The EQ Big Five: #5 - Impulse Control
We have arrived at the final installment of our series on The Big Five Skills of Emotional Intelligence! This is like a crash course in EQ for managers and supervisors to help them stay out of The Bosshole® Zone.
Links and Resources from the Episode:
Click here for more information on EQi 2.0® & EQ360®
Walter Mischel - The Marshmallow Test
The Marshmallow Test
-
-
The Bosshole® Chronicles
“The EQ Big Five: #5 - Impulse Control”
Original Publish Date: 2/6/2024.
Hosts: John Broer and Sara Best
Sara Best: Hey, there we're back. This is the fifth and final installment in our series, the Big Five Skills of EQ. Today we're talking about impulse control, which is something I'm pretty familiar with in terms of something I'm trying to master myself. So good conversation ahead. I do feel it's kind of important to note too. John recently attended a podcast, which is a conference for podcasts and people doing podcasts. I am so excited to announce that we're in the top 10% of podcasts globally, based on the cool metrics that are required, so it's a big thank you first to you, our listeners, and to all of our subject matter experts who've helped us circulate this idea that no one was born to be a bosshole. We can find ways to not live in the bosshole zone, and we're just excited to explore finally here the last installment impulse control. So let's dig in.
John Broer: 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. Well, we are back for the final installment of the five skills, the big five skills of emotional intelligence. Sara, I think this has been a great series and our listeners would agree, just judging from the downloads. Thanks for taking us through this. Where are we going to go today?
SB: Well, today, John, we are talking about impulse control, which certainly has connection to all four of the other big five skills. And I have to say what's been interesting from my experience as we've been creating these episodes, there's been real front and center examples for me in my life of why these things are important and how to practice these skills and how to grow in our ability rather humbling. But the good news is we can. We can get better, we can improve our capacity, for example, in this case, to hit the pause button. That's what we mean by impulse control. Can I share a definition? Absolutely?
Impulse control technically is the ability to resist or delay an impulse, drive or temptation to act. And another way I like to think of it is, you know, the ability to hit the pause button before we speak, drink, eat, buy, whatever it might be. It's that space between a stimulus and response. I found the greatest quote, John, from Victor Frankel. Actually, between the stimulus and response there is a space and in that space lies the power to choose, and our choices really do create the freedom and growth. So the power to choose is that thing that becomes available to us when we don't just do and we don't just act or speak or move and respond or react.
So it's significant. It is definitely the causation and a link to probably the top five killers of both men and women today. So we know that impulse control or poor impulse control lends itself to poor health conditions. And if we were to look at, you know, the things that influence men and women's health we're not even talking about kids at this point but men and women's health. It is related to our ability to wait.
JB: Hit the pause button and again, and we talked about this in a few of the previous episodes of the Big Five, and that is the word choice that's so critical, I think, to anybody. Listening is in that space is a choice, so I don't make that choice very well sometimes.
SB: I don't know what you're talking about, John.
JB: Yeah, this impulse control thing has fascinated me ever since we started working together and I've been learning more about emotional intelligence. That one just sort of leapt out at me.
SB: Well, and let's just distinguish too. There are behavioral correlations, like motivating drives can can kind of predispose us to good or poor impulse control. For example, we have the patience factor. So on the high side, you know, in our world, in predictive index, high degrees of patients lend themselves to steadiness, calm, seeking, understanding, waiting to act. Low degrees of patients, which I really don't know anything about, that Is is about moving quickly, responding, initiating, even being competitive and proactive. So people that have lower patients may in fact be more inclined to have challenge with impulse control.
I'm not, you know, an expert here, but these are some things that we've deduced. The formality, the de-factor, when there's a need for order and structure and precision and accuracy and rules and and just you know to be precise, mm-hmm, there's, there's a natural, I think, a natural propensity to to be focused on the steps and the details, whereas the opposite of the de-factor, the low version of the de-factor, is spontaneous, free-flowing, moving, you know, going with the energy. I certainly can Relate to that in the work we do or in my attempts to be a professional you know that's something I continuously have to manage is the desire to go five million different places in the next ten minutes right, right and again for our new listeners, because we're getting new listeners all the time.
JB: Sara's referencing some of the science we use, the analytics we use through the predictive index, and if you want to know your reference profile, you can go into the show notes. There's a link in there and we will send you your description of your reference profile. But it will talk about propensity to be more proactive or impulsive, possibly, versus responsive and more methodical. So I just wanted to, as a side note, just give people some context there.
SB: Yeah, I think the other part of that, John, is the decision-making style. Like some people are naturally objective and logical and it's got to make sense and it's got to stack up, and other people are very intuitive, subjective and emotional. And that emotion, when it's aligned just below the surface, I I do think creates a an added challenge of managing such powerful energy, which comes from emotion.
I would like to say too, it's important to know your natural behavioral drives it. We, you know, we use an emotional intelligence assessment. There are many out there, but if you're gonna look at your emotional intelligence skills, you can't do it in a vacuum, right?
I think it's more beneficial if you at first at least understand your natural propensity, your natural wiring, and then map those things over to your skills and abilities and emotional intelligence. So I think that's good and I'm glad we're reminding people that they can get a sense of that if they'd like to. Sure, the other thing we want to offer up here is that Impulse control can have other causation and other, you know, mitigating factors. There are other reasons why people can be challenged with impulse control.
Mm-hmm and there are things like neurodivergence, so people that have attention deficit disorder or dyslexia or they're on the spectrum, you know there's there's really a myriad number of ways that those kind of challenges can impact our ability to hit the pause button. So we just want to acknowledge that there's, you know, tourette, brain injury and other mental health considerations that make it easier for people to make rash decisions or act without forethought or even even become destructive in some cases. So I just want to acknowledge that we're not talking about, you know, a fix all for anybody with impulse control. That really what we're talking about.
Right is skill that we each have to manage outside of some of these other challenges.
JB: So to clarify that for you and I, who are naturally highly proactive, low in patience, work at a fast pace. This is a skill that we can. We can choose to employ and and work to dial down that high level of impulse control. But for those in in the neurodivergent group that that's a different thing. Their capacity to just sort of pull that lever or use that skill is just influenced more by their circumstances around neurodiversity.
SB: I think it could be. I think it makes it could potentially make impulse control challenges, yeah, more more intense. Actually, John, this might be a good time to introduce one of our upcoming guests, Nancy Disbro. She's actually gonna be our next podcast subject matter expert. She specializes in neurodivergence in the workplace and I'm actually getting to know Nancy quite well and and deepening my understanding of you know how some of these common challenges are precipitated by diagnoses that maybe are undetected, but they don't have to be, you know, a life sentence of challenging and frustration. There's actually a lot of things, a lot of tools, a lot of techniques we can deploy.
To address those things. So she's gonna talk with us about that in our next episode. Cool oh.
When we do training and we're teaching organizations and people about these skills, or just talking about emotional intelligence, we often reference the marshmallow test, which, if anyone in our listening audience has ever taken a psychology class, you might remember learning about this. In 1972, Stanford professor Walter Michelle did this marshmallow experiment. In this study he took four year olds and placed them in a room and put a marshmallow in front of them and said "hey, here's a marshmallow If you wait for me to come back because I have to go somewhere for a few minutes, but if you wait until I come back and this marshmallow is still here, I'll give you another one and you can have two marshmallows. So this study has been replicated millions of times, I'd have to say and the findings were pretty significant in that Walter Michelle followed the students that he studied. So there were kids who could wait. They had no problem. They distracted themselves. They didn't really have any challenge or stress in waiting. There are some that totally struggled. They smelled their marshmallow licking the marshmallow., trying not to eat it like trying not to break the rules, and so I do think that we should put a link to one of the more current versions of the marshmallow test study.
JB: I'll do that yeah.
SB: Yeah, because I think our listeners would appreciate that. But as they follow these kids for 20 years post study, they had higher grades, they were academically more solid in their performance, they had healthy relationships, they were earning more money, their health overall was better. So in all the factors that probably measure success, you know, for us in the world today, these kids outperformed the children who couldn't wait for that second marshmallow.
So a lot has come out of that awareness. One is that we can learn how to wait. We can learn how to hit the pause button. There are techniques. We are going to talk about a few of those today. It's a muscle, it's a groove in the brain that we have to redesign and if we haven't said this so far, I think this is the most exciting news of all about emotional intelligence. Our brain is so flexible and neuroplasticity.
There's a lot of neuroplasticity. The brain can rewire and rework itself in remarkable ways. So, even though we have a propensity and a lifetime of poor impulse control, we have this deep groove in the brain that says go, you know, don't, don't think before you act, just do it because it feels good. We can actually create a new groove, a new pathway in the brain, because the connection between our thinking brain and our emotional brain and the work we do in there allows us to shift the train tracks, if you will create a whole new path. It just takes repetition and practice.
JB: I was just going to say. It also probably takes the mistakes and recognizing like wow, every time I sort of jump into that and don't hit the pause button, the outcome is usually disappointing. Maybe we're like really bad, you know through experience. Yes, but what I've always loved, Sara, about how you've presented the skills of emotional intelligence is that that they are skills and they can be learned and we just need to give people the methodology or the tools to understand how to build that muscle or develop these skills.
SB: Yeah, I love that part of it. I'd also contribute that awareness is at least half the battle. Becoming aware that this may be a challenge or you'd like to improve in this area sets a great foundation for instantaneous growth in that area.
So, John, people that have challenges or lower impulse control, they're overly talkative, they fire off, they have a short fuse they get hijacked by their emotions pretty easily. You just said a minute ago about you know, we learn from our mistakes, right? Oh boy, I learned from a big one in the last week and as I think back to this situation I was a part of, I know that I was hijacked by strong emotion. So there was no, there was no capitalizing on the pause between what somebody said and me taking time to notice what my thoughts were about it and what emotions I had.
So the end result was I started talking, and it's like I picked up the end of an invisible rope and started pulling. Okay. And I just kept going and the person who was speaking to me was like, but wait, that's not what I was saying, and I just kept going. And I'm just being honest, like it was pretty challenging.
JB: Was it an out of body experience going oh my gosh, I'm seeing myself doing all this. I'm kidding, of course, just about. I mean yeah.
SB: And you know, even later. It's like, was that really bad? Was it as bad as I thought it was? Yeah, it really was, because the impact on the other people in the room, and particularly the person who was trying to share his idea, was pretty devastating. They were a little shocked and and I don't mind being transparent about I'm practicing this stuff too. Like it is it is an everyday sort of deal, but here's what can be very helpful.
If you know, if we want to capitalize on the pause, we have to be better acquainted with emotions, we have to be aware of them, we have to welcome them into the conversation. We have to identify them and give them names and be willing to, in a non-judgmental way, be aware of that information.
JB: Which goes right back to episode one of this series on emotional self-awareness and your and your feeling word list. So please, please continue. I just want to make sure that people are making a connection to all five of these episodes.
SB: And as I reviewed the situation I just briefly described, I know now that what was dominating my drive to share my opinion was fear. It was fear and irrelevance and some other interesting words that I just didn't notice at the time. The other thing is there was no empathy. I had no access to empathy in that conversation because I stopped listening when, I picked up the end of the invisible rope.
So impulse control, emotional self-awareness, being able to stop and say, okay, we also know John I think we talked about this in the emotional self-awareness episode. Thoughts and feelings happen very quickly, almost simultaneously. When we experience a stimulus, there is a thought and a consequential emotion and reaction, but it's so fast and we can develop strength and endurance to make that a slower and longer process, and that's something certainly I work on all the time, because generally the thoughts that pop up first are the negative ones. They're automatic negative thoughts. They're from somewhere else, they're not really you. Then they create that potential hostile feeling or fear or worry, or the fight or flight gets activated.
So the pause is so very important when there's emotion present or when the stakes feel like they're high. This is gonna be more challenging if we look at it another way too. We have a society and a culture where feelings get covered over in any way, shape or form. We can find out how to do that. I just wanna feel better, I'm just gonna drink this or eat that or buy this. There's another thing we have to acknowledge about impulse control, and in my opinion it has to do with our discomfort with negative emotions or just discomfort.
in general, it's just easier to feel better. So I'm just gonna have this glass of wine, or I'm gonna go online and shop, or I'm gonna doom scroll for a while because I get to get out of my emotion.
JB: Doom scroll.
SB: Yeah.
JB: I've never heard that term. That's awesome. Sorry, not a good thing, but I've never heard. Good term. Go ahead, sorry.
SB: Well, this is a good time to refer to our previous guest and our good friend, Mark Ostach, who is actually a digital disconnection expert and so many other things. He's a poet, he's a warrior, but he's the one who identified this is addicting. It creates a sense of something that keeps us coming back. So impulse control is all up in there. It's all connected in there, and we need to be aware of our emotions. We need to take time to see what the thoughts are, because the other great tool we can use is the challenging of those thoughts. Is that really true? Could the opposite be true of that? Is that really true? And then I'd go a step further and say even if what I'm thinking is true, does that serve me or serve this situation right now?
JB: Right, right. Is that a battle I really wanna fight?
SB: Yes.
JB: Yeah, or take up yeah, yeah.
SB: As I think back to that scenario I shared, I'm like gosh, where were all these insights and wisdom that day? Cause I wish I could dial that one back.
JB: We all have that, though, sarah and one. First of all, thank you for sharing that, because we're in this. This is the work we do with our clients and the people that we advise and leadership development clients, and yet we're human.
SB: Yeah.
JB: We understand that we can fall victim to this too. It just happens, and it usually happens, as you said, in a completely unexpected way, and then we're in it, and then we have just we have jumped in it, I, and then I think about now you you mentioned our culture, our society. It's almost like a raw nerve out there where don't talk about politics, don't talk about religion, don't talk about global issues I mean, you could activate somebody or you could get activated, I think, for the. For me, it's like I have to really check in on myself of the things that somebody could say that could activate something in me. That is, I have a different perspective, but that's when I go back to hit the pause button and say, yeah, hold on a second. This person is genuinely coming at this from a different point of view. Yep.
I can't make them wrong just because I think it's different, but that is a hard choice to make sometimes. It really is yeah.
SB: It is, and it is a choice, as we outlined in the empathy episode. You know it is choosing to believe and and feel what the other person is experiencing as the truth for them. But impulse control is exactly the access. We need to have greater comprehension of that, to have at least access to a non-judgmental viewpoint, because if we're just responding in the moment to how we feel and those are old ideas- the beliefs that we have all that stuff.
it's old stuff, but how about increasing the quality of your response to people. Like I know for a long time I over responded to people that thought differently than I do. I felt very threatened, which actually was a drawback to my childhood. Like you know I had privy to a lot of conversations that were negative about things like that, so it was like fear. I didn't feel safe. Right.
But now that I can see that I'm more interested in the quality of the response I give to that situation and I'm no longer like, caught up in it, I can stand back from it and it creates the opportunity for emotional regulation. So we don't have emotional self-awareness. Impulse control is going to be challenging. Case in point, John. Do you ever find yourself you know you go to your computer to send this email, but then you quickly notice there's another email and you open it briefly to look at it and there's a link in the email like oh, I always wanted to learn about that. And then you open that link at least this happens for me. About 10 minutes later I've gone eight different places. Oh yeah.
JB: So that can happen.
SB: Or how about when sustained effort is required, like I have to finish a proposal, I'm working on the presentation of a concept, but I get antsy. And I know now that my propensity is to get up and walk to the kitchen and say I'll just get a cup of tea, or I'll just have a handful of pistachios, or I'm just going to go whatever, and to come back to the task at hand. I think the research I've read says it takes us at least 17 minutes to refocus and get back. So recognizing that just because there's discomfort doesn't mean you have to go do something else.
JB: Right.
SB: Because in that moment I felt stuck or uncertain or unsure. That was the discomfort I'm not sure what to do next. So I'm going to go distract myself.
JB: Yes, that makes total sense. So in other words, you're looking at impulse control in a again a very pragmatic way of how we can be distracted and diverted and how I know for me who in my impulse control is something I need to work on. But to your point, when I know I have to put a proposal together or it's work where I have to be at my desk on the computer, I will literally block out time you know whether it's a half an hour or an hour and again discipline myself to focus on that task. Otherwise, if I don't set that this is for me, if I don't set that time aside, if I don't make an appointment with that task, I'll get distracted and I'll go in 10 different directions. Totally get that, totally get that. And, by the way, I can still set that appointment and still go in 10 different directions.
And that's a hard but that's a hard discipline Now for some people. I admire those people who that's not a problem for them. They can close the door heads down and it's like, wow, how do you do that? I have no idea.
SB: Well, and to those people, they probably have that natural diligence and discipline. Yeah, let's just note for a minute, though in its extreme form, like incredibly high impulse, control can be equally challenging. If we have people who are so meticulous and so in control of what they're doing, they can be emotionally detached and even robotic. It just seems like you know they're not fully engaged and therefore yeah, like not comfortable taking a risk, so I'm just going to stay over here and not really do anything. Right.
So that's the other extreme of that. So, John, you know we have covered so much ground. What the question I'm sure people are asking is so what now? What? So if we know there's a challenge with impulse control, what can we do to better access that space between the stimulus and the response so we can actually choose to go?
JB: Hmm, what's really happening here?
SB: What are my thoughts?
JB: And I bet you've got some, and I bet you've got some really good suggestions.
SB: Well, I have two simple ones.
JB: Okay.
SB: And, and you know there's there are things that I'm certainly trying to practice. I'm sure there are a multitude of other ways, but the first one is to breathe is to breathe. If you get really good at noticing physically in your body how you respond to things that heighten your emotion, those can be the first little clues you need to breathe, Literally breathe in through your nose, blow out through your nose. That stops that cortisol and that stress response. The fight or flight is, you know, the adrenal activity is what makes this all the more challenging, because we're wired to survive.
So if we can breathe, there's an opportunity to at least see the space, access the space.
JB: And it forces yeah, it just forces you to stop and pause. Good Okay.
SB: Five, four, three, two, one. Like, sometimes I literally have to count five. You know in my head five four, three, two, one. Just to make sure I've given myself an opportunity to step back. I have to physically say that in my head and it works. There are other ways to deploy that same five, four, three, two, one to take action. But what do you think about that one, John?
JB: I love it and I'm actually going to share another one that I learned from you. Good, I can tell. I mean, if somebody says something and I can feel it. I think your point here is that you can feel the physical, the physiological manifestation of impulse. You can feel it in your hands, your body, whatever I have learned from you. To ask a question, or if somebody says something that I think is likely to, or I can feel the impulse coming, I would say tell me more about that or say more about that. And I got that from you. I remember I thought, gosh, that's such a great way to get clarity. But also just hit the break before I say or do something that could offend somebody or make it worse. Just say, well, tell me more about that or say more about that.
SB: It's a powerful technique. I just had a vision, also like in my mind, of me sitting in a room by myself with a marshmallow on the plate in front of me and you know, I do spend periods of time, you know, without.
It's not really an issue of someone else and what they're saying or doing, it's really totally to do with my energy. But you know when, and for other people it might be a candy bar, it might be, I don't know. You fell in the blank. But what would it be like to sit with that and not take an action and to actually develop some comfortability with not doing anything, just noticing what you're thinking, noticing what you're feeling? I tend to be pretty impulsive, john, because I'm a low E. I am a highly subjective, intuitive and emotional decision maker. You know this. Yesterday because I, when we were talking, I was like, "John blah and I dumped all this stuff on you, by the way, without regard for all the crazy things you were dealing with. So that subjectivity dominates and being aware of that and like I see myself staring at the potential reward or the thing that's going to feel better. But what would happen if I just waited to see if it got better?
If my, you know, like if the wave is going to crash, if that craving, if you will, is going to subside, because I'm just getting more comfortable, I'm building some endurance around waiting for that thing.
JB: You know, we've been working together long enough and we know each other well enough and we understand each other's behavioral DNA, so our factors, our factor combinations and our decision making style. If I didn't know that about you, if a person doesn't know that about you, they could receive that reaction very differently. To me it's like if you don't have the data, you don't understand how a person is wired and you are likely to be given over to a reaction that is just inappropriate.
SB: Well and you're making a good point, John we will fill in the meaning, We'll fill in the idea about the person. If we don't have the data, we'll make it mean something that it probably doesn't?
JB: Oh, that's true. Yeah, for sure. We'll tell our own stories in our head. That's correct.
SB: So maybe, in summary, John, if the goal is to respond versus react, to be able to pause, to capitalize on when that space is available, there are so many different ways to respond. I was thinking about that situation again and when I talked to the chief individual involved I said, having thought about it, there are a million different things I could have done in that moment. And he said, no, I understand. I appreciate that I wanna have access to that buffet of options.
I don't just wanna do what comes naturally and what my brain would say I'm hardwired to do, and the benefits of doing that are certainly for our health. So, we will, in fact, mitigate negative impact on our physical health. If we can get better at this, obviously we're gonna perform better. We're gonna understand things more quickly. There was so much that was said that I didn't hear in that one particular conversation, so it will improve the quality of our response. Like, who does not wanna show up better in scenarios for people? :
And it over time gives us a lot of capacity with emotional regulation Just being able to have emotions but not let them drive the bus. Emotions are okay. But, in their extreme, they can be challenging. And then this one, this last one is really important. What would it be like if we could greatly reduce the conflicts or the sense of frustration and prickliness and misunderstanding we have with people that is oftentimes fueled by this inability to stop and listen. That's what I'm talking about.
JB: Sara, I'm almost sad that our series on the big five is coming to an end. This has been so great and I would encourage in the show notes you could go in and you'll see the first four listed in the show notes. But I also wanna let everybody know we're gonna curate this into a PDF. So organizations out there that really wanna make your managers, actually all your people, aware of these critical skills of emotional intelligence, just let us know and you can have that curated list. But this has been so good. This has been so good.
SB: Thanks, John. I will say maybe down the road. I have a new presentation I put together called the Nine Ways to Unleash your Energy with EQ, so maybe that's a topic we'll pick up just to refresh and renew some of these ideas. But I'll tell you what it is a blessing to be able to talk about that, which I am absolutely trying to learn and master myself, so this has been really good. Thanks for the opportunity.
JB: Awesome. Thank you, Sara. Thanks everybody for listening in and, as Sara said, check in next week with Nancy Disbro. We'll be talking to us about neurodivergence within the workplace. It's really remarkable information, but it's been great, Sara, thank you so much.
SB: You bet, see you next time.
JB: We'd like to thank our guests today on the Boss Hole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Once again, mystory@thebossholechronicles.com, we'll see you again soon.