Latest / Wellness in Today's World / Ep. 4: Emotional Intelligence for Real Life

Transcript

Ep. 4: Emotional Intelligence for Real Life · Wellness in Today's World

• 0:05
  I'd like to welcome you to Wellness in Today's World with Debra Kawahara.
• 0:10
  It's a space where we talk about psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
• 0:15
  Hello, I'm Debra Kawahara, and thank you for joining us.
• 0:19
  Today's topic is on emotional intelligence, and we have the distinct pleasure of having Dr.
• 0:26
  Travis Bradberry here today.
• 0:28
  When I look through his bio, we are in for a treat today.
• 0:32
  Dr.
• 0:33
  Bradberry is the bestselling author of The New Emotional Intelligence and the world's number one bestselling author in the field of emotional intelligence with more than five
• 0:45
  million, that is million, books sold.
• 0:48
  Dr.
• 0:49
  Bradberry is a LinkedIn top voice,
• 0:51
  with 2.5 million followers on the platform.
• 0:56
  He has written for or been covered by Time, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business
• 1:11
  Review.
• 1:12
  So I'd like to welcome Dr.
• 1:14
  Travis Bradberry today.
• 1:15
  Thank you, thanks for having me.
• 1:17
  Yes, we're so happy that you're here.
• 1:19
  Now when I reached out to you, I was thrilled that you said yes.
• 1:24
  I know that you had trained as a clinical and organizational psychologist.
• 1:30
  And so I think there's a lot of people wondering, what was your journey or path to then becoming an author, a consultant, this emotional intelligence expert?
• 1:43
  I think people would be really interested in your path.
• 1:45
  I learned about emotional intelligence as an undergrad and I wasn't sure what type of graduate program I was going to go into.
• 1:52
  UCLA at the time had a MBA, clinical psychology, PhD combo.
• 1:57
  It's pretty hard to get into UCLA clinical PhD program.
• 2:00
  But also, I didn't want to be a professor; I wanted to be a practitioner.
• 2:04
  And when I learned about the CSPP program, the dual I/O clinical PhD, I thought that was a really good fit for me.
• 2:10
  When I started, I was doing autism work.
• 2:13
  My last year of undergrad, I started doing social skills interventions under the supervision of a psychiatrist.
• 2:19
  I did really well with that work and I found it really rewarding.
• 2:22
  But at the same time, I was in this dual program and I needed a topic to research that would meld the two fields.
• 2:28
  And for me, it was a no-brainer that emotional intelligence melds the two worlds of clinical and industrial psychology better than any other.
• 2:34
  So I started doing all my class projects, eventually my dissertation on EQ and my colleagues in the hallways at school were calling me "the EQ guy." And it just kind of led
• 2:44
  to this progression.
• 2:45
  The interesting thing is, I actually went into business with, one of my professors.
• 2:49
  Jean Greaves, who's also a CSPP alum, she taught my Entry to the Workplace course, and she gave us a lot of really practical knowledge of what it's really like to be an industrial
• 2:58
  psychologist in the consulting world.
• 3:00
  I needed an internship and I convinced her to give me one.
• 3:03
  She wasn't taking on interns; somehow I twisted her arm and, she gave me a lot of opportunity.
• 3:07
  And this is the thing about CSPP that I think is really sort of underrated is that there's some really excellent opportunity working with the right practitioner in the field,
• 3:16
  because contrary to what some others in the field were telling me, how seasoned I needed to be, to be a consultant, she saw the work I was doing with kids with autism.
• 3:26
  I was operating as a consultant.
• 3:27
  I was going into their school and I was building programs on behalf of the psychiatrist who, you know, was like, I don't know, $600 an hour at the time, and people didn't want to
• 3:36
  pay him to do that.
• 3:37
  So I was a more affordable solution.
• 3:39
  And she said, "You have the skillset to be a consultant.
• 3:41
  So I'm going to allow you to apply this.
• 3:43
  I'm going to allow you to work with me on projects." And about a year later, I was right there with her.
• 3:49
  Obviously she was much more experienced and skilled than I was, but she was letting me do peer-level work.
• 3:53
  This was about probably between my third and fourth year in the program.
• 3:57
  And by the time my fifth year rolled around, we were going into business together.
• 4:01
  And the idea there was, yes, emotional intelligence was a focus, but we were working on a suite of products, a lot of them assessments.
• 4:10
  As consultants, we used a lot of other people's assessments, right?
• 4:12
  And they were earning this sort of passive income off our sweat.
• 4:16
  And we said, "Wouldn't it be cool to have our own assessments, right?
• 4:19
  And develop our own." And that's what we did.
• 4:21
  And that was the business we started.
• 4:22
  Because the consulting work was no longer going to be the big component of the business—it was going to be the products—we went into business together 50–50.
• 4:31
  My fifth year in the program was a very tough year because I was still doing coursework.
• 4:36
  I was doing my final clinical internship.
• 4:39
  I was doing my dissertation; my dissertation was done when I graduated, except for a revision after I defended, and we were launching the business.
• 4:46
  So it was crazy.
• 4:47
  It was a very difficult year, but I really wanted to get out there.
• 4:51
  did undergrad in three years I wanted to get out into the PhD program.
• 4:55
  I really lamented, and I still do, that we don't have more of a apprenticeship type model, right?
• 5:02
  That you go and you get this graduate degree that can be at times fairly esoteric and not necessarily really hands on and applied.
• 5:09
  So I kind of built that for myself, right?
• 5:11
  By working with my professor, by getting out in the field.
• 5:13
  And I was just so motivated by that, that I was, I was willing to suffer.
• 5:17
  I suffered hard year five to pull all that stuff off, but that was my journey.
• 5:21
  I finished my degree with a business that was starting up.
• 5:24
  We had customers for our assessment.
• 5:26
  We were selling to people in the San Diego community through our network.
• 5:29
  Google AdWords was a brand new program;
• 5:31
  we had no money, but at 11 cents a click, when someone's searching for an emotional intelligence test, you can convert them, you know, and sell a $30 assessment; the ROI is
• 5:39
  pretty good.
• 5:40
  That was the path; we were slowly building and bootstrapping this business when I finished my degree.
• 5:44
  Wow.
• 5:45
  So you were doing this as you were going through graduate school and building these products.
• 5:50
  I'll tell you a funny story that's in my new book.
• 5:53
  I mentioned it briefly; it's not a full-blown story.
• 5:56
  I only got a marginal pass in one course at CSPP.
• 5:58
  It was a course on consulting; I'm obviously not going to name names, but it was taught by a local consultant who was adamant that we could not be consultants until we're at least
• 6:08
  five years out of the PhD program.
• 6:10
  That was the message that was being delivered.
• 6:11
  And I'm sitting there,
• 6:13
  working on my consulting work, you know, for my business while this message is being delivered.
• 6:19
  And I got caught; that's why I got a marginal.
• 6:21
  It was sort of a punishment, even though my grades were good.
• 6:23
  Sometimes you gotta...
• 6:24
  the entrepreneurial journey can be kind of an edgy non-traditional journey.
• 6:28
  I don't regret those experiences, even though they were a little painful at the time.
• 6:32
  It absolutely kind of sounds like, you know, out of the box, thinking out of the box and not kind of adhering to what the regular path for a student is.
• 6:45
  You were already starting your career while you were in graduate school.
• 6:49
  Do you think you had that entrepreneurial spirit in you already?
• 6:54
  Do you think that is part of the EQ that you have learned and spent two decades continuing your journey with it?
• 7:03
  It was a force within me that I could not fight.
• 7:06
  And I had it at a very early age.
• 7:08
  In the third grade, I had this racket where I was selling all my old Hot Wheel cars at school.
• 7:13
  You know, it's kind of like a cornered market.
• 7:15
  Everybody's got lunch money and nobody's got toys.
• 7:17
  So you could sell these old crappy toys for good money.
• 7:20
  Middle school, the racket was another kid, his neighbor had a pallet of gum called Fresh-Lam gum.
• 7:28
  It was from the Middle East.
• 7:29
  I don't even know what country; maybe Lebanon?
• 7:31
  You couldn't get it elsewhere.
• 7:32
  And so he would sell it to us by the box and then we would go and sell it in class.
• 7:36
  So this, kind of entrepreneurial bent I've always had from a very young age and it's been a drive of mine.
• 7:42
  It's, it's very satisfying.
• 7:43
  The interesting thing is I sold my business.
• 7:46
  Gina and I sold the business in 2019.
• 7:48
  It did well, you know, like it was the kind of money you can retire on.
• 7:51
  And I just figured I was going to ride off into the sunset.
• 7:54
  And it's like that itch just doesn't go away.
• 7:57
  So I'm doing it again.
• 7:59
  I mean, I'm putting out a new book.
• 8:00
  I'm into business with a friend that's building an EQ business.
• 8:04
  It's like, I can't;
• 8:05
  I can't shake it.
• 8:06
  But I will say for those, especially students that are maybe semi-entrepreneurial, maybe it's not like they can't fight it, but they're interested in it?
• 8:15
  I graduated in 2003, so I'm 20 years out of the program now.
• 8:19
  And I've seen my colleagues who maybe weren't fully entrepreneurial like I was when we were in our twenties, take that route and be quite successful at it.
• 8:28
  It's more of kind of a learned approach.
• 8:30
  So, if someone did want to do that, what would you suggest to them or recommend to them?
• 8:35
  You know, if they have that semi-entrepreneurial itch.
• 8:40
  I think it's about being exposed to the right people.
• 8:44
  That definitely plays a role.
• 8:46
  For me, I've learned a lot from different people along the way.
• 8:48
  I got into book writing because of another CSPP alumni who was in Gene's cohort and his name's Mark Munchnick.
• 8:55
  This is like right after we launched our business a year later, 2004.
• 8:58
  We meet with a lot of people, have coffee with people in the community and he's like, "I'm writing a book with Ken Blanchard, who's a really well-known
• 9:04
  author. He's sold millions of
• 9:06
  books. I need help doing an assessment." So we ended up developing the assessment for the
• 9:10
  book. And I learned from him along the
• 9:11
  way. It's like, look, if you want to build this kind of consulting business and then you really want to be a thought leader,
• 9:16
  right? Because then people want your
• 9:18
  And the great way to be a thought leader is to have a book, have a bestselling book.
• 9:22
  And so I saw him doing that and I literally started writing.
• 9:25
  I had actually already started working on a book when I was in my fifth year of the program on organizational justice.
• 9:31
  I just wrote like a couple of chapters.
• 9:33
  Apparently I wasn't suffering enough.
• 9:34
  I felt like I needed more to do.
• 9:35
  I don't know.
• 9:36
  uh Yeah.
• 9:37
  of dissertation and internship.
• 9:40
  Wasn't sleeping a lot.
• 9:41
  I was not very well-behaved.
• 9:42
  On the last day of my clinical internship, we did kind of like the share group where everyone gives you feedback.
• 9:49
  I got some very negative feedback on my patients and stuff like that because I was spread way too thin.
• 9:55
  I was justified.
• 9:56
  I accepted it humbly.
• 9:57
  But anyway, people like that, when you bump into them, you can learn a lot from them.
• 10:01
  And so, those
• 10:03
  interactions with Mark were the spark for something that really drove my career.
• 10:07
  So I guess my advice would be to seek exposure.
• 10:10
  had lunch with a lot of different people, a lot of different people who were out in the field who were consultants, or maybe they developed assessments or just something to try
• 10:18
  to learn from them.
• 10:18
  And I think that's a good strategy.
• 10:21
  Lots of relationship-building, sounds like.
• 10:24
  And, and, and just trying to find a way to bump into people.
• 10:27
  It's like, you can learn something online, but it's really different sitting down with someone face to face and picking their brain.
• 10:33
  Let's get into you writing these books because you've written many, many books on emotional intelligence.
• 10:42
  This new book, "The New Emotional Intelligence," what will readers get that's different?
• 10:47
  What will they learn or gain by this book as opposed to the previous books or other books on emotional intelligence?
• 10:55
  I wrote a book in 2009 that I'm most known for that's sold, you know, I think 4 million copies.
• 11:01
  It's an evergreen bestseller; continues to hit the bestseller list, which is awesome.
• 11:05
  You know, that's like 16 years later.
• 11:07
  That's, that's amazing.
• 11:09
  But at the same time, the book has become outdated, right?
• 11:12
  The world is changing drastically.
• 11:14
  Technology is changing the nature of work and how we interact with people.
• 11:17
  And I just felt like it needed a fresh take.
• 11:20
  It needed a fresh touch.
• 11:22
  I really liked the approach to that book.
• 11:24
  It's strategies-focused.
• 11:25
  There's a shorter, maybe 20% of the book that teaches you what emotional intelligence is and why it's important.
• 11:31
  And the bulk of the book is how you can go about improving your EQ.
• 11:35
  So I use that same format with my new book and I have 60 new strategies, which reflect what I've learned in the ensuing 16 years.
• 11:43
  There's been a lot of developments in psychology and neuroscience.
• 11:46
  Brain imaging is so much more advanced than it was in 2009.
• 11:48
  And there's just some really interesting anecdotes and strategies that have come out of that.
• 11:53
  So I've tried to turn that into ways people can apply it to increase their EQ.
• 11:57
  The other big thing is, that first emotional intelligence test I wrote in, 2002.
• 12:03
  We validated it and we launched it and people started using it and you're kind of not allowed to touch it.
• 12:08
  You can change the feedback report, but God forbid you touch the assessment items on something that someone's been using in a training program or something like that.
• 12:16
  So now I have an opportunity, having sold the business, I've got a clean slate and I've written an entirely new emotional intelligence test.
• 12:22
  And that was a really long time coming.
• 12:24
  I really liked the challenge of trying to stop people from faking good,
• 12:28
  which was the biggest criticism of, well, I mean, it's a criticism of any self-assessment, but it was the biggest shortcoming of my previous test.
• 12:36
  I think I've done a very good job of stopping people from faking good.
• 12:40
  This new test, I find when people try to fake good, it actually lowers their scores because what looks like the right answer isn't always the right answer, which is great
• 12:47
  because what I want people to do is let that go and just, it's a frequency test, right?
• 12:52
  How often do you do this?
• 12:54
  How often do you do that?
• 12:55
  Just answer honestly,
• 12:56
  Mm-hmm.
• 12:56
  an objective look at your behavior.
• 12:58
  The new book has a new test and it's my first one in a very long time and I'm really excited.
• 13:02
  Yeah, and it sounds like it was long in coming because it's been a while since the other test was developed.
• 13:09
  And so you can integrate all the learnings and new technologies that have been developed since the first test was developed.
• 13:18
  Yeah.
• 13:18
  There's some really interesting, online learning tools that come in the feedback report, you know, that are AI-driven.
• 13:23
  It analyzes your score profile and based on your unique score profile, it picks three strategies of the 60 from the book that will increase your EQ the most.
• 13:32
  So it gives you a starting point.
• 13:33
  There's a lot of interesting and really fun new bells and whistles that you can apply these days.
• 13:37
  Yeah, it's been a lot of fun to build.
• 13:38
  I know in this book you highlight four areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management, which oftentimes I hear them being called the
• 13:50
  "soft skills," even though I don't think they're soft; I think they're actually skills that you need to have in order to be effective, right, and successful.
• 13:59
  How do you utilize these skills in your own life?
• 14:02
  That's a great question.
• 14:04
  It's a lifelong process.
• 14:06
  I feel like the idea with emotional intelligence is, well, I try to follow the method in the book.
• 14:12
  And the method in the book is I'm trying to teach people to form new pathways.
• 14:17
  So target a very specific behavior.
• 14:20
  It can be really difficult to use at first.
• 14:21
  Like let's say you're a yeller.
• 14:24
  Learning to not yell and raise your voice when you're frustrated is really hard for people that yell.
• 14:31
  And you have to be very mindful and you have to sort of bite your tongue in the beginning.
• 14:34
  But as you learn and you start to use an alternate behavior, you're basically kind of killing off that old pathway and your brain's forming a new one.
• 14:42
  And so, you know, you end up forming a habit; and you end up doing it without thinking about it and catching yourself.
• 14:48
  "Wow.
• 14:49
  Normally I would have had to,
• 14:50
  you know, really bite my tongue, not to yell." That's the process that I follow in my own life is I try to make things habitual and try to force myself to do something new until I
• 14:58
  catch myself doing it without thinking about it.
• 15:00
  Sometimes people will say, you know, the book hits you at a lot of levels.
• 15:04
  So there's some stuff that's more advanced and there's some stuff that's more sort of rudimentary and a good reminder.
• 15:10
  I have
• 15:11
  No problem with good reminders.
• 15:12
  I've been writing about this stuff forever and I'm constantly typing at the keyboard going, man, I really should do this more.
• 15:17
  You know, this is, this is good advice that I guess I'm giving myself.
• 15:21
  You know, we need those reminders.
• 15:22
  We all know that, you know, things kind of regress, and then you work on them and get them back to where you have improved that skill, that habit, etc.
• 15:33
  The way I see it is I just feel like there's more barriers to it.
• 15:36
  Our brains are wired to have face-to-face interaction with people.
• 15:41
  They haven't evolved much since the telephone came out.
• 15:45
  And so we're constantly developing technology that creates this buffer between people, right?
• 15:49
  You think of how much of your communication at work now is happening in Microsoft Teams or a text message.
• 15:54
  You're not seeing how people react to what you're saying.
• 15:57
  So I feel like these kids that were raised on the tech, they're just not even aware of this stuff and how much it matters.
• 16:04
  And they have to learn the importance of face-to-face interaction and try to develop these skills.
• 16:09
  So they're at a little bit of a deficit.
• 16:11
  They have a little bit of a handicap there.
• 16:13
  My kid is 16 too.
• 16:14
  And he grew up in a nicer neighborhood than I grew up in.
• 16:17
  I don't know if that's part of it too, but I do feel like they're far less mature than we were at their age.
• 16:23
  And I wonder if.
• 16:24
  like independent, like out there and just doing stuff on their own.
• 16:29
  And I don't know what that is.
• 16:34
  I know it's like, couldn't wait.
• 16:36
  It's like, let me get my driver's permit.
• 16:39
  Let me get my wheels.
• 16:40
  My son is, is, is getting closer to getting his license and we're driving the other day and he goes, "Well, why do I need to learn to drive when a car is just going to drive for
• 16:49
  me?" I'm like, are you kidding me?
• 16:52
  Like, do you want to, what's going to happen when that car breaks down?
• 16:55
  Do you want to be able to drive away?
• 16:56
  Like, do you want to be independent?
• 17:03
  Yeah.
• 17:03
  And I also said, "Do you think you're going to, do you think you're going to be able to afford a car with self-driving?
• 17:07
  Cause mom's old car that we're giving you, isn't doing any self-driving and there isn't one coming."
• 17:10
  Well, If the grid goes down, you're going to have to drive a car manually.
• 17:11
  Okay, last question.
• 17:15
  I know that you've learned a lot, you have read a lot on emotional intelligence.
• 17:21
  But really, what I want to find out from you is,
• 17:24
  what are the lessons and the gems that you have learned along the way as you've been doing your journey in terms of your life?
• 17:33
  I'll tell you a few that then made it into the book.
• 17:36
  One I really like is something that I actually first heard about, it was in my final clinical internship.
• 17:43
  It was at a community clinic in East County.
• 17:45
  We did a lot of domestic violence and anger management work and we taught people the concept of you spot it, you got it.
• 17:51
  So the idea is, people do annoying things all day long, yet certain things get our goat.
• 17:56
  right?
• 17:57
  And they really, they really annoy us.
• 17:59
  And that's because they reveal something about you that is important.
• 18:03
  It could be something you're not aware of.
• 18:05
  It could be something that is your own vulnerability, something you know you need to work on.
• 18:10
  That is a powerful self-awareness exercise.
• 18:13
  And I'm always trying to play you spot it, you got it and wondering why something gets my goat.
• 18:18
  Interestingly enough, I never wrote about that concept in a book.
• 18:22
  So it made it into this book for the first time.
• 18:25
  I have had a lot of time while I was writing this book, you know, I'm not running a business.
• 18:29
  So I had a lot of time to think and it's, and I'm thinking, "How come I've never put this in a book before?
• 18:34
  I'm going to do that." So that's, that's a big one for me.
• 18:37
  Another one is, being willing to lose the battle to win the war.
• 18:42
  A lot of times we want to dig our heels in and prove that we're right and sort of fight this fight in the moment, but it erodes the overall quality of the relationship.
• 18:51
  So I'm always looking for opportunities to do that.
• 18:54
  And another thing, and this is, this is something that's addressed in the book, is learning to trust your intuition about other people.
• 19:01
  So what your feeling tells you about what's going on with someone else.
• 19:05
  There's a study I share in the book.
• 19:06
  It was conducted at the University of the Netherlands.
• 19:08
  And what they did is they took people that, their eyes worked perfectly, their optic nerves worked perfectly.
• 19:13
  They were blind because they had lesions in their visual cortex.
• 19:17
  And what they did is they put these people in front of computer monitors and they flashed images of people demonstrating strong emotions.
• 19:24
  And when you do that with someone with sight, you can't help but mimic the emotional state of what's on the screen because of mirror neurons in your brain.
• 19:31
  So if someone's really angry, you might just furrow your brow just a little bit.
• 19:34
  If they're really happy, you might crack a little smile.
• 19:36
  So these people that couldn't see what was on the screen were having the same reactions as people with sight.
• 19:41
  And these researchers, it just really blew their mind.
• 19:44
  They couldn't make sense of it.
• 19:45
  And they would ask them, "What's going on there?
• 19:47
  Why did you crack a smile?
• 19:48
  Did you see something?" "No, dude, I'm blind.
• 19:50
  I didn't see anything.
• 19:51
  It was just a hunch.
• 19:52
  I don't know.
• 19:52
  I just felt the urge to do it."
• 19:54
  So they did further analysis of the MRIs on these folks.
• 19:57
  And what they found is basically a pathway that people weren't previously aware of.
• 20:02
  And that is the optic nerve was actually sending signals to their limbic system on the way to the visual cortex.
• 20:09
  So these people were having an emotional reaction to what their eyes were seeing, even though their brain wasn't yet aware of it.
• 20:15
  Their visual cortex hadn't even processed the information.
• 20:18
  And the way this is applied in real life is,
• 20:20
  think about how many times you've walked into a room full of people and you can absolutely feel something is going on, but you don't know what it is.
• 20:27
  You haven't made sense of it.
• 20:28
  You're not necessarily even processing what you're feeling.
• 20:30
  Sometimes I think our brains are actually, the way our brains are wired, we get what feels like intuition because we're processing information emotionally.
• 20:39
  And I think that that's a really interesting strategy that you can apply to learn to trust that intuition.
• 20:44
  Those are great lessons for people to take and use for themselves.
• 20:50
  I would like to thank you, Travis, for coming on the podcast today.
• 20:55
  You know, I think our listeners learned a lot from you.
• 20:59
  I hope you will check out his book, The New Emotional Intelligence.
• 21:03
  And I just want to thank everyone for being here today.
• 21:07
  Remember, wellness is a journey, not a destination.
• 21:11
  I hope you take good care of yourself and we'll see you next time.