Use Emotional Intelligence to Tackle The Tough Stuff
As a leader, you are looked to for your reaction in many tough situations. And your reaction sets the tone for how the rest of the team will proceed through the situation themselves.
During the 2021 Top Producer Summit Dr. JP Pawliw-Fry, co-founder of Institute for Health and Human Potential and NY Times best-selling author, gives tips on how to reframe hard situations so they aren’t happening to you but rather happening for you.
Pawliw-Fry has worked with the NFL, NBA, Navy Seals and Olympic athletes. He says the most common barrier to success is our reaction to challenges, which can be managed through using emotional intelligence.
He shares in hard to have conversations, hard to make decisions and hard to do tasks, people can easily navigate the first 92%, but it’s the final 8% of completing one of those three that falls victim to one of two predictable behaviors—avoidance or making a mess of it.
“If you can manage these moments, the world is yours,” he says. “By our data, most people are avoiders, and if you know your patterns, you can manage around it.”
He shares there are two risks to not completing that final 8%. There can be a loss of external reputation from your team, and there’s also a loss of internal reputation within yourself.
“When we choose to avoid a situation, or take an off-ramp or make a mess of something, it effects how we are seen and how we view ourselves,” he says. “If you manage through that last 8% it means you don’t burn up energy in anxiety, you’re managing intentions, and you stay in relationship with those who are you having the tough conversation.”
Our brains our designed to make us feel before we think. If you can hijack that natural process to allow yourself to stay engaged in a challenge rather than react emotionally, you can chart a course for success.
As a tool to assess yourself, Pawliw-Fry shares these three ways to know when you are reacting on emotion:
- How you feel physically. For example, heat in your face/head, tightness in your chest, or butterflies in your stomach.
- Having a sense of certainty. This is when the world becomes very black/white or right/wrong. It results in being closed off from the conversation at hand.
- Urgency. If you feel like an event demands action right now, it means you are overlooking the value of analyzing the situation.
As a tool to help leaders start their day with mindfulness, movement and mental training, he has a free podcast, The Last 8% Morning. Click here to learn more.
And you can see his full presentation, The Calm Person in The Boat: Leverage the Power Of Emotional Intelligence, from the 2021 Top Producer Summit. You can still register for access to the full event’s presentations through March 31. Use the code “ONDEMAND” to take $25 off your registration fee.
