2016 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Dr. Travis Bradberry

(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

I love speaking to audiences who are interested in learning and bettering themselves.  Emotional intelligence will change the way you see people around you and how you go about your work. 

EQ is so important because IQ is a very small predictor of success.  Emotions are often what drive our behavior.  Phineas Gage was a foreman working to build railroads in Vermont.  He was polite, friendly—his workers adored him.  He was working with a metal bar called a tamping iron that tamped down the sand to create a precise blast with dynamite.  One day someone forgot to put the sand on top of the dynamite and when he used the tamping iron he was blasted from the site.  Six months later he was healed and he went back to work.  His workers noted he was rude and abrasive and prone to anger.  The area of the brain that controlled emotions had been damaged. 

What is EQ physically? – Signals in brain travel through the limbic system to the rational brain and how these work together results in EQ.   You may ask, why didn’t I learn about this growing up?  In our society we’re not always taught what we need to know.  We’re not always taught to use the skills we’ve been given.  We’re not taught to lead or how to motivate people.  We’re not taught to understand emotions.  Only 36% of people can identify their emotions. 

IQ=how fast you can learn information.  That doesn’t change much over time.  Personality also is fixed in your late teens and early twenties.  EQ, however, can be improved. 

People with high in IQ may or may not be high in EQ.  The four skills you need to know:

Self-Awareness – awareness of your tendencies and being prepared to deal with them.  The more you do self-discovery the better you equip yourself to use these skills.  Only certain things really bother us because they reflect something in ourselves we don’t like.

Self-Management—what do you do with the self-awareness.  You can be equipped with a lot of information. It’s not about stuffing your feelings; it’s about channeling it to provide the control you want.  Positive feelings need to be managed also.

Social Awareness—knowing what people are trying to communicate to you.  Requires you to focus more on another person than on yourself. 

Relationship Management—requires you to use the first three skills in concert.  You need to know what’s going on with you, what’s going on with the other person, and how to manage this.

             

The biggest mistake is winning the battle to lose the war and trying to prove you are right and losing the relationship.  Relationship Management is a tricky skill.  (clip from The Pursuit of Happyness--Will Smith’s character realizes he was wrong as a parent and recalibrates .) 

What is EQ Conceptually? – EQ is a skill that trickles into a lot of things, such as how you deal with stress, how you are on a team, how you are as a leader. 

            --EQ accounts for 60% of performance

            --90% of all top performers have high EQ

Research found the higher the responsibility in a company the lower the EQ scores.  Organizations get short-sighted when it comes to promotions.

Improving EQ involves a lot of practice because you need to form new habits.

Increasing your EQ requires—

--you get your stress under control – Stress is a necessary emotion and intermittent, mild stress helps improve memory.  Prolonged or severe stress causes degeneration in the area of the brain that controls behavior and causes more stress.  You need strategies like taking a walk, breathing exercises, turning phone off at night, developing an attitude of gratitude.  Gratitude alone reduced cortisol dramatically.

--clean up your sleep hygiene—getting more sleep will help (7-9 hours) but also you need quality sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep you have toxic proteins flowing around your body that cause you to feel sluggish.  To improve sleep quality—don’t take anything to help you sleep; no blue light in the evening (computer screens).  Not getting high quality sleep makes you fat—it increases cortisol and also makes you hungrier and not feel full.

--get your caffeine intake under control—stimulates ‘fight or flight’ hormones.  Caffeine has a 6 hour half-life so it takes 24 hours to clear your system.  Don’t drink caffeine after noon.