Kerry Goyette

The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (You Can Actually Use)

Kerry is the CEO of Aperio Consulting Group, a corporate consulting firm that provides workplace analytics and training to build high performance cultures. Her TEDx talk ‘Stop Trying to Motivate Your Employees’ has been viewed over a million times.

Her book The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (You Can Actually Use) breaks down the neuroscience behind emotional intelligence (EQ) and explores how we can leverage our skills in this field to better understand ourselves, our relationships and our environments.

The core of the book is split into three parts:

Decision-making

- Focuses on the brain science behind emotional intelligence (EQ).

Agility

- Focuses on how we can reimagine our environment by applying emotional intelligence (EQ).

Relationships

- Focuses on how we can re-think our approaches to motivation by using emotional intelligence (EQ).

Here are some of the ideas that stood out for us after we finished reading the book.

Switching between autopilot and manual settings

Planning the workload between our limbic brain and prefrontal cortex.

Improving our mental agility starts with recognising the amount of data are brains are attempting to process. Whilst we want to make well-thought-out conscious decisions as much as possible, it’s important to appreciate that the part of the brain that is responsible for this (the prefrontal cortex) is a limited resource. Using it requires us to engage manual mode when it comes to our thinking, and because prioritising and making decisions are energy sucking tasks - we need to know when to lift some of the burden.

President Obama only wore blue or grey suits because he wanted to focus his decision-making energy elsewhere. He was effectively delegating duties to his autopilot mode of thinking (the limbic brain) in order to get a favourable result.

Thinking about how we can set our days up to make the most of our prefrontal cortex, means planning out how we can avoid splitting its attention (and over stretching it) with less important decisions that are best left to our limbic brain.

“Dilemma flipping”

Recognising the difference between fixing a problem and managing a dilemma.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) can help us shine a light on the difference between problems and dilemmas. Understanding the distinction between the two can often help us to focus our energy accordingly. A problem is something we (or a small group of people) can identify, wrap our heads around and find a solution. Dilemmas, on the other hand, are continuously moving targets which are more messy and complicated.

However, because dilemmas are usually connected to something that matters to us - we should still seek to manage them. A good way to do this is start looking at them as openings for practising innovative thinking. The key here is knowing we need to turn down the limbic part of our brain that may instinctively respond to a dilemma with fear as part of a ‘fight or flight’ response and instead bring our prefrontal cortex to the forefront, which will allows us to creatively build out options to tackle the situation. This is where “dilemma flipping” comes into play and where we can start reframing an unsolvable challenge as an opportunity.

An example of this in action is where Disney World faced the dilemma of long lines at their amusement parks. It wasn’t a problem that was fixable - but it was important that the negative effects of this where mitigated. To address this they decided to provide video entertainment, wait-time indicators and an app for visitors to interact with whilst they waited.

Understanding your threats

Getting to the core of our emotional turmoil.

To get to the root of an issue we need to explore what is triggering our concerns about it. Often the problem stems from us interpreting the issue as a threat. Threats trump rewards - which is why they occupy a lot of our thoughts. Identifying the specific threat we are encountering is a helpful starting point and it is useful to consider six common ones that can stir-up uncomfortable emotions and exhaust our capacity to think clearly:

• Lack of clarity

• Competing priorities

• Lack of autonomy

• The fear of failure

• Lack of recognition and validation

• Lack of fairness

Once we have some clarity around the threat we are experiencing we can start taking steps. The first step, involves asking ourselves specific questions in order stop us ruminating or using our ‘fight or flight’ response. For example, “If the issue could be resolved, what would change?” helps us carefully look beyond the present to spot the differences between our current thinking and where we would like our thinking to be.

The second step, is talking through where we are at with someone else. According to social neuroscientists, our brains are designed to connect and interact with others, especially during times of stress. Bringing a trusted party into the equation enables us to start shifting from using the emotional part of our brain to the thinking part as we begin engaging in collaborative problem-solving.

Understanding your derailers

Stopping our impulses from taking over.

A specific ‘fight or flight’ impulse that served us well at one point in time, will often end up holding us back in the majority of cases. For instance, if blaming someone else got us out of trouble when we were younger might means we might subconsciously resort to this type behaviour - even though that will often present its own set of problems.

These impulses can be boiled down to six common detailers (things that can literally derail us or throw us off course!)

• Conflict Avoidance

• Impulsiveness

• Blame-shifting

• Control

• Perfectionism

• Power Hungry

Whilst, their habitual nature makes them challenging to shake off, the good news is that drawing on our emotional intelligence (EQ) can help us respond to each of them. Here are examples for three of them:

• Conflict Avoidance: Using escape or intimidation to mask insecurities.

  Recognise the fear that that’s making you avoid the challenge will come back and bite you if you don’t deal with it. Label the “fear”, start writing a plan and sense-check it with someone you trust.

• Impulsiveness: The degree to which a person can control the need for immediate gratification.

  Anticipate the consequences by asking problem questions: “What might I have missed here?'“ or “How might this be perceived by other people inside and outside of the situation?”.

• Blame-shifting: This is a bias toward exaggerating the negative and feeling like a victim.

  Recognise the assumptions you are using to justify blame-shifting. Assuming you are faultless, means you rationalise that you should not be blamed. Assuming you are powerless, means you rationalise that you should be blamed. Assuming someone is bad or mean, means you rationalise that is OK to blame them. Acknowledge that these are only assumptions and allow yourself to admit to your failures (not faultless), take action (not powerless), and build relationships (others do things without evil intent).

Your thoughts:

Have you read The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (You Can Actually Use) already?

Do you think these ideas are useful?

Please feel free to leave a comment below.