The EQ Big Five: #1 - Emotional Self-Awareness
We start the new year with a five-part series on Emotional Intelligence. To be specific, the "Big Five" skills of Emotional Intelligence with none other than our resident expert, Sara Best! EQ is one of the must-have skill sets for any manager and/or leader to be effective in today's workplace.
Links and Resources from the Episode:
Click here for more information on EQi 2.0® & EQ360®
Click here for a list of "feeling" words from retired educator Tom Drummond
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
“The EQ Big Five: #1 - Emotional Self Awareness”
Original Publish Date: 1/9/2024.
Hosts: John Broer and Sara Best
John Broer: Well, I certainly hope all of our friends out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation are having a wonderful start to 2024. A brand new year, a brand new season of the Bosshole Chronicles, and it's so good to have you with us. This week we're actually going to be starting a five-part a series on the big five skills of emotional intelligence. Many of you already know that my wonderful friend and amazing business partner, Sara Best, who is expert in so many different things, is actually a certified consultant in the field of emotional intelligence, and over the years, I have come to learn so much from her about this practice area and I thought it would be really beneficial for her to share with the audience what are the big five and I've heard that term, she's used that term before and the big five represents what some would consider to be the five most critical skills of emotional intelligence. Now, there are many different skills of emotional intelligence, but we want to dedicate the next few weeks to talking about these five, and Sara is going to be walking us through this. So this is a great series, wonderful for any managers that are currently managers or people that are thinking about getting into management. This is an essential skill set that you need. Let's jump in.
The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.
JB: Hi, Sara, how's it going?
Sara Best: Hey John, it's going real good. Happy 2024.
JB: I know it's amazing. I can't believe it's here already and we're off to such a fast start. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool and I'm thrilled that we can be back in the studio together talking about cool Bosshole prevention stuff and this is really going to kick off a very special series and I'm so glad that our audience is going to get to hear from our very own expert on emotional intelligence at Real Good Ventures, Sara Best. But, Sara, I've heard you talk about the big five skills of emotional intelligence and I thought this would make a great series and this is going to be the first part of that series. But can you tell us just a little bit more about what are the big five and where are we going to start?
SB: I'm happy to do that, John, and if I just step back a little bit further, I would offer that. The concepts that we're going to talk about in our short series here are things certainly I've been passionate and trying to master for the last 23 years, because I was certified in emotional intelligence in the year 2000. And what I saw that was so valuable about EQ is that number one, we all have it. We all have emotional intelligence. We naturally develop these capacities as we mature and grow and we can at any point in time determine which skills and abilities would assist us most in our current chapter. So I love the fact that they're almost like dials. We all have the dials. You need to know which ones to turn when, and maybe you need to get a little more conversant with one or two of the dials.
They're kind of foreign to you but, we have them, so I like to just offer this word of encouragement. It's not like we're talking about anything new under the sun, and I want to just assure our listeners you have these capacities. You just need to more effectively amplify them and intentionally utilize them.
JB: I was going to say I know when to deploy them or know when to turn up those dials or turn the dials up or turn the dials down. And while we're going to be talking about the big five, there are actually far more skills for emotional intelligence. How many are there actually? Just let me know what you think.
SB: Well, in the model that we use at Real Good Ventures, john, Which is the Emotional Quotient Inventory, or EQ-i, there are 15 competencies in emotional intelligence and I actually was certified in the use of this model and this assessment. It was the first reliable and valid emotional intelligence assessment in the book of measure, so I think that's noteworthy. We've been talking about EQ since 95, for sure.
Daniel Goleman's book put Emotional Intelligence on the map, and other great contributors built upon his model, tweaked and developed their own. This particular model, originally designed by an Israeli psychologist born in America and collaborated with, is owned by MHS or Multi-Health Strategies. There are 15 competencies and we've determined through our work and our research that these five, if we're going to have to talk about EQ or we'd like to talk about it, these are the five that would really help us get some traction in creating more fulfillment, more success, more stability in our work life and even in our personal life.
JB: All right, cool, cool. So what are the big five? And we're going to do one at a time. We have a five-part series. So what are the big five and which one are we going to start with?
SB: The big five. John, Are you ready?
JB: I'm ready.
SB: Starting in reverse order, number five insignificance impulse control.
JB: Okay.
SB: Number four assertiveness. Number three self-regard. Number two, most important of the big five, empathy.
JB: All right.
SB: And number one and this shouldn't surprise our listeners, because we talk about how self-awareness is the cornerstone of leadership, development and strong leadership. It's emotional self-awareness. That's number one.
JB: Okay, and that's where we're going to start, right.
SB: Yeah.
JB: All right, so take us through it, Sara. Okay, emotional self-awareness. And, by the way, just so everybody knows, just because we measure everything at Real Good Ventures, it is possible to measure these and get objective data around them. So, emotional self-awareness, take it away.
SB: Emotional self-awareness is in fact your ability, John, to understand what you feel and why you feel that way all the time.
JB: Okay.
SB: So, simply said, it's the capacity to identify the depth and breadth of emotions you are experiencing and to even take it a step further to understand why you feel that way. So knowing there's emotion at play all the time. We think and feel almost simultaneously, so we have a feeling, oftentimes as a result of a thought. Those processes, as they play out in our brain, produce emotion and consequential behavior. So just understanding that emotion and what's behind it can be game-changing. That's why it's the cornerstone. We all have varying degrees of emotional self-awareness. Interestingly, I've always perceived myself to be someone who's highly emotionally self-aware and assessments have indicated as such, and of course they're self-assessments. So it's my perception of me. But there's when you're high in emotional self-awareness. It means you do know how you feel. But it can become a bit of a challenge for us or a liability, in that we could be over guided by the emotion. So there's also an element here in self-awareness that allows us to work toward managing the emotion not being driven by it.
So I would say let's think about each of these big five in terms of if you have a lot of it, if you're right down the middle in your confidence or ability in that skill, or if you have a low amount.
JB: Okay.
SB: So I think if you have a lot of it, you would be able to often say gosh. This is the feeling that I have and you know what I was thinking about this when preparing for our chat today, a feeling word vocabulary. I share different variations of something like this with all my clients because oftentimes we don't have a strong vocabulary for emotional words. In many of our experiences, you know, emotions are taboo. We've been trained that they're not to be expressed or identified in the workplace, for example. But we're having them and we need to move beyond just mad, sad, angry and glad.
JB: Okay.
SB: Like as an example you know I'm happy, okay, I get that. How about hopeful as a distinguished element of happy? I feel loved, I feel satisfied, I feel grateful or thankful. Those all fall in the category of a positive emotion we call happy. Okay, mad you know, I have a little experience with this one.
Are you mad, are you impatient? Are you frustrated? Are you defensive? Are you feeling offended or jaded? Are you feeling scorned? I mean there's, there's just so much more underneath these very commonplace notions. I'll do one more. Scared, so afraid. Yeah, I feel afraid, I feel lost, I feel uncertain or hesitant. So the the idea here is that the stronger our vocabulary, the more, the more we know and can describe what we feel, then we can manage those uniquely. And you talk about. It's a feeling vocabulary, correct?
JB: Yeah, okay, so just broadening that and just really understanding because there's so many nuances to each one of those just really understanding what that is. And, if I may, I- this happened just the other day, you know, and I've talked about this before but I was driving and something was really bothering me and it was one of those things where, you know, you just feel a little off and I, I wasn't pissed, but I was angered by something. But I could, I I couldn't name it. I literally I couldn't name it. Yeah, I literally had to pull over and just go back through just the last few hours, you know, of the day to figure out what really activated that. And I was able to figure it out. It was like, oh okay, now I, now I, I don't even is that sort of in the realm of emotional self-awareness.
SB: I mean, I couldn't, I knew it was affecting me, but I really needed to stop to go bigger, go back and figure out what was the thing that activated that 100% and, and, first of all, your willingness to do that indicates that you have emotional intelligence, that you knew, driving your car, that if you didn't stop and get to the bottom of the, you know the origin of that frustration or that yuck. You were feeling that it would probably disrupt your effectiveness.
Oh, for sure yeah and your well-being, so I love that. And so, if I may ask, I was gonna ask, did I do? Was it my fault? Did?
JB: I do something.
SB: It was that comment I made about your graphic, wasn't it?
JB: No, no, no, not at all. I know it was, that's funny. No, it was, it was, and actually it was something kind of innocuous, it was just. It just kind of it threw me off and I just needed to go back and sort of resolve it. Just in my mind it wasn't a big thing, but but I but I think what you just said is really profound. It absolutely clouded the way I was looking at that present moment in my day, wherever I was going, and the conversations that were coming up, and I needed to clear that out. I needed to get rid of that clutter.
SB: Let's just agree that your willingness to do that created a management of that emotion, and my guess is, John, that you, as you processed it, you changed your thought about what happened.
Oh for sure, yep, yep and the good news is we all kind of do this the same way. Something happens, we tell ourselves something about it and we have a feeling and an emotion in response. Generally they're negative thoughts that create very negative emotions and if we can just appreciate that, they're deeply, you know, ingrained grooves in our brain because we've been conditioned and we spent a lot of time thinking that way. Our brains are wired for negativity. But emotional self-awareness and being willing to explore the depth and breadth of you know what you could be feeling. Let's give it a name. Let's give it a specific name.
JB: Okay get.
SB: That clarity gives you an opportunity then to use other tools and methodologies. For example, we always talk about it's basically cognitive behavioral therapy, but what it is is challenging your beliefs. Is that really true? What happened and what you heard that person say? Is it really really true? Is there something else that could be going on? And that exercise of changing or adjusting the way you think about it is, in fact, the access to well-being in peace and serenity and letting go or processing through negative emotion right.
So that's good if I have mid-range ability with emotional self-awareness, I think it just simply means that I'm hit or miss, like there are some, maybe some areas of motion that I'm really comfortable digging deeper and they're not. They're not uncomfortable for me, the mid-range person. John just simply doesn't do this consistently. Maybe, they have some success. Maybe they have a good resource around them, a colleague or a trusted partner or a family member, a loved one, who can challenge their thoughts and beliefs to the point where they begin to do it themselves, quite naturally.
And I would say, if you have low emotional self-awareness and we certainly coached a lot of executives over the years this is common. The higher you go in an organization, when we find people that perform very effectively, they get results, they move quickly, they're they've they've won that position and that influence because they're more focused on the task, sure, and how they do the task, for example, that's a whole nother conversation. But for those individuals, I found it was very common that they would have low emotional self-awareness and you know, when discussion happened, it would be common to hear well, I really don't, you know, that's not important, it doesn't matter how I feel and it's that we get this job done or I'm right that I make this happen, but the reality is, this is the whole reason we have our podcast.
It does matter because if you feel a certain way, everybody knows it.
JB: Yeah, why did?
SB: They know it because it's in your voice tone, it's in your body language, it's on your face. So you may be saying one thing, but what you're communicating to others is a hundred percent different.
JB: Yeah, no, I think of some of the meetings we've been in with some clients, some executives, and you could just look at this person's face. It's like, oh, he's in a bad or she's in a bad place right now and and we need it, we can't. This will not move forward. Actually, I've seen Sara, I've seen you do this and I think it's masterful. Where you know it's like hold on everybody, we, we are not on the same page or this individual, where are you right now? Because this does not seem to be sitting well with you, because we can't move forward if we can't sort of resolve this, and that takes guts and I've seen all kinds of responses. But that's a really critical element around team dynamics and you're right, I guess. I mean, could we say that people that drift into the Bosshole Zone it's not unusual, that maybe they suffer from very low emotional self-awareness. It's not that they can't be there, they just haven't accessed it yet.
SB: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. The cost of low emotional self-awareness at that level of leadership could be that it's kind of a straight shot to the Bosshole Zone if, in fact, you are unaware of or do not reverence the emotions that you're feeling, because they're gonna happen. I mean, we're human beings. We will get frustrated, ticked off, annoyed, agitated, afraid, scared. But without the attention to that emotion and in a lot of cases we might stuff it down or walk right past it or think we're walking right past it it will emerge that energy and those emotions will emerge in some way, and generally it's not positive.
It could be a blow up at somebody. I lost it. Well, sure you did, because you haven't said what you needed to say for the past eight meetings.
JB: I'm not sure if that's a really good example, but no, I think it's a great example, and I know one of the things that you always say and this will be woven into this series is say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it mean.
SB: Well, that's assertiveness, that's on our list.
JB: So, Sara, if for somebody listening right now that is questioning whether or not they have a strong degree of emotional self-awareness, a high, moderate or low amount of emotional self-awareness, what could somebody do to figure that out, or what are some tools that are available to them?
SB: Well, in simple form I'd say get a feeling. Vocabulary list John, let's make sure we put one in the show notes.
JB: Okay.
SB: I don't subscribe to any one particular style. If you Googled feeling word vocabulary, you'd pull up gosh thousands of hits. So we'll put one in the show notes but, use that as a guide.
Simple examples. So if you're in a meeting and we all are in meetings let's say you have a weekly tactical meeting, or it's your leadership team meeting, or it's a meeting that you don't enjoy going to, at least three times during that meeting, stop and write down how you feel. So when an exchange is happening, when people are dialoguing or people are asking you questions, at least three times during that meeting, stop, look at your feeling word list and find the word that describes how you feel in that moment. Later on you can go back and do the why.
So what was happening and why did I feel that way? And we'll get into this, maybe, John, in another session. But once you establish the why, then you gotta challenge the why, right, right.
Or the thoughts I had. So that's what I would say right out of the chute, and recognizing our ability to tap into positive emotions. Negative emotions are pretty overpowering and they can be all consuming. They can be long-lasting if they're not managed. And I'm not saying don't feel the feelings, but sometimes a quick hack to move away from very negative or what you and I like to call below the line thinking and acting and emotion like guilt and fear and shame, that kind of stuff it's all below the line would be to choose something you're grateful for. So focus on gratitude and appreciation and that is a direct access to your physical body responds in kind. So when there's negative emotion, it's fight or flight and adrenaline and all the things that happen under stress response, and when it's gratitude and appreciation and peace and joy, that's when the dopamine and the things we need come naturally and work to balance out that stress response.
JB: Makes total sense, and I know you said we talk about above the line and below the line, just even that perspective on things am I above the line or below the line, and what that represents I think that could be a helpful tool as well.
SB: Well, and as you say that, John, it reminds me that we need to say, as we wrap up here emotions are okay, they're good.
They're omnipresent. They're there. If we don't acknowledge them, they have much more power over us and they're not bad. So for everybody who learned when you were a kid that it's not okay, you want, you want to feel bad. I'll give you something to feel bad about. Like you know, suck it up, Buttercup. It's really okay to feel emotion, and emotion is data. It's powerful information that if we disregard it, we'll come back to haunt us in a not so good way.
JB: Yeah, yeah. And that's pretty consistent, sarah, with the theme that we've heard over the last couple of years of moving away from that command and control and trust and autonomy within command and control and sort of that philosophy. Yeah, I sort of envision that suppressing. You know, you push those emotions down and you show up and you work hard and it doesn't matter what you feel, it doesn't matter. And I think that gives that's a lot of freedom right there to be able to say it is, if I'm in a leadership role, absolutely I'm going to own these emotions, I'm going to have my feeling word list. I love that.
SB: You know, over the holidays my family took some time to binge Suits on Netflix and you know, sorry if that offends anyone in the listening audience. It's quite an entertaining show.
JB: It's entertaining. It's a good show, yeah.
SB: Yeah, the character in the show we could probably do a conversation about, have a conversation about each of the characters, but Lewis Litt, the attorney who has really no consistent application of any of these skills and abilities we're going to talk about. You know what? What he doesn't do is acknowledge in the moment what's really driving his behavior, and in some cases it's jealousy, uncertainty. He's doubting himself or fearful that someone else is doubting him.
JB: Right.
SB: And these are normal things, you know, not to the scale that they happen on that show, but or maybe they are. But that's the kind of stuff that if you're a leader you have to really tune into what's behind the scenes all the time.
For you it goes back a long way and it doesn't make it bad, but it's going to influence and skew your perspective on what choices you make next. So it's nothing more than important information, and the more you attend to it, the more comfortable you become attending to it and the easier it is for your brain to switch gears from a negative emotion to a positive emotion.
JB: Right, oh, that's great, that is great, okay. Well, I think we're off to a good start with number one of the big five skills of emotional intelligence. Sara thanks so much for this, and everybody check the show notes and be sure to tune in next week when we will talk about empathy, which was number two, right?
SB: Yeah.
JB: All right, thanks, sarah.
SB: You bet John, See you next time.
JB: We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bosshole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechroniclescom. Once again, mystory@thebossholechroniclescom, we'll see you again soon.