FOCUS ON EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
A few years ago I was invited to give a talk on emotional intelligence to a group of leaders at Adobe. Jeff Vijungco, then Adobe’s VP of Global Talent, introduced me by saying, “Mike’s here to talk to us today about emotional intelligence, also known as EQ. I’ve always believed that IQ gets you your job, but EQ gets you promoted.”
I’d never heard someone say that, and found it both succinct and relevant. I got up onstage, thanked Jeff, and said, “Well, what Jeff just said is basically the point of my entire presentation.” The group laughed and so did I.
In today’s fast-paced, diverse business environment, emotional intelligence is more important than ever. And organizations who understand this and create an environment conducive to the emotional awareness and development of their people are more likely to thrive.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
For generations, it was thought that our intelligence quotient (IQ) was the primary determinant of our success, especially in business. In 1990, however, professors Peter Salovey of Yale University and Jack Mayer of the University of New Hampshire coined the term “emotional intelligence” (now also referred to as the “emotional quotient” or EQ). Salovey and Mayer described EQ as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action.”
In 1995, psychologist and author Daniel Goleman built on this work and brought it to a much wider audience with his international best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. And in 1998, Goleman wrote a classic article for the Harvard Business Review in which he shared the research he’d done on EQ at nearly 200 large, global companies. This was the first significant and mainstream application of emotional intelligence theory in business. Goleman found that the most effective leaders are distinguished by a high degree of EQ. Without it, he argued, a person can have first-class training, an incisive mind, and an endless supply of good ideas, but still won’t be a great leader. According to Goleman, EQ was even more important to our success than IQ.
This was a radical notion at the time, and in some circles it still is. But we’ve all worked with people who were incredibly smart and talented but struggled to deal with the emotional stress and complex demands of work, or had difficulty dealing with the “people dynamics” of their jobs. This is especially true of leaders. There are many smart people in high levels of business leadership who lack social and emotional skills, which creates a host of challenges for them and everyone they work with.
Today, most of us understand the importance of emotional intelligence in business, and the research on and awareness of this topic has grown exponentially in the past two decades. Many companies have formal programs that train employees, managers, and executives in EQ skills. And during the recruiting process for many jobs, companies try to assess not only the interviewee’s IQ, experience, qualifications, and skills but also his or her emotional intelligence. But although EQ gets talked about a great deal in today’s business world, it’s important for us to first discuss its primary components, so that we can then go deeper and explore how to both increase our own emotional intelligence and influence the people around us and our work environment.
The Four Components of Emotional Intelligence
Self-awareness is about being able to recognize and experience our own thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. This can be challenging, not least because of the lightning-fast pace of work and life these days. Self-awareness is about paying attention to ourselves and noticing what’s going on inside of us. It’s about more deeply understanding who we are and what makes us tick, as well as what we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it, both in general and in a given moment.
Self-management is about being able to manage our thoughts and feelings as best as we can, as well as to motivate and discipline ourselves. In order to have some ability to manage what’s going on inside of us, we of course have to be aware of what we’re thinking and how we’re feeling. It’s also important that we pay attention to what works and doesn’t work for us as we make our way through life. This is about being able to intervene and direct ourselves when we get stuck in negative loops of anxiety, apathy, stress, or worry. It’s also about being able to channel our energy in directions that are the most positive and productive for our work and relationships. Self-awareness and self-management are intricately connected to each other. They’re like the “1” and “1a” of emotional intelligence. The first of them is about noticing (awareness) and the second is about taking action (management).
Social awareness is about paying attention to other people and tapping into what’s going on for them emotionally. Another way to think of social awareness is “other awareness.” If self-awareness focuses on how we’re thinking and feeling, social awareness focuses on what the people around us might be thinking or feeling. Of course we can’t read their minds or feel their feelings, but we can pay attention to others with curiosity, compassion, and interest. Social awareness has a lot to do with our ability to empathize with others and use our instincts and intuition to sense where people are coming from, to pick up on body language, to pay attention to social cues, and more.
Relationship management is about how we engage with and relate to other people, and how we manage the different relationships we have. This has to do with our ability to connect with different types of people, understand the context and intention of each unique relationship, and navigate the complexity and diversity of our interactions. Not everyone is like us, of course. For us to be effective in managing our relationships, especially at work, we have to tap into our social and relational skills, which are sometimes referred to as social intelligence. Relationship management is also about building trust, connecting, and motivating others. Similarly to the first two aspects of EQ, social awareness and relationship management are like the “2” and “2a” of emotional intelligence, the first of them again being about noticing (social awareness) and the second being about taking action (relationship management).
Emotions at Work
Although we’ve made progress on this front in recent years, there still seems to be a stigma about expressing certain emotions at work. It’s like we’re supposed to check many of our feelings at the door when we walk into the office. I’ve always found this phenomenon to be strange. Most organizations and leaders want their people to be excited, engaged, passionate, and motivated about their work, the products and services they offer, the mission of the company, and the customers they serve. Yet at the same time, in many organizations there are clear (albeit unwritten) rules about which emotions are appropriate to express at work. In many cases, expressing feelings like sadness, fear, jealousy, hurt, anger, doubt, and insecurity is seen as “inappropriate” or “unprofessional.” According to the research of Dr. Brené Brown, however, “the problem is that we cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb those hard feelings, we also numb joy, gratitude, and happiness.” If we want to be excited and engaged at work, and we also want the people around us to feel the same way, we have to make space for a wider range of emotions, even the uncomfortable ones. This takes courage, commitment, skill, and, of course, personal and collective emotional intelligence.
A beautiful example of this popped up in the media just as I was writing this chapter. Madalyn Parker, a web developer at a company called Olark Live Chat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent out an e-mail to her team that said,
I’m taking today and tomorrow off to focus on my mental health. Hopefully I’ll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%.
Thanks,
Madalyn
Later in the day, the CEO of her company, Ben Congleton, responded with an e-mail back to her saying,
Hey Madalyn,
I just wanted to personally thank you for sending e-mails like this. Every time you do, I use it as a reminder of the importance of using sick days for mental health—I can’t believe this isn’t standard practice at all organizations. You are an example to us all, and help cut through the stigma so we can all bring our whole selves to work.
(Sidenote: I love that he used the phrase “bring our whole selves to work” in his note back to her.)
Madalyn shared a screen shot of the e-mail exchange on Twitter and said this in her post:
When the CEO responds to your out-of-office e-mail about taking sick leave for mental health and reaffirms your decision 100%.
Very soon after she posted it, Madalyn’s tweet was retweeted more than 16,000 times, was liked more than 45,000 times, and received hundreds of comments and responses. Her viral tweet was also picked up by several news outlets. When Ben was asked about his response to Madalyn for an article in Money magazine, he said, “I sort of felt like this was just something that should be normal. It’s just business as usual for us, not something new.” He went on to say, “We built this organization with a culture where this kind of talk is no big deal. So many people live in fear of disclosing mental health issues at work. In many ways that fear makes those mental health issues worse.”
In response to Madalyn’s tweet, however, some Twitter users shared negative reactions to their requests for mental health days at work. One woman said she left a job after “HR wanted to know in advance when I’d have a panic attack.”
According to the aforementioned article in Money magazine, one in five adults in America experience depression, anxiety, or some other kind of mental or emotional disorder. The American Psychiatric Association provides information for companies to better understand mental health in the workplace, ranging from detailing how anxiety disorders are “not a sign of personal weakness” to reporting that 80 percent of employees treated for mental illness showed improved levels of work efficiency.
As someone who comes from a family with a lot of mental illness—my dad suffered from bipolar disorder for most of his adult life, which caused significant difficulties in his career—I’m keenly aware of the challenges associated with mental illness and the stigma that often surrounds it. My own struggles with depression in college and throughout my early twenties helped me to understand that mental illness is as debilitating as any other illness. But it’s often accompanied by intense judgment and shame from ourselves and others, which adds to its difficulties and makes it harder for us to admit to and, for people who haven’t experienced it, to understand.
This isn’t just about particular mental health issues; it’s more about understanding, appreciating, and acknowledging the overall significance of our mental and emotional state at work. Checking our emotions at the door as we walk into work is not only unhealthy, it’s almost impossible. We humans are emotional creatures, and it’s our feelings that connect us to ourselves and each other. The more open and courageous we are about feeling and expressing our emotions, the more access we have to our own power and the more permission we give to the people around us. Our emotions are a big part of our “whole selves,” and if we suppress them, it holds us back in many detrimental ways and keeps us from performing at our best.
Madalyn Parker exhibited self-awareness and self-management in knowing that she needed to take a few days off to manage her mental and emotional well-being. She courageously chose to share this publicly with her team, which made her vulnerable. Ben’s response exemplified his social awareness. And the empathy and appreciation he expressed for Madalyn not only positively impacted his relationship with her, but also reinforced a cultural and relational norm for the company that he as the CEO believed to be important. Their interaction displayed both personal and collective EQ.
Being emotionally intelligent takes awareness, commitment, and skill. As Dr. David Caruso of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence says, “It is important to understand that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence, it is not the triumph of heart over head—it is the unique intersection of both.” Dr. Caruso points to the fact that for us to be successful at work, we have to integrate our IQ and our EQ.
A manager named Susan reached out to me a few years ago and told me that after hearing me speak about the importance of emotional intelligence she realized she wanted to do a better job of checking in with her team on an emotional level. She said that she started asking each of her direct reports in their weekly one-on-one meetings, “Are you happy?” The first time she asked this of her team, a few of them burst into tears. Susan told me, “I guess some of the people on my team weren’t very happy and were much more stressed out than I’d realized. Those conversations were hard, but important.” Emotional intelligence is about paying attention to and managing our own internal state and wanting to understand the internal states of those around us, so that we can connect with them more deeply, build stronger relationships, and know how to best collaborate with them.
Crying at Work
Speaking of bursting into tears, crying is something that many of us have resistance to and judgment about, especially at work. Why is this? A lot of us have been shamed or criticized for doing it, or simply coached not to do it. Some of this can be specific to our background, culture, age, industry, position, and other unique factors. And our gender definitely plays a role: most of us men were taught at a young age that “boys don’t cry.” We were also told to “suck it up” and “be a man.” Such messages—which I myself heard often growing up, especially in sports—can be emotionally damaging.
From a very early age, I was an incredibly sensitive and emotional kid, but from what I could tell that wasn’t a good thing. I didn’t get much emotional support or encouragement from my friends, teachers, coaches, or even at home. So like most of my male peers, I did what I could to shut off that emotional part of me. For a lot of men, it’s not just crying at work that’s an issue—it’s crying in general. Many of us have trained ourselves not to cry much, if at all, and we worry that if we do, we’ll be seen as weak.
As for women, many I’ve talked to about this issue have told me about receiving clear messages to “keep it together,” especially at work. “There’s no crying in the boardroom” is a saying that many women have quoted to me when talking about this. The feedback they get is that if they allow themselves to be emotional at work, and especially if they cry, they won’t be taken seriously and will be labeled as “too emotional” or “too sensitive,” damaging their professional credibility.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, when we were talking about being authentic, crying at work entails definite risks. It makes us vulnerable and is almost always below the waterline of our iceberg. But one of the many things tears can do is remind us of our humanness, our connection to one another, and that there are things much bigger than the particular circumstances we’re facing. While some of us cry more easily than others, it’s an involuntary act. We cry for different reasons and from different emotions. Sometimes we shed tears of pain, sorrow, loss, disappointment, sadness, anger, frustration, embarrassment, or grief. Other times tears show up because of love, joy, inspiration, hope, celebration, or kindness. Regardless of the underlying emotions, and even when the reason for our tears is painful, crying often makes us feel better and is one of our most authentic expressions of emotion as human beings. And it’s a healthy thing for us to do. According to a study by Dr. William H. Frey II, a biochemist at the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota, there are both physical and psychological benefits to crying. Tears help release toxins from the body. And according to Dr. Frey’s research, 88.8 percent of people feel better after crying, whereas only 8.4 percent feel worse.
Even though crying is natural and healthy, we still have to grapple with the stigma associated with it, especially at work. I see this a lot in my own work, and I’m often fascinated by how people react when tears show up, which is a fairly regular occurrence when I speak and especially when I’m working with teams.
I delivered a workshop for a leadership team at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and we did the “If You Really Knew Me” exercise. As we went around the table and people lowered the waterline on their icebergs, a few of the people in the group were moved to tears. When the exercise was complete, I had them pair up with a partner to talk about their experience. After a few minutes, I asked the group as a whole, “How was that for you?”
A woman named Judy spoke up right away and said, “That was awful!”
“What was so awful about it for you, Judy?” I asked.
“I hate crying at work. I’m too sensitive and I cry easily. I’ve worked really hard to control it, especially in this role and on this team, because I want to be taken seriously. And then you make us do this exercise and I’m a mess,” Judy said.
“Yes, sometimes being emotional and crying can be intense and get a little messy,” I said. “You weren’t the only one who got emotional during the exercise, though. What was it like when other people shared and even cried when they were talking?” I asked.
“I actually liked that,” said Judy. “I appreciated their courage, openness, and could relate to a lot of what they shared. I was also happy to know that I wasn’t the only crier on this team.” As she said this, Judy laughed, and so did everyone else around the table. The laughter lightened the mood in the room. I was about to respond to her when Judy got that wide-eyed, lightbulb look on her face, and blurted out, “Oh my gosh! It never occurred to me until just now that when I break down and cry it feels messy and like I’m being weak, but when other people do, it usually seems courageous to me and I appreciate it.”
Judy’s insight that day was profound for her, the team, and for me. She identified an interesting but important paradox about crying and vulnerability in general. When we do it, it often seems like weakness to us. When we see others do it, however, it often seems like courage.
I’ve seen tears (and other expressions of emotion and vulnerability at work) dramatically shift people’s perspectives, change the dynamics of a conflict, and bring teams together. It has a way of breaking down emotional walls and mental barriers we put up within ourselves and toward others. Crying is natural, and a great human equalizer. As Sheryl Sandberg’s son reminded her (and all of us) in that story I shared in Chapter 1, we all have things that make us cry. Remembering this and giving ourselves and others permission to cry if necessary, or to express ourselves in other vulnerable ways, allows more emotional space in which to connect with one another as human beings, which is a big part of what bringing our whole selves to work is all about.
Wisdom 2.0
A great example of the evolution of emotional intelligence in the business world is Wisdom 2.0. In February 2011 I attended the second annual Wisdom 2.0 conference in Redwood City, California. The event was put together by Soren Gordhamer, author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected. Soren was interested in the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions, particularly meditation, and the digital world, which at the time was exploding with social media, smartphones, and a whole new level of interconnectivity.
The event was incredibly stimulating. There were about 400 people there, and the presentations and panels consisted of founders, leaders, and investors from tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay, as well as authors and teachers with decades of experience teaching meditation and mindfulness. They were talking about both the importance of mindfulness and how to integrate it into how we work and how companies operate.
Mindfulness is one of the most powerful ways for us to deepen our self-awareness and to expand our capacity for self-management. And the more mindful we are, the more empathy we tend to have for others and the better we become at managing the relationships we have. So mindfulness is, of course, a key practice in the evolution and deepening of our emotional intelligence.
Aside from loving the conference, I was excited to meet other like-minded people and to find out there were so many other folks interested in both of these things. It felt a bit like my two worlds colliding, and although it was a little disorienting at first, it was inspiring. Being at this event reinforced a few important things that I’d been aware of before, but not in such a profound way. First, the personal and the professional aren’t really all that separate, especially in today’s world. Second, there is a deep desire that many of us have to connect with ourselves and each other, especially as things continue to speed up and we have more devices to distract us. Third, I was selling out myself and my clients, and not bringing my whole self to the work I’d been doing in the corporate world for many years, because I had too many stories in my head about some of the things I was interested in, like meditation, and about some of my deeper personal and spiritual beliefs being too “out there,” too “woo-woo,” too “touchy-feely” for me to bring them into the companies where I was speaking and consulting. The truth was I was simply too scared and didn’t believe or trust that there was an interest. And in a practical sense, I needed to find a way to make the case that these things were important to the success and fulfillment of my clients. The connection between mindfulness and emotional intelligence became clear to me, and it was exciting to realize that there were a lot of smart and successful businesspeople and companies that were seeing this and starting to embrace it.
Over the past seven or eight years, I’ve continued to attend the annual Wisdom 2.0 conference and some of the other regional conferences they’ve offered. I’m honored and grateful to have been invited to speak at and participate in a number of their events and to connect more deeply with the Wisdom 2.0 community and the larger mindfulness movement that has emerged. The annual event has grown from a few hundred to a few thousand each year. The speakers at these events have included such notables as Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos), author-teacher Eckhart Tolle, Congressman Tim Ryan, singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter), author-teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arianna Huffington (founder of the Huffington Post), Pete Carroll (head coach of the Seattle Seahawks), Bill Ford (Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Company), and author-teacher Byron Katie. The attendees are from companies of all types and sizes, as well as people who work in the education, nonprofit, and philanthropic worlds. It’s wonderful to see the expansion of interest in mindfulness in business—both through the Wisdom 2.0 community and in the country and the world at large.
Mindfulness at Work
The Wisdom 2.0 community has been both an example of and a catalyst for the expansion of mindfulness in the business world. Following on the growing understanding of emotional intelligence over the past few years, interest in and research about mindfulness, and programs to bring it into the workplace, have exploded. According to the American Mindfulness Research Association, between 1980 and 2000 there was a total of 58 studies of mindfulness in scientific or medical journals. By 2007, the number of journal articles on mindfulness had grown to 69 in just that single year. And for the year 2016, it had increased almost tenfold, to 667.
The evolution of mindfulness in the West, and its penetration into the business world, are key to understanding how to embrace it more deeply in our professional lives. Many of us were introduced to meditation in a personal or spiritual context. For me, my meditation practice has been an important part of my spiritual journey for almost 25 years. There are, however, many forms of meditation, and mindfulness is just one of them. While it can be a part of someone’s spiritual practice, as it is for me, mindfulness isn’t necessarily spiritual or religious in nature.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has arguably played the most significant role in establishing the scientific credibility of mindfulness in the West. Although he studied with various Buddhist teachers and has drawn on many Buddhist techniques, he’s not a Buddhist himself, and his approach to mindfulness is not religious in nature. Jon has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT and became fascinated with the health benefits of mindfulness. In 1979 he created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
To this day, MBSR programs, which usually consist of an eight-week series of two-hour classes each week, a one-day retreat (six-hour mindfulness practice), and daily homework of 45 minutes, are delivered all over the world by certified teachers. Much of the modern interest in and research behind the benefits of mindfulness started with the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR.
Building upon that, his own meditation practice, and his interest in emotional intelligence at work, Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan wanted to create a program that would train people to be more mindful in their personal lives and at work. He was interested in putting together a course that would help people become more aware of their emotions, more compassionate toward others, and more able to build sustainable and harmonious relationships at work. In other words, he wanted to teach the fundamentals of mindfulness and emotional intelligence in a way that would benefit and resonate with his colleagues at Google. He assembled a group that included some consultants, a scientist from Stanford, and Marc Lesser, a Zen teacher with an MBA, who worked together to create the “Search Inside Yourself” program, which launched in 2007. It very quickly became the most popular training program at Google, and drew lots of attention from the corporate world given the impact it was having and the fact that Google had established itself both as a worldwide leader in business success and company culture. Google has been ranked #1 on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list eight out of the last 11 years.
The interest in this program became so significant that Tan and Lesser created the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) in 2012, and the following year Tan’s book Search Inside Yourself, which was endorsed by former president Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Lama, became a New York Times bestseller. SIYLI delivers programs for companies and businesspeople all over the world. According to their website, as of mid-2017, 13,000 employees had participated in their programs, with some noticeable results: 36 percent reduction in stress levels, 62 minutes in increased production per week, 7 percent reduction in health-care costs, and $3,000 saved per year per employee owing to gained productivity.
The success and awareness of programs like this one at Google have led many other companies to create or institute mindfulness programs for their employees in recent years. In the same way that organizations a decade or two ago realized they could reap benefits by encouraging their employees to exercise and eat better—even creating on-site resources and incentives for these healthy activities—this has been happening in the past few years with mindfulness.
And while this “mindfulness movement” may have started in Silicon Valley, it has quickly spread to companies and industries outside of the tech world. There are now mindfulness programs at Aetna, Ford, Schwab, BlackRock, General Mills, Dow Chemical, and many other companies. We’re also seeing mindfulness programs for members of the military and law enforcement, and in schools.
At the 2015 Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I had the honor of being on a panel with Dr. Michael Gervais and George Mumford. We talked about mindfulness and peak performance. Michael is a sports psychologist who works with the Seattle Seahawks; George is a mindfulness teacher who worked with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, and with Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2000s.
While we were onstage together, Michael said, “In our culture we focus a lot on mastery of task or mastery of skill. If you’re really good at something in business, sports, or the arts, you get recognized and rewarded for that. However, what it ultimately takes to be really good at something is mastery of self. Unfortunately, we don’t talk about or focus on that as much.” He’s right. As a culture we’re so outcome focused that we tend to overlook the process and what it truly takes to create the result. Mindfulness enhances our self-awareness and our focus, which can allow us to respond more effectively when we need that “mastery of self” to achieve a goal, accomplish a task, or simply remain calm in the face of adversity or uncertainty. It’s about self-management at the highest level.
George’s story and background blew me away. In 1970 he sustained a career-ending injury while playing in a pickup game with the varsity men’s basketball team at the University of Massachusetts. His roommate at UMass was Hall of Famer Julius (“Dr. J”) Erving. The end of George’s basketball career ultimately led him to a severe drug addiction. Meditation and mindfulness helped him get clean and sober, and also helped him manage his chronic pain. He completed an internship in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program, and together they created the Inner-City Stress Reduction Clinic in the early 1990s. In 1993 Phil Jackson, then coach of the Chicago Bulls, contacted Jon looking for someone who could teach mindfulness to his players. Jon recommended George, and George went on to help Phil Jackson and the Bulls win their second set of three consecutive NBA championships in the late ’90s; George later worked with Jackson’s Los Angeles Lakers when they won five NBA titles between 2000 and 2010.
During our panel discussion at the 2015 Wisdom 2.0 conference, George said, “I feel like I can come out of the shadows now. Back in the 1990s when I was working with the Bulls, and even just a few years ago when I was working with the Lakers, it didn’t seem like it was okay to talk openly about mindfulness. But now it’s become cool; and people in sports, business, and other areas of our culture are understanding the importance mindfulness plays in our ability to perform at a peak level.”
George is right on both fronts. It has become way more “cool” to talk about and practice mindfulness. When I was playing pro baseball in the mid-90s, I would never tell my teammates that I liked to meditate. In those days it was just starting to become socially acceptable for athletes to talk about working with sports psychologists, and even that was considered a bit “out there.”
As we’re now learning from brain scientists, mindfulness plays an important role in our ability to operate at the highest level. In a study conducted by Adrienne Taren and Peter Gianaros of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, and J. David Creswell of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, MRI images showed that after 155 healthy adults underwent an eight-week course of mindfulness practice, the “primal” part of the brain known as the amygdala appeared to shrink. The amygdala, also known as the “fight or flight” center of the brain, is associated with our feelings of fear and our instincts for survival. It initiates the body’s response to any stress or threat to one’s safety by causing the arteries to harden and thicken, enabling them to handle the increased blood flow from a fight-or-flight response. As the amygdala shrinks, the newer “rational” part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, grows. The prefrontal cortex is associated with our higher functions and acts as the control center for our thoughts, words, and actions. The Taren-Gianoros-Creswell study demonstrated that mindfulness practices not only cause the amygdala to shrink, but they weaken the “functional connectivity” between the amygdala and other parts of the brain, meanwhile strengthening the neural networks between the higher-functioning prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. In other words, practicing mindfulness is good for our brain and nervous system, and helps us stay calm and focused.
Similarly, participants in Google’s aforementioned Search Inside Yourself program reported 34 percent less emotional drain after the program, a 32 percent greater ability to focus and be more effective, and a 29 percent improvement in their ability to maintain calm and poise during challenges.
Mindfulness has gained a great deal of attention in recent years for a number of reasons: it’s important, lots of successful people and teams are talking about it, it has impact, and we have scientific proof of its benefits. By learning to be more mindful, we can train our brain and our nervous system to relax, focus, and be more open. This is a practical way to enhance our EQ and our ability to perform at our best. And as the practice of mindfulness becomes much more socially acceptable, especially at work, it allows us to expand our capacity for being present and connecting with others—which is the essence of emotional intelligence.
My Mindfulness Practices
As a way of demystifying mindfulness a bit and giving you practical examples, I thought I’d share some of my own mindfulness practices. These practices are important for a few reasons. First, like anything positive or healthy, the more we practice, the better we get; and doing something on a consistent basis turns it into a habit, allowing it to have the most impact. Second, mindfulness practices are practical ways for us to enhance our emotional intelligence—by increasing our self-awareness we can also expand our capacity for self-management, social awareness, and even relationship management (all four components of EQ). And third, these types of practices can help us keep things in perspective, disconnect from the daily stress and drama of life and work, and enhance our well-being—thus setting us up for increased success, joy, and fulfillment.
Following are some of the main practices I use nowadays, and which have evolved quite a bit over time. I’m more consistent with some than others, and most are fairly simple—but they have a big impact on my life, my outlook, my mental and emotional state, my overall well-being, and my ability to operate effectively and bring my whole self to work.
Morning meditation. I like to meditate in the morning when I have time. My meditation practice transformed a few years ago when I gave myself permission (with the help of my counselor Eleanor) to just meditate in bed right after I wake up. I’ve always found it easiest for me to relax my body and my mind when I lie down, but I struggled for years with the idea that lying down in bed didn’t count as “official” meditation. While there are certain types of meditation practices that involve sitting in particular postures, I find it works best for me to just lie in bed and meditate. I’ve trained myself not to fall asleep, which is one of the biggest practical challenges to meditating in this position. For people who find this difficult, getting up, using the bathroom, and splashing some water on your face before lying back down can help ensure that you stay awake. I meditate sometimes for as little as five minutes, and sometimes for as long as an hour. On average I do it for about 20 minutes. I start by counting down from 10 to one, focusing on the lower part of my body and moving up toward my head. I sometimes just focus on my breath and relax, but most often I do a guided-imagery meditation technique where I visualize myself going through a particular process—walking through the woods, lying down in a field, flying through the air, and so forth. I’ve learned a number of these visualizations over the years from various teachers and recordings. Two of my favorites are ones that I talked about in detail in my book Nothing Changes Until You Do; they are called “Fulfilling Your Own Needs” and “Embracing Powerlessness.” I still use these, along with others. I’ve even recorded audios of these two visualizations; you can download them for free from my website at Mike-Robbins.com/Meditations. I also sometimes listen to other meditation audios; or I simply visualize activities, conversations, or events that are coming up that day or that week for me—playing them out in my mind in a positive way. I find meditating in the morning works best for me and sets the tone for my day.
Journaling. While I was in college I started writing in a journal and carrying it around with me all the time. These days I actually have two journals. The first is my regular journal, in which I write about how I’m feeling, where I’m at, what’s going on, where I’m struggling, what I want, and more. It’s a safe place for me to write anything and everything—about myself, my life, my work, and my internal process. I go through stretches when I write in my regular journal every day, and others when it will be a week or two between entries. I like to write in this journal first thing in the morning after I meditate, or if I can at the very end of the day—sometimes both. Sitting on airplanes or in waiting rooms I also find to be good times for me to journal (if I can remember to put down my phone). My second journal is a gratitude journal, which morphed recently into a gratitude/self-forgiveness journal. I try to write in this journal each day—three things I’m grateful for and three things for which I forgive myself. I’ve been doing this daily (well, almost daily) gratitude off and on for many years, and love it. It helps keep me grounded and focused on the many blessings in my life. The self-forgiveness part of this is something I started recently as a way to practice more forgiveness and compassion for myself. I’ve been enjoying this, and it’s helping me be a little more kind to myself and a little less self-critical.
Music meditation. As part of a workout and eating program that Michelle and I were introduced to a few years ago called The Happy Body, based on a book with the same name by Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek, I started to do a short five-minute meditation at the conclusion of my workouts. According to Aniela and Jerzy’s research, doing this allows the body to relax, recover, and burn fat—thus enhancing the impact of the workout. Instead of rushing right into the next activity or checking my phone, I lie down on the floor and listen to a five-minute piece of classical music they recommend called “Thaïs: Meditation.” It’s a piece from the opera Thaïs by French composer Jules Massenet. I downloaded it from iTunes, and when I’m done working out I turn it on and allow myself to relax. It’s one of my favorite parts of my workout. And if I didn’t get a chance to meditate in the morning (or even if I did), it’s a nice little break that allows me to stop, breathe, and take inventory of how I’m feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally. And if it actually helps burn a little extra fat too, that’s awesome.
Visualization. As I’ve already said, I like visualization. Given that I’m more auditory (than visual or kinesthetic), when I visualize I don’t usually see vivid images in my mind. During my days as an athlete, however, I learned about the power of positive visualization, and I still use this practice. I find it most helpful when I have a meeting, speech, event, or project that I’m feeling nervous about and that I want to go well. I’ll often take a little time in my office, my car, my hotel room, or wherever I can before I head out for the meeting or event to ground myself. If I’m feeling really nervous about it I might take out a piece of paper and write down some of my biggest fears, doubts, or insecurities—not to freak myself out, but just to get them out of my head. After writing them out, I rip up the piece of paper and either throw it in the trash or flush it down the toilet—to give myself a clear message that I’m letting go of those limiting thoughts and beliefs. I’ll then close my eyes and visualize how I want things to go, how I want to feel, and what I want the experience to be like. Sometimes I also write this down in my journal or on a piece of paper. I find that doing this can change my perspective on whatever it is I’m about to go do. And, I find that this practice helps me prepare myself emotionally and is a great self-management technique.
Leaving my phone out of the bedroom. This is one I just started doing, and it’s making a big difference in how I sleep. I had gotten into the habit of bringing my phone to bed with me—using it to read, listen, or watch stuff right before going to sleep. I knew it wasn’t the healthiest thing for me, my marriage, or my sleep, but I had gotten somewhat addicted to it, thinking that because so much of my life runs through my phone, I needed to have it close to me at all times. I’ve started to leave it downstairs in the kitchen and it has really helped me relax more, sleep better, and wake up more refreshed. If I do bring it into the bedroom because, for instance, I want to listen to a meditation audio in the morning, or I’m in a hotel room and I can’t leave it somewhere else, I try to remember to at least put it on airplane mode, so that in both a practical and an energetic way it can’t distract me or suck me into something that will keep me awake or get me all amped up. I find this practice is becoming more and more challenging, and at the same time more and more important. My love/hate relationship with my phone continues to evolve, and this self-management practice is helping me deal with it in a more healthy and mindful way.
These are some of the simple things that I do to practice being more mindful, which has had a positive impact on my life, my work, and my well-being. They also enhance my emotional connection to myself and to others. I’m sure you have certain practices that you do that focus on your well-being and mindfulness (whether or not you think of them this way). It’s not about being fanatical about them. I know a thing or two about this, and have learned the hard way that even when we do “healthy” things too intensely, it sometimes defeats the purpose. The goal is for us to find simple practices that we enjoy and that put us in touch with our minds, hearts, and bodies in a healthy and open way. This is what emotional intelligence and mindfulness are all about. Many of these are things we can do at work or in conjunction with our work. And all these things help us bring more of ourselves to the work that we do.
Empathy
Empathy is one of the most important aspects of emotional intelligence and building strong relationships. Social awareness and relationship management, the two components of EQ that focus on other people, are predicated on our ability to empathize. Empathy is our ability to understand and share the feelings of another. We could also say that it’s “walking in other people’s shoes.” There are many situations in which empathy is essential to our success and fulfillment at work. And like a lot of things we’ve been discussing, it’s also something that can seem a little “soft.” But even in the most competitive environments, empathy is an asset. Being able to understand and relate to people is important regardless of what we do, where we do it, and with whom. If we manage other people, empathy is essential to relating to the people on our team. If we’re in a role where we sell or promote a product or service, being able to empathize with both customers and colleagues allows us to be more effective. If we’re in a service role of any kind, empathy is vital to our ability to respond appropriately, anticipate what’s needed, and communicate successfully with those we serve and support.
Whether we work for ourselves, run a large company, manage a team of people, or have just started our career as an entry-level individual contributor, empathy is crucial to our success. For a variety of reasons, it’s a more important business skill than ever before.
The Center for Creative Leadership studied data taken from 6,731 managers in 38 countries. The study showed a positive correlation between empathy and job performance. Managers who were rated by their direct reports as showing more empathy received consistently higher job-performance ratings.
Having empathy for the people we work with is something we can both exhibit and increase in simple ways. It’s about opening our minds and our hearts, and choosing to pay attention and care about the people around us. When we do this, we’re often motivated to perform small acts of kindness and compassion that go a long way to building stronger relationships at work and creating a positive environment in which to operate.
Dr. Kelsey Crowe is the co-author of There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say or Do When Life is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to the People You Love and the founder of an organization called Help Each Other Out. Her organization is a growing collective of people who are embracing the idea that being there for others is often easier than we think, that it can be learned, and that it matters. Through social-science research, storytelling, and art, Kelsey and her team deliver “Empathy Bootcamp” workshops for groups and organizations of all kinds, giving people the skills to be supportive in all types of relationships and situations.
When I interviewed Kelsey on my podcast, she told me, “Empathy is our ability to imagine what someone else might be going through. This requires that we tap into some other kind of core experience that we’ve had, even if we can’t relate to specifically what they’re going through. For example, maybe you’ve never lost your job, but you may know what it’s like to have your confidence shattered. And with that understanding, imagine approaching someone who has lost their job.” She continued, “We can reach out to others, especially at work, with a light touch. A woman I worked with described mentioning to a colleague that today would have been her due date if not for her miscarriage. And then after lunch, there were flowers on her desk. Sometimes just small gestures that don’t even require a lot of conversation show that you notice and that the person’s life matters.” Kelsey’s wisdom and insight are so important. Having empathy for the people around us doesn’t take a lot of effort, but it can have a profound impact.
Another example, which is actually more of an example of a lack of empathy, is the United States Congress. Tim Ryan is an eight-term Congressman from Ohio’s 13th district and is the author of two books, including A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit. I’ve gotten to know Tim in recent years, and have heard him speak on several occasions about a simple but profound change that has taken place in Washington, DC, over the past few decades. He said, “A generation ago, most of us in Congress would move our families to DC when we were elected. This meant that people on opposite sides of the political divide had kids at the same schools, saw each other at the grocery store, and interacted with one another as members of the same community. Today, most of us live in our home districts because the pressure to be at home and to constantly raise money is so intense, we simply commute back and forth to DC, which means we no longer live in the same community with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. It would be a lot harder to go onto the House floor or on cable TV and say nasty things about each other if we knew we’re going to have to see each other at our kid’s soccer game over the weekend.”
When I first heard Tim talk about this, it made total sense to me and wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before. And while the state of politics in Washington, DC, is challenging for a number of reasons, one of the simplest may be a lack of empathy.
This happens all the time in business, especially in large companies with multiple locations. The people in the other offices or departments can easily turn into “them,” and we lose our understanding of one another. Empathy is about remembering the connection we have with each other and tapping into our common humanity.
Listening
Listening is a fundamental and practical element of emotional intelligence. It’s a very specific manifestation of social awareness and relationship management in action. It also happens to be the key to communication—which is a pretty important element of our business relationships, don’t you think? Although we all know how important listening is, many of us still struggle with it. And even if we don’t (or think we don’t), we definitely work with people who do, right?
What makes listening so challenging? What gets in the way for you when you’re listening to others? There are three main categories of things that usually get in the way for us when we’re listening to other people:
Practical. The practical barriers to listening have to do mainly with not paying attention or being distracted. This is more pronounced than ever nowadays, with all our devices. I’ve been in team meetings with my clients recently where people will be sitting around the table with their laptops open and their phones either in their hands, in their laps, or faceup on the table right in front of them. I’ve even seen people with not one but two phones (which I assume means one is for work and the other one personal). It’s hard to pay attention to someone speaking when we’re staring at a screen. And let’s be honest about our phones: in addition to being somewhat addicted to them, most of us are total hypocrites about them. When we’re talking to someone and they’re looking at their phone, what do we call that? Rude, right? But when we look at our phone, it’s important. In addition to distractions, time constraints get in the way of listening. According to a 2015 Accenture survey of 3,600 business professionals from 30 countries, 64 percent of respondents said that listening has become significantly more difficult in today’s digital workplace; 98 percent reported that they multitask at work; and 80 percent said they multitask during conference calls. We can’t effectively listen to people and do something else at the same time.
Informational. Sometimes it’s hard to listen to people because we just don’t understand the information they’re sharing. They may be communicating it in a way that doesn’t make sense to us, or is hard to follow. Or we may not be interested in what they have to say, or don’t think it’s relevant to us, or simply don’t care. We’re often asked to be on conference calls or in meetings where some (if not all) of the information being presented isn’t relevant to us. And sometimes we don’t agree with the speaker, which also makes it hard to listen. We might feel compelled to argue, which isn’t always smart or politically correct, so we might just sit there and stew.
Personal. Sometimes it’s not about the message, it’s about the messenger. If we don’t like, respect, or trust the person speaking, it can be challenging for us to listen to what’s being said. We may agree completely, it may be super relevant to our job and our life, and we may need to pay close attention to every word that is being said, but if the individual conveying the message is someone we have unresolved issues with or don’t particularly care for, it’s often hard for us to listen effectively. We also tend to hear different things based on who is speaking and how we feel about them.
So whether it’s practical, informational, or personal, listening can be difficult for us. But listening to others is crucial to the success of our relationships and our work. How can we enhance our capacity for listening? By understanding the three challenges of listening I just mentioned, as well as the three levels of listening listed directly below.
1) Listen to what’s being said. This means we have to slow down, put down our phone or turn away from our computer, and actually pay attention to the speaker and the information they’re sharing. This is no small thing, especially in today’s fast-paced world. If you start paying attention to your ability to pay attention, you’ll probably notice that you check out a lot when people are talking. It’s not because you’re selfish or don’t care; it’s usually because there are so many things inside your brain and out in the world that can distract you. Our attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter, and the pressure on us to be checking our various devices, accounts, and messages is increasing all the time. If you don’t listen to what people are saying, you’ll not only miss important information, you’ll also diminish your ability to connect to, understand, and empathize with them. Listening to what people are saying is actually a great mindfulness practice, and is something that can enhance your EQ. Noticing when you check out or get distracted is a great way to practice being more present and bringing yourself back to the conversation. Just as in meditation noticing that our mind wanders enables us to come back to our breath; so too in listening it enables us to come back to the present moment.
2) Make an emotional connection. The second level of listening is making an emotional connection to the person who is talking—whether that is one-on-one or in a group. We can’t make an emotional connection to the person speaking if we’re not actually listening to what they’re saying. So in order to get to the second level, we first have to pay attention to them. Making an emotional connection is about listening to and tapping into the emotion behind the words. It’s about empathy. Sometimes people say one thing, but they mean something else. If we’re really listening to them, we can hear not only what they’re saying but what they may be communicating nonverbally. Making this emotional connection is especially important when we’re coaching someone, wanting to more deeply understand where they’re coming from, working through a conflict, trying to influence or motivate them, or offering support. This second level of listening is essential to social awareness and relationship management.
3) Clean out our filter. When we listen to people, we don’t usually hear what they say. We hear a filtered version of what they say. This filter is based on our judgments, opinions, assessments, and evaluations—of the person and of what they’re saying. We are, of course, entitled to our opinions, and in some cases part of our job is to evaluate people and what they say. But oftentimes these filters are filled with our biases—conscious and unconscious—and, as we discussed in Chapter 1, a degree of damaging self-righteousness. When we have conflict with or disconnection from someone we work with, it’s usually because our filter has gotten clogged up with negative, self-righteous judgments. It’s kind of like the filter in the dryer: it needs to be cleaned out regularly, because if it isn’t, there’s a ton of buildup that accumulates. If we continue to neglect it, it can blow up the dryer and set the house on fire. Something analogous is what can happen in our relationships if we don’t clean out our own filter.
After a speech I gave on emotional intelligence and communication at a managers’ conference for one of my clients, a man came up to me and said, “Hi, my name’s Chris. I appreciated your presentation and resonated with much of what you talked about, except for the part about the filter.”
“Really? What didn’t resonate with you specifically about the filter?” I asked.
“Well,” Chris said, “I think I understood the concept, I’m just not sure it fits with my boss. He’s a jerk. That’s not a ‘filter’; it’s the truth.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can tell you have a very strong opinion about your boss.”
“He’s awful. He doesn’t care about people, doesn’t communicate, ridicules us in front of each other, and is sometimes downright cruel. I tried to talk to him about it, which only made it worse. I even tried to talk to his boss about it, but they like him because he’s smart and our team puts up big numbers for the company.”
I could tell by his passion and genuineness that he was really frustrated. I asked him, “Would you like this situation with your boss to improve?”
“Yes.”
“I have two suggestions. The first one will handle it completely, but the second one will take more effort and commitment,” I said.
“What’s the first one?” Chris asked.
“You could quit your job,” I said.
“I’ve thought about that,” he said. “But I really like my job and love the company; I don’t want to leave. What’s the second suggestion?”
“You could clean out your filter. In other words, you could change how you relate to your boss,” I said. He looked at me like I was crazy, so I continued. “Let’s imagine that for some reason, a year from today you’re no longer working for him. Is that a realistic scenario?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Chris said. “I mean there are no plans, but things change around here from time to time, so it could happen.”
“Okay, so a year from today you’re no longer working for him—maybe because one of you gets another job within the company or something like that. But let’s say that starting today you decide that instead of getting upset, annoyed, and offended by his behavior, you’re going to challenge yourself to think of him as a very important ‘teacher’ for you.”
“A teacher?” he asked, looking confused.
“Yes, a teacher,” I said. “And what’s he teaching you? How to deal with difficult people more effectively. I don’t think this is the last difficult person you’ll ever work with, and maybe not even the last boss you don’t particularly care for either. Imagine if you called me one year from today to tell me that he left the company or took another role. And let’s also imagine that you could honestly say that you were less stressed out and more effective, not only in dealing with him, but in dealing with any difficult person at work or in life.” Then, after a pause, I asked, “Would that be a valuable relationship for you?”
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess it would be.”
“Look, I realize that it’s easy for me to give you this advice and then walk out that door. I don’t have to go back to work and deal with a boss that I can’t stand. It may not be easy and probably won’t be all that fun, but if you really take it on and challenge yourself, it can have a big impact. I’m not sure what you’ll do specifically—maybe you’ll practice not getting offended so easily, or you’ll stop gossiping about him with your co-workers, or complaining about him to your wife. There are lots of different things you can do and try. I trust that you’ll figure out what to do if you’re really committed to things changing.”
Chris looked at me with a hopeful yet still somewhat skeptical expression and said, “Thanks.”
Listening is not always easy—we first have to commit ourselves to being present, paying attention, and putting down our phone or turning away from our computer. We then have to care enough to make an emotional connection with the person speaking—to use our emotional intelligence to empathize with them as best as we can. And finally, we’ve got to be aware of and take responsibility for our bias, judgments, and the filter through which we listen, and be willing to clean them out if we want to connect with people in an authentic and open way.
There are really only two ways to clean out our filters. We can either deal with the conflict, issue, and person directly, until things change and get resolved. Or we can simply let it go and choose to change our perspective, as I challenged Chris to do. Both of these things take commitment, courage, and quite a bit of emotional intelligence. However, we all have experience doing both of these things, even though they can be challenging.
Emotional intelligence is a pretty easy concept to understand. Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management—all are fairly simple terms and ideas. The practice of emotional intelligence, like many of the other themes of this book, is a bit more difficult to integrate as we go deeper below the surface. When we do, however, the rewards are huge for us and our co-workers. It’s our EQ that allows us to connect with who we really are so we can both bring our whole self to work, and also connect with the whole selves of the people around us.