Navigating Covid-19 with Emotional Intelligence

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation about going beyond COVID-19 by going a little bit more in-depth around the topic of Emotional Intelligence.

Right now, there are a lot of emotions that people are experiencing and they’re experiencing those emotions in an uncertain environment. As we talked about last week, the way that the brain works without emotions is that it can trap our thinking down in the emotional brain, the limbic brain, and it can stop us from making good decisions up in the prefrontal cortex, in the logical brain.

When we’re experiencing emotions and we’re not sure which emotions we’re experiencing, let alone why we’re experiencing them, it can create a feeling of overwhelm. So, what I want to do today and continuing on next week is I want to go into this topic of Emotional Intelligence.

Just recently, I was blessed to be named the Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year, and I get to travel the world and work with people around developing their Emotional Intelligence.

The reason why I’m so excited about that topic is for most of my life, I didn’t even know what Emotional Intelligence was, let alone have the skills, the competencies that come in that area.

As I developed in my own life, in my own career, I saw the need to develop these skills. And right here, right now, being able to identify what’s going on in the moment, take those thoughts captive, bring it back to logic so that we can make great decisions and remove ourselves and move forward from fear and anxiety into faith and certainty. I’m going to teach you about emotional self-awareness.

Here are some of the problems that we experience on a daily basis. The first thing is that we have blind spots. Have you ever been in a car and all of a sudden a motorbike or another vehicle just whooshed past you and you thought, “Where did that come from?”

It came out of your blind spot. You weren’t able to see it. And when that happens with emotions, it can give us that same fright and that same feeling of, “What’s going on?”

And not knowing what’s going on in the emotion in the moment is like navigating in the dark. It creates challenges of collision and conflict. It’s all about not seeing the signs. It’s not seeing the cues and emotions are signals to let us know that something’s going on. By the way, emotions last for only a small period of time. What we make of that emotion, what we make it mean, what we do from that emotion is what carries it on and whether it creates resourceful or unresourceful behaviour, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

When we develop our Emotional Intelligence, we see the signs and we understand them and we can make adjustments and it gives us a start point to know where to go. It’s like having a roadmap to follow.

It’s like having our nav in our car and maps on our phone that says, “Go up here.” “Turn left.” “Go here.” “Do that.” So, it takes the emotional and puts it into the logical and allows us to navigate with confidence, whether it’s through a pandemic or any part of our life. To do that, we need to develop our self-awareness competencies.

Now, self-awareness is the first quadrant of Emotional Intelligence and indeed the work I do is around Social and Emotional Intelligence. So, we’ve got self-awareness, we’ve got self-management, and then we’ve got social awareness and relationship management. So today, I just want to introduce us to the topic of self-awareness. Let’s just talk about some key ideas and key principles around self-awareness before we get into how to build it.

The first thing to understand is the diagnosis is critical. Many years ago now, about seven, eight years ago now, I lost this thumb to a melanoma cancer. Before they could come up with that diagnosis, I had to get them to have a look and to go through a process and do a biopsy and all those things. And then I got to the realisation that if they didn’t remove the cancer and sought out lymph nodes, those sort of things, I was going to die.

So, diagnosis was critical before they could bring the solution and it’s the same with our emotions. We’ve got to be able to in the moment go, “Hey, what’s going on right now in my emotions?”

The second thing to understand is it’s good for you and it’s good for others. Being emotionally aware, knowing our blind spots, being able to navigate our emotions in a healthy way is a little bit like the spoonful of Cod liver oil that my mum gave me as a child. Apparently, this stuff was great for gut health and I had to take this and let me tell you, it didn’t taste really good.

And sometimes, the self-awareness feels like that. We know it’s going to do us good, but it might not taste good because we’re going to have to realise things about ourselves that might be a little bit uncomfortable because it goes against the normal.

The third key thing is that we need to look for strengths. We need to look at, “Well, what am I already good at?” What is it that I can identify in my emotions and that I’m able to navigate through instead of just looking at it as an exercise of going, “Oh, let’s find out what’s wrong with me”? Because there’s nothing wrong with you. Emotions are a good thing.

Learning to navigate them is a skill, something that can be learned.

The fourth thing is we need to ask others for help sometimes. We need to be able to get other people’s opinions because if you’ve ever heard of the Johari window, there’s things that we know about ourselves and there’s things that others know about us. And sometimes we don’t know what they know. We don’t see what they see or we choose not to see it. So, we get people involved in helping us with that.

And the fifth principle in anything that I teach and in particular in this area is awareness by itself is of no value. We need to press the start button, we need to use that information and we need to use whatever that signal is telling us to move forward in a logical, resourceful way.

So when we teach and we work in the area of Social + Emotional Intelligence and in the self-awareness quadrant, we deal with three competencies: emotional self-awareness, accurate self-assessment and personal power. And those three competencies form a foundation of Emotional Intelligence.

So over the next few weeks, what I’m going to do is I’m going to step you through and give you some tips on how to build each of those competencies. And if you’re serious about this and you want to be able to regulate your emotions in a healthy way, make sure you come on the journey.

My team and I are working really hard right now in this COVID-19 period to create something that is of great value to the marketplace. And what I do hasn’t changed, but how I do it has. And I’m developing an Emotional Intelligence online master class series right now and the first part of that will be a complete course around developing the competencies of self-awareness.

So if that’s something that you’re interested in, make sure that you follow the journey and we’ll tell you when that’s ready. But right now, I just want to keep adding value and keep giving you these tips and I’d love to see your questions. I’d love to see you come back and tell me your insights, what was most valuable to you.

And I will take us on a logical sequential journey over the next few weeks and together we will get control of our emotional responses and we will be able to navigate beyond COVID-19. Going from feelings of fear to feelings of faith, going from uncertainty to clarity, and being able to in the moment recognise the emotion we’re going through, allow that to happen and then regulate our response.

Well, that’s it from me for this week. Join me again next week when we will go into the first competency, and that is emotional self-awareness where I will teach you how to know in the moment, how to recognise in the moment which emotion you’re going through so that you can then regulate the correct emotion. I’ll see you then.