talked to him.

[1169] But it kind of made sense because his interview had come out that day.

[1170] Exactly.

[1171] His little portion on the fact check had come out.

[1172] So I thought you were asking, like, how's he doing?

[1173] Were people mean to him?

[1174] Right.

[1175] And then I was upset because, you know, I was acknowledging your sad and inquiring about it.

[1176] Sure.

[1177] All to be misunderstood like an episode of three's company.

[1178] Big misunderstanding.

[1179] I looked up how to fix it.

[1180] sun or light therapy there's there's light therapy yeah but i i have a little light source in my room that's yeah it's supposed to help but it doesn't no you need the like the big uv baker uh overhead like in alaska they have to give the children that light therapy it's i know but it's like it's this big i bought one not so i have a night light no it's not a night light it turns on um a half hour before you wake up.

[1181] Hmm.

[1182] And it tries to mimic a sunrise, so it starts out red and then slowly gets to a light.

[1183] You want a device like this?

[1184] Yeah.

[1185] It's by hatch.

[1186] It's very cool.

[1187] Oh, I want to see it.

[1188] It's a clock, too, which I like because I don't want to check my phone.

[1189] Uh -huh.

[1190] And you can do meditation.

[1191] They are not sponsored, but they should be.

[1192] Wow.

[1193] You do a little like half -hour meditation before bed.

[1194] Oh.

[1195] The lights dim for like 20 minutes so you can read.

[1196] like, you know, wind up.

[1197] It's a whole process so that you get the best sleep.

[1198] Yes, it's a whole program so that you can sleep the best.

[1199] And you know, I've been on a journey with sleep.

[1200] Yeah.

[1201] And the wake up is to mimic sunrise.

[1202] So you get that circadian rhythm that gets put into gear.

[1203] But it hasn't been working for me. And then I bought one of those sad lamps.

[1204] So I was really excited about that.

[1205] And it's like half the size of this laptop.

[1206] I don't trust it.

[1207] You need a big, big light source.

[1208] I know.

[1209] In general, if you had to give a rating, your sleep before you quit drinking, out of 10, and then overall, after quitting drinking.

[1210] That's a good question.

[1211] Oh, we can't say quit because you've drank by now, because we've already been to Hawaii by now.

[1212] Oh, right.

[1213] But at any rate, go ahead.

[1214] Pretend it's today.

[1215] I always said I haven't quit for good.

[1216] I just haven't drank in a couple months.

[1217] Yeah.

[1218] Before I took my hiatus, my sleep was probably three.

[1219] Okay.

[1220] And I bet now it's six or seven.

[1221] That's significant.

[1222] It is significant.

[1223] It is.

[1224] Because you were discouraged the first couple weeks.

[1225] You were like, oh, it's not really helping my sleep.

[1226] I was.

[1227] I wonder if one of the reasons among many is simply your schedule is probably way more predictable.

[1228] Like you leave hangs earlier than you.

[1229] to you like it might just be that you're much more on a schedule that could be true because you're not like having fun and staying up till two at the Hansons on one night once a month you'd end up being at the Hansons to like one or two yeah I am having a hard time though because recently I just feel so low energy and I don't understand why because I'm not drinking I'm sleeping seemingly better at the very least.

[1230] I'm eating well.

[1231] I feel like I should feel so full of energy.

[1232] Yeah.

[1233] I don't know why.

[1234] It's another grievance.

[1235] Okay, we got to do something important.

[1236] Okay, yeah.

[1237] So Daniel, he has a test, emotional intelligence test.

[1238] We haven't done a test in so long.

[1239] Oh, great.

[1240] Problem is she gave me the website, but I can't find the test on it.

[1241] Hmm.

[1242] I'm almost afraid to take this because I think I have really high emotional intelligence, and what if I don't?

[1243] I guess similar anxiety about taking an IQ test in general.

[1244] Oh, sure.

[1245] You think you're smart, but then you're going to find out your average.

[1246] Well, you know you're smart.

[1247] Oh, what a fun noise your computer is making.

[1248] Oh, I love that noise.

[1249] If this noise agitated you, you have emotional intelligence.

[1250] O 'Reilly.

[1251] Wow, it's been a long time since you.

[1252] It has.

[1253] O 'Reilly.

[1254] I'm sorry.

[1255] We're going to have to do a test that's not Daniels.

[1256] Okay.

[1257] Okay.

[1258] We wanted to do Daniels, and we simply couldn't find it.

[1259] Okay.

[1260] Ready?

[1261] Set.

[1262] Go.

[1263] My emotions generally have either a strong impact on the way I behave, little or no impact on the way I behave.

[1264] Very strong.

[1265] I am generally guided by my goals and values, others' goals and values.

[1266] My goals and values.

[1267] When I'm under pressure, I generally have changed behaviors from normal, behaviors that remain unchanged.

[1268] These are abstract questions.

[1269] Yeah.

[1270] I think the latter.

[1271] Okay.

[1272] I generally learn most by actively doing activities from reflecting on past experiences.

[1273] I'd say reflecting, I guess.

[1274] I generally have a good sense of humor about myself or take myself seriously.

[1275] Yeah, I have a good sense of humor about myself.

[1276] I present myself with self -assurance and having presence or with some confidence and cautiousness.

[1277] The first.

[1278] Erigance.

[1279] Where there are uncertainties and pressures, I am always, A, decisive and make sound decisions, be cautious about making the right decision.

[1280] Well, we know I'm not cautious about making decisions at all.

[1281] I always voice views that are unpopular and go out on a limb for what is right, or most others agree with in support.

[1282] Those see, that's labeled diametrically opposed, but it's not.

[1283] I would say I do both, though.

[1284] Well, I'd say I do a provocative argument, and I think sometimes I convince people, or they see the merit in it.

[1285] But I'll just stick with the first one.

[1286] Okay.

[1287] I think so.

[1288] I always like to take on new challenges, maintain the status quo.

[1289] New challenges.

[1290] I generally inspire confidence in others, rely on others' confidence.

[1291] Inspire confidence.

[1292] I generally allow my emotions and moods to impact on my behaviors, or I generally keep my disruptive emotions and impulses under control.

[1293] What do you think?

[1294] I want you to answer that for me. I think you let them impact your behavior.

[1295] Oh, okay.

[1296] When I'm under pressure, I get easily distracted in other things or I think clearly and stay focused.

[1297] Oh, latter.

[1298] I always do as I say I will do, do only what I have to do.

[1299] Do what I say I'll do.

[1300] Trust by others is automatically given to me, is built through reliability and authenticity.

[1301] The latter.

[1302] I am always flexible in how I see events.

[1303] I am always able to see events for what they are.

[1304] The latter.

[1305] During changing situations, I always work hard to try and keep up with the demands, smoothly handle multiple demands and shifting priorities.

[1306] The latter.

[1307] No?

[1308] This is you filling it out.

[1309] I know, but I want you to call me on it.

[1310] I might not be objective about many of these.

[1311] I think during changing situations...

[1312] Like, here's what I'm interpreting.

[1313] That is, like, I'm really flexible.

[1314] I think what makes me director is when I get there and shit isn't the way it's supposed to be.

[1315] I just immediately start figuring out how to make it work.

[1316] I don't get, like, bogged down and why?

[1317] That was supposed to be here and blah, blah, blah, blah.

[1318] I just go like, okay, I can make it work if we do X, Y, and Z. Right.

[1319] I'm very flexible in that way.

[1320] Sometimes, though, because, like, if, like, it's top gear, then it's not, you're not as flexible.

[1321] If you're the person.

[1322] Well, no, I think that show, I was immediately thinking of that show, but it would be way too hard to articulate.

[1323] We have no plan.

[1324] Like, we show up there and we have cars and a premise, and I'm so comfortable knowing things will happen and we'll, like, pivot the story and we'll find something.

[1325] Great.

[1326] I always set myself challenging goals.

[1327] I always complete the goals that are set for me. See, those aren't different.

[1328] Like, you can set challenging goals and then complete them.

[1329] I know.

[1330] But you have to pick.

[1331] I don't like that.

[1332] Well, this isn't Daniel's thing.

[1333] I just can't pick it.

[1334] I can't find it.

[1335] Right, but both.

[1336] Okay, I don't think you're actually flexible to changing situations because listen to you.

[1337] Maybe this question is just supposed to force you to figure out the previous question.

[1338] I set goals for myself and I accomplished goals.

[1339] Which one should I pick?

[1340] I think you set challenging goals for yourself.

[1341] Okay.

[1342] When obstacles and setbacks occur in pursuing my goals, I always readjust the goals and or expectations.

[1343] Persist in seeking the goals despite what has happened.

[1344] I do both.

[1345] You know, right?

[1346] You can't do everything.

[1347] I think it's saying like...

[1348] Well, like, here's what I'm saying.

[1349] I pursue directing and writing movies for a very long time.

[1350] I really stick with it.

[1351] 10 years.

[1352] And then when that's not going to work, I pick a new goal.

[1353] And I, and then I decided to do other things.

[1354] So maybe readjust.

[1355] Okay, I'll readjust.

[1356] Generally, I pursue goals beyond what is required or expected of me, or I pursue, I just had the thought, what if this is the wrong test?

[1357] I'm like, I'm not understanding how this is relating to emotional intelligence.

[1358] At all, me either.

[1359] Yeah, this is great.

[1360] Hold on, let me see.

[1361] What if it tells you afterwards, you're Italian?

[1362] You're Italian.

[1363] It says emotional intelligence test.

[1364] Oh, my God.

[1365] Okay.

[1366] Generally, I pursue goals beyond what is required or expected of me. Pursue goals only as far as is required of me. The first one.

[1367] When I identify opportunities, I am always uncertain about whether to pursue the opportunity, proactive in pursuing the opportunity.

[1368] The latter.

[1369] Group differences are always causing difficulties in unrest, understood and valued.

[1370] The first one, I think?

[1371] When I see bias and intolerance, I always challenge the initiating people, turn a blind eye and ignore it.

[1372] The former.

[1373] I always help out based on the tasks others need help with, understanding others' needs and feelings.

[1374] The latter.

[1375] I hate helping people with their tasks.

[1376] Well, you, that's true.

[1377] But you do, like, like, helping people with cars.

[1378] I love, like, if you have a problem, I love, immediately I want to just, like, talk about it and figure out, like, what's going on.

[1379] You're right.

[1380] But if you're like, I need to...

[1381] My shower head.

[1382] Yeah, but I did fix your sonos.

[1383] I had a real whirl one day last time we recorded here.

[1384] I fixed your treadmill.

[1385] Yeah, which...

[1386] Fixing my treadmill was putting...

[1387] The safety key back on the magnet.

[1388] Yeah, literally putting a magnet on a magnet that fell off.

[1389] And then getting your sonos all working.

[1390] Yes.

[1391] And then hooking up your humidifier.

[1392] Yes.

[1393] It was pretty good.

[1394] It was very helpful.

[1395] I'm trying to make up for not having done your shower head.

[1396] Yeah.

[1397] Who'd you end up having to it?

[1398] What competing boy?

[1399] Laura's boyfriend.

[1400] Oh.

[1401] I always listen to the important words being said.

[1402] Listen well and am attentive to emotional cues.

[1403] I'd say emotional cues.

[1404] I don't really believe anyone knows what they're saying.

[1405] Like, I'm looking for the emotion that's happening.

[1406] Okay.

[1407] Not the facts of what they're saying.

[1408] Like, I'm so mad at so -and -so.

[1409] He tried.

[1410] And I'm like, you know, what something else is going on?

[1411] Okay.

[1412] Others' perspectives are always understood and sensitivity shown, clouding the issues and getting us off track.

[1413] Probably the latter.

[1414] I always find social networks in the organization get in the way of delivering performance, help create better decision networks.

[1415] I don't, I've never worked in that kind of environment.

[1416] but I think I wouldn't like social networking.

[1417] It's getting the way.

[1418] Yeah.

[1419] I always use informal key power relationships to get what I need, formal decision networks to get what I need.

[1420] I don't know what either of those means.

[1421] Do you use, like, friendly relationships you have to, I think you do that?

[1422] Like, you're more likely to work on a project of someone you know and like than like through a studio head or something.

[1423] thing.

[1424] I always give customers what they ask for.

[1425] I always understand customers' needs and match product services.

[1426] I'm not in this situation.

[1427] But this is also talking about work.

[1428] Yeah.

[1429] You do have customers.

[1430] Yeah, but we're not getting much feedback.

[1431] Well, that's not true.

[1432] We hear from Armcherry's on Instagram.

[1433] I'm trying to give them emotionally what they need.

[1434] I'm not telling them.

[1435] Wait, but then you understand customers' needs and match product services, not you give customers what they ask for.

[1436] No, I probably don't give anyone what they ask for.

[1437] I always act as a trusted advisor to the customer.

[1438] Tell the customer what they want to hear.

[1439] Act as a trust.

[1440] Advisor, yeah.

[1441] It's just weird.

[1442] Customer is a weird word.

[1443] Mel, this is an English one.

[1444] So maybe customer means something else in Britain.

[1445] Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty is always part of the way I work, is not important in achieving the sale.

[1446] The latter.

[1447] The vision and mission are always given to staff so they know where we are going, used to inspire groups and individuals.

[1448] Know where they're going.

[1449] I always let people know of the behaviors expected.

[1450] I always model the behaviors expected of others.

[1451] Ladder.

[1452] I always give assignments to people who can get the job done and do it well.

[1453] We'll grow and develop as a result of the challenge.

[1454] The first.

[1455] Interesting one.

[1456] Winning people over is something that I find.

[1457] difficult to do.

[1458] I am very good at.

[1459] I enjoy.

[1460] That's not an option.

[1461] I don't want to say I'm very good at it, but I enjoy it.

[1462] I always communicate in a way that everyone understands what I'm saying that seeks mutual understanding and full information sharing.

[1463] I don't know.

[1464] What do you think?

[1465] I think that everyone understands what I'm saying.

[1466] Okay.

[1467] I always go along with the changes being driven by others or I always recognize the need for changes and remove barriers.

[1468] We certainly don't go along with decisions by others.

[1469] maybe through the null hypothesis, I have to pick the other one.

[1470] Okay.

[1471] That's why I'm the worst employee you can have.

[1472] I don't think you.

[1473] I'm a very bad employee, unless you want to hire someone who's going to give you their opinion all the time.

[1474] But this is, let's say it's boss.

[1475] Think of it as a boss.

[1476] Do you wait for the employees to tell you something needs a change and then you do that?

[1477] Or do you look around yourself and say, oh, that needs a change?

[1478] Oh, that.

[1479] Okay.

[1480] Like, with your editing, you didn't come to me and say, I can't.

[1481] I'm overwhelmed editing, but I'm like, this is killing you.

[1482] The version of the editing you're doing is killing you.

[1483] Let's figure out how to.

[1484] Right.

[1485] I always handle difficult people in a straightforward and direct manner with diplomacy intact.

[1486] Direct and straightforward and aggressive and confrontational.

[1487] I always seek out relationships that are mutually beneficial that will help me achieve my end goal.

[1488] Mutually benefit.

[1489] Well, I don't know.

[1490] I think so.

[1491] Yeah, I think so, too.

[1492] I think so.

[1493] I generally have a stronger focus on tasks rather than relationships, balanced focus on tasks and relationships.

[1494] Relationships.

[1495] When I work with teams, I always make it clear what I expect members to do.

[1496] Draw all members into enthusiastic participation.

[1497] Make it clear.

[1498] All right.

[1499] Score test.

[1500] The following numerical scores are categorized.

[1501] from your answers to the EI test.

[1502] If you answered honestly and accurately, your score is out of 10 for each quadrant will reflect your capability level within each of the EI quadrants.

[1503] Self -awareness, nine.

[1504] Out of what?

[1505] Ten?

[1506] You weren't listening.

[1507] Okay, listening two.

[1508] Just kidding.

[1509] So self -awareness was a nine out of ten?

[1510] Yes.

[1511] Self -management, seven.

[1512] Okay.

[1513] Social awareness, six.

[1514] Oh, oops.

[1515] Relationship Management 5.

[1516] Oh.

[1517] But do you want me to read a little bit about it?

[1518] I've got to be flexible.

[1519] I claim to be flexible.

[1520] So here we go.

[1521] Social awareness description.

[1522] Social awareness is comprised of three competencies.

[1523] Empathy, which is understanding others and taking an active interest in their concerns.

[1524] Organizational awareness, which is the ability to read the currents of organizational life, decision networks and navigate politics, and service orientation, which is recognizing and meeting customers needs, the adaptable success oriented type.

[1525] Interesting.

[1526] Okay, relationship management description.

[1527] The social cluster of relationship management is comprised of seven competencies, visionary leadership, which is inspiring and guiding groups and individuals, developing others, which is the propensity to strengthen and support the abilities of others through feedback and guidance, influence, which is the ability to exercise a wide range of persuasive strategies with integrity, and also includes listening and sending clear, convincing, and well -tuned messages, change catalyst, which is the proficiency in initiating new ideas and leading people in a new direction.

[1528] I think you have a lot of that.

[1529] Conflict management, which is resolving disagreements and collaboratively developing resolutions.

[1530] That's probably where it got you.

[1531] Yeah, that's the negative three.

[1532] Building bonds, which is building and maintaining relationships with others, and teamwork and collaboration, which is a promotion of cooperation and building of teams.

[1533] So those were you're lower.

[1534] But let me talk about your upper.

[1535] Self -awareness, nine.

[1536] Big one.

[1537] The core of emotional intelligence is self -awareness.

[1538] Self -awareness is comprised of three competencies, emotional self -awareness, where you are able to read and understand your emotions as well as recognize their impact on work performance and relationships, accurate self -assessment, where you are able to give a realistic evaluation of your strengths and limitations and self -confidence, where you have a positive and strong sense of one self -worth.

[1539] The starting point and key in these areas is the ability to be critically self -reflective.

[1540] That's great.

[1541] That's true.

[1542] Self -management, last one.

[1543] This is you had a seven on.

[1544] Self -management is comprised of five competencies.

[1545] Self -control, which is keeping disruptive emotions and impulses under control.

[1546] Transparency, which is maintaining standards of honesty and integrity.

[1547] Okay, so the first one I'd say I was bad at.

[1548] Second one I'd say I'm good at.

[1549] Yeah.

[1550] Honesty and integrity, managing yourself and responsibilities.

[1551] That's all part of transparency.

[1552] Adaptability, which is the flexibility and adapting to changing situations and overcoming obstacles.

[1553] Achievement orientation, which is the guiding drive to meet an internal standard of excellence and initiative, which is the readiness to seize opportunities and act.

[1554] Interesting.

[1555] We love quizzes.

[1556] We sure do.

[1557] We're going to find the real one from Daniel.

[1558] And then I'll give you that one.

[1559] Okay, great.

[1560] Yeah.

[1561] Great.

[1562] All right.

[1563] All right.

[1564] Well, we're back from Hawaii.

[1565] It was fun.

[1566] It was great.

[1567] You're healthier, never.

[1568] My sad is gone.

[1569] You've been drunk for six days.

[1570] You're so scared of me drinking there.

[1571] No, I'm not.

[1572] I feel it.

[1573] It keeps coming up.

[1574] Well, it's a big change.

[1575] You haven't drank for two months.

[1576] I'm not going to drink a lot.

[1577] I can't because I'm not supposed to go from none to a lot.

[1578] Okay.

[1579] Well, however you do, it'll be great.

[1580] For real.

[1581] I never had a problem with you drinking, ever.

[1582] You didn't, but it seems like in my sobriety.

[1583] Well, I'm very interested in it.

[1584] Yeah, I know you're interested, but I feel that it's something more.

[1585] I feel that you are happy.

[1586] I can tell you what it is.

[1587] I don't have 1 % fear you have a drinking problem.

[1588] Not one.

[1589] Point five?

[1590] None.

[1591] Okay.

[1592] I don't have that at all.

[1593] Okay.

[1594] I do have the thought, is it additive or deductive for you?

[1595] Sure.

[1596] And I'm only wanting you to honestly assess that.

[1597] Yeah.

[1598] If I saw that you drive so much joy from it, then to me, it would be like, yeah.

[1599] Yeah.

[1600] And then if you didn't drive any downside from it, I mean, like, yeah.

[1601] Yeah.

[1602] But I see you drink, in my opinion, more habitually than it is that great.

[1603] For sure.

[1604] Sure.

[1605] It is.

[1606] That's why I wanted to take a break.

[1607] Yeah.

[1608] So I'm not affected one way or another.

[1609] Like you're not annoying when you drink.

[1610] It doesn't bother me when you do it.

[1611] Like for me, there's no impact on you drinking.

[1612] But as someone who loves you and wants you to like sleep well, if that's something you like and it's gotten better.

[1613] Yeah.

[1614] And you have such a rock and personality sober.

[1615] I guess that's the other thing.

[1616] Like I know people that are, they're in such a shell without alcohol.

[1617] that it is really a lubricant they kind of need.

[1618] And socially, it's, it is infinitely better for them.

[1619] And it's obvious.

[1620] But you don't really have that.

[1621] You don't have a problem engaging without that.

[1622] That's true.

[1623] That's true.

[1624] You're not, like, really inhibited or anything.

[1625] No, I'm not.

[1626] Yeah.

[1627] You got a 160 on your emotional IQ score.

[1628] Just let you know.

[1629] Assume that's out of 160?

[1630] 200.

[1631] Oh, well, I could be better than.

[1632] I think the IQ things out of 200.

[1633] What did I say you had?

[1634] 160.

[1635] Yeah, that's above genius.

[1636] Genius is above 140.

[1637] Great.

[1638] You're great.

[1639] You're emotionally a genius.

[1640] I love you.

[1641] Love you.

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