Emotional Intelligence—From a Different Perspective!

SARAH SHAFER: Emotional Intelligence from a Different Prospective hosted by HRDQU and presented by James Evanow. Today’s webinar will last around one hour if you have any questions you can always type them into the questions box. We will be answering questions as they come and live at the end of the presentation or as a follow-up by email. My name is Sarah Shafer and I will moderate today’s webinar.

James is an international speaker, author, coach, and serial entrepreneur. What sets him apart is his 23-year journey as a sea captain. His passion for helping people inspired him to write his first book, Wisdom from the Sea. James has had diverse experience in the business world. He is a certified life coach and has trained a personal empowerment coach under the Tony Robbins coaching program, Strategic Intervention. He has traveled throughout the United States and Canada conducting training on EI and creative leadership in over 46 cities. His flagship program, Chart Your Course, is an encompassing training to break destructive patterns that limit your growth in business and in life. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

JAMES EVANOW: Okay, thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, everybody, or good morning depending on where you’re located. I’m in San Jose and still beautiful here and I’m really honored to be on the webinar today. So, let’s get going here in the sake of time. I am a speaker and a trainer and a life coach. And, as Sarah mentioned I have been through the Strategic Intervention course which is a Tony Robbins and Chloe Madanes program that really added to my emotional intelligence training. So, I’m pretty excited about that part and I was looking for the right program that would really complement what I was teaching people. And I found the right program, so I’m very excited about that. I’ll talk about that later. I am a speaker and a trainer as I said, but what makes me a little bit unique compared to a lot of speakers out there and coaches is that I am a sea captain as well. I spent a lot of time at sea, I know what it’s like to go through very rough conditions at sea and on land. I own my own businesses, or several businesses, actually. And sometimes we experience turbulence. We have the storms that keep coming and it’s just really amazing sometimes. I’ve been in 30-foot seas and 70-knot winds and you really wonder about your life and your safety and your future and all that stuff. It’s very similar to what happens on land. So with that said, I am also I like to call myself a fisher of men and women just because of the fact that being a fisherman I’m looking for people right now that I can help get on course in their lives or get on track in their lives and to share things like emotional intelligence, leadership training, and different types of things that will enhance what they are doing and help them to become more successful. And, as Sarah mentioned, I am a serial entrepreneur and it’s something that I look at it as a curse sometimes. I don’t know how many entrepreneurs are on the call, but, sometimes as you know the ideas keep coming and you really have to reign that part of it in. But I’m getting a lot of pleasure at working with a lot of other entrepreneurs and helping them get their businesses up and running.

So, what is emotional intelligence? Why is it when we hear this term we immediately think of the brain? It’s something that is a question that I really pondered. I spent two years traveling across the United States and Canada and training on the topics of emotional intelligence and leadership. The book by Daniel Goldman is a fabulous book. If you haven’t read that, I really recommend that you picked that up and you read it. I’m not a PhD, let’s get that right out of the way, there’s a lot of real great people out there talking about emotional intelligence. And what I started thinking about was is it really coming from the brain because when they’re talking about emotions, something about that doesn’t make sense to me. I know there’s probably a scientific or logical explanation for why that is, but when we’re talking about that it’s like isn’t it coming a little bit from the heart? So today you are going to learn a little bit about how to really connect with your people. If you are in HR or CEO, upper-level management if you are a supervisor or manager, whatever your role is at your job or whatever it is that you do, maybe you are an entrepreneur and you have your own business, sometimes connecting with people is difficult because we don’t really know why they are acting the way they are acting. Sometimes we are having our own situations that are going on and we’re going to touch on that a little bit. So you can connect better with other people. Also, how to really connect with yourself and I use the word really and it’s underlined here for a reason is that we can connect with our self, but, you know, the bottom line is sometimes you almost have to think to yourself, it’s almost like there are two of us. And if you’ve ever been in a situation where you have said I told myself I was going to do that. Or you do something and you have this conversation with yourself and you start beating yourself up. If you think about that it’s almost like there are two of us at times. And if you pray or you meditate and you throw thoughts out to the universe or to God or whatever you want to call that sometimes you really have to wonder where these thoughts are coming from. So I’m going to talk a little bit about that. How can we connect more with our true selves? And how the ego can control our very existence, every move we make, every decision we make is based on a belief that the ego will take and run with. So we will go a little bit deeper on that. And then how to break free from old patterns because, let’s face it, we all have patterns. And sometimes we do things and you know it takes like 23 days I think to actually break a habit, if you are procrastinator, you’re going through things, you are doing things, you’re constantly going through these changes in your emotions from depression to anger to happiness, whatever that looks like, that’s very typical of most human beings.

So, who is in control? Is it the brain, is at the heart, or is it the ego? Let’s face it, the brain is not necessarily your best friend. Sometimes the brain will take advantage or take control of us and it will take us down the wrong path in life. We have decisions to make. I wrote a book called Wisdom from the Sea, and at the end of that book in the last chapter, there’s a chapter called the Pirate Within and the reason I use that metaphor is that it’s almost as if there’s something inside of us that when things get really nasty or something happens in our life or somebody confronts us then that pirate wants to wage war upon that situation. And this all happens in the brain so we have to be careful about what the brain wants us to believe. It’s not always to be trusted. Sometimes we will make rash decisions. Sometimes we will get in a situation where we might be better off if we just take a minute to walk away or we take a minute to go somewhere and relax a little bit before we make a decision. And we store a lot of old patterns. There’s a lot of things in our brains that, there’s some real, real heavy science out there talking about how we might actually store beliefs, and store thoughts in our neuro-skeletal system in our brain and what they call a INAUDIBLE. And there’s a great book out by Michael Talbot called the Holographic Universe, and if you get a chance to read that, again, it’s like, where to our thoughts come from? We have to stop and think about that. We will go into that a little bit deeper.

So, the amygdala, if you have read the book, Emotional Intelligence, if you know about the brain there is a cluster of two small glands about the size of an almond and that’s exactly what amygdala means in Greek is almond. In this little tiny almond gland is in control largely of what we do whenever something happens to us. So if you picture yourself, a great example is if you’re walking somewhere and it’s dark and you’re by yourself and there are no streetlights, and you see somebody coming out of an alley, a shadowy figure coming out of an alley, and your first reaction is going to be there is danger coming. Or maybe a dog confronts you and your first reaction is fear. That’s what the amygdala does, it’s almost like a safety mechanism that’s in our brain that can really control everything we do. So, that shadowy figure might not be a mean person at all, but, our first natural thought is to defend ourselves or to be careful. So that’s great and it is an important thing to happen in our nervous system is to be able to be aware of danger when it comes, but, there are times when we can almost see where the amygdala can hijack what we are thinking. So what I mean by that is when we have a thought, sometimes we are quick to react to that thought. And it’s really hard to break that pattern. It’s hard to break away from that need to react quickly. In some countries, in some cultures, people will take like five seconds before they respond to an answer, when they are asked a question. Sometimes they’ll take a little bit longer. In the United States we’re pretty quick to want to get that answer right back out and there’s an extreme need to respond. And when I call this is cerebral terrorism. It’s when that amygdala is in control of our thought process and we’re really quick to respond to whatever is confronting us at the time.

So, let’s go to the heart. What do we think about only see the heart? Well naturally the first thing we think about his love. And this is kind of like, if you are thinking, if you’re looking at the heart from a Hallmark card point of view then it’s probably something that’s dealing with maybe it’s compassion, empathy, which by the way if you know about emotional intelligence, which I know there is a lot of people talk about that on HRDQ webinars, is that compassion, empathy, self-awareness are some of the core tenets of emotional intelligence. So when you’re thinking about the heart and we are thinking about love and compassion, and empathy, that’s why I came up with heartfelt intelligence. I really felt that emotional intelligence is a great topic. I know it’s being embraced in a lot of corporations right now. There is a lot of, I think it was the number one topic again last year for trainings in corporate America. And it’s making a huge difference in a lot of corporations and a lot of different cultures. But that’s why I came up with the idea that heartfelt intelligence is that when we are coming from a place of the heart or we are coming from compassion and empathy and we really want to help people, we really want to connect at that heartfelt level, I think that our mind is probably the last thing we want involved with that in the sense that it’s going to try to dominate what we are thinking. And so that’s where the ego comes in. I love this little gremlin figure, for those of you who have seen the movie the Gremlins, that’s my idea of what the ego looks like. It’s like that little creature that wants to manipulate everything that we do. And if you think about that, you know, largely, is conditioned by the past. We are conditioned by the environment that we grew up in, the culture we are in as we are growing up through life, and our upbringing. Some of us had very great childhoods, others had childhoods that were not that great. And a lot of people who are very great people these days went through a tough childhood and they came out smelling like a rose, they came out very powerful and very educated. I think Ben Carson is a great example of that. Somebody who grew up in Detroit, going through some very hard times, and now he’s running for president. He’s a neurosurgeon. So, obviously depends on the individual, dealing with their environment that they grew up in. And are they going to succeed through that? But usually the ego really starts kicking in when we start that point, we get to that point in our lives when start putting vowels together. We are understanding words and we can start to realize that we have ownership and things. We have, for instance a little boy that has his first ball or his first tricycle, and when somebody takes that what is the first thing that comes out of his mouth? And if you want to type that into the chat box right now what is the first word that we have when we identify with things that are ours? Okay, and I see mine. The word is mine, exactly. Thank you for putting that in there. And then the next thing we hear is no. So we go through our life and this ego is based on these different identities or different identifications with things in our life. And then the worst part is when we are growing up we are constantly being told that we can’t do certain things. That we can’t succeed in life. Maybe we are too short, we are not fast enough, we’re not smart enough, we get that brutal abuse growing up through life. So there is a way out of this type of mindset though of ego’s dominating it and we need to look to the heart. And it starts with our beliefs. So, again, we’re talking about our beliefs when we are born, we come into life, and we are constantly being told throughout our life maybe it’s by our coaches, our teachers, our pastors, maybe it’s the friend, a cousin, your parents. Different people are putting beliefs on us. But it usually starts when we’re going through our life we a lot of us self talk we’re talking about how we should do things. Can I get that promotion? Can I get that can I start this business? Can I make it doing certain things in life? Sometimes we will beat ourselves down. We will have the belief in our mind that we can’t do that. And then like I said when we have others in our life that are constantly bombarding us with thoughts. And I want to point one thing out here too that I always make a point to get the elephant out of the room on this. When I’m talking about beliefs in this sense I’m talking about limiting beliefs. I’m not talking about religions, or traditions, or anything that we have that are good in our lives that we cherish. I’m talking about the things that will hold us back in life. Possibly negative beliefs that are there.

The media, right now what is happening, I see cable TV for the most part is really starting to decrease in numbers because people are starting to go toward different sources of information. The Internet is huge for putting a lot of information into our minds. We all know what that is like. We can get online and get lost in Facebook. We can get lost in like a news channel that keeps having its pop-up ads pop up. The media has an incredible way to persuade our minds. This is been going on for a long time. It’s propaganda in a lot of ways. An example of that is Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany how he was able to convince people that they should do a certain thing because things would get better in their lives. And so when people are feeling enough pain, it’s very easy for somebody that is charismatic and somebody that is powerful to be able to sway their opinions. And that happened in Jonestown with Jim Jones in Guyana. There are some people that have that kind of a power, but I see that happening with the media, with TV channels and obviously depending on what you want to see and what your politics are, you can choose whatever channel you want to make you feel good. To get that information and to have that feeling that you are on the right track in you’re getting the right information. So why is this important? Because the reason it is important is we need to break away from that sometimes. We need to step back and to be able to think clearly for ourselves. And then we have future beliefs and these fall in the categories of worry, when you’re constantly worried about your bills, you’re constantly worried about you know some people worry about whether they will ever have a relationship, some people worry about whether their relationship is going to fall apart. There’s a ton of different things that we bring upon ourselves that are really quite honestly made up in our heads. And so we really need to be able to step back and sort that out as well. And one of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain was that he had more problems than most people in the world. He said I’ve had more problems than most people in the world, but the good news for me is that most of them did not come true. And I love that quote because it really it explains it perfectly how we can make things up in our heads that aren’t true and I am guilty of that as a lot of people do that. And to be able to master that is extremely important.

So, with that said, where do our thoughts come from? I talked about that a little bit. Your thoughts, for the most part come from your mind and you get used to your patterns and you get into a situation where you’re constantly doing things in your life. You been taught things by a lot of people. But, if you open your mind up to the possibilities that maybe these thoughts are coming from somewhere else. There’s a very great possibility of that happening. If you are a religious person you are spiritual, your thoughts come from where they come from. We have no control of that. But it’s what happens when these thoughts come into our minds how we interpret things. And the meaning that we give to the events in our lives so what will happen as it will become a feeling and then it will become an emotion. And so, when these emotions start to overwhelm us, whether it’s sadness, anger, frustration, happiness, whatever that feeling that emotion looks like when it’s coming in, this is where we really, this is the secret to what I’m talking about, of being able to separate that initial thought that comes right from the amygdala through the process to your emotions. And being able to step in between that and take a step back and take a look at that. Then our emotions will obviously affect our behaviors and what we do. It will affect our buying decisions, how we buy things, it will affect how when we want to have a job, we have a passion for different things in our lives. It will affect whether we don’t do things in our life. Things that we know we should be doing. There are a lot of people on this call right now that maybe they want a promotion, maybe they want something to change in their life, but they just don’t want to take that step. And that could be coming from fear. A lot of people live in fear. Constant fear. So, it’s being able again to see these things and it’s quite honestly the rules that we put to the events in our life that make the difference. And I’ll go into that here in a minute.

So, when we’re talking about our different values in our life, I put I have a list here some values. I want you to take a piece of paper and a pen take a minute here and write down, you can use some of these if you like, but write down some the things that are really very important to you in your life. Some of the things that you cherish the most, and you might not be obtaining some of these things in your life. You might want to think back to when you are a teenager or when you were younger when you had all these ideas about how life was going to look. How things were going to be when you got to retirement age, how things were going to be when you got out of college, and really think about that for a minute and write down a list of things that really, you don’t have to have these in your life right now, you can be wishing that you had these in your life. And if you feel like it, go ahead and type a few of those into the chat box some ideas here that are not on that list. And I want you to take this list and what I do is I work with my clients and what I find out every time that we go through this initial list is that we will reprioritize these values and what we’ll find out is that the values have been knocked out of alignment. And when in fact somebody thinks that love is their primary value in life, then it very well could turn out to be wealth, it could turn out to be adventure, they may want more variety in their lives. And it’s just a series of questions that we go through, but we get these back into alignment. Because what happens is much like the ocean, when I am at sea, you can see a storm coming. And believe me I have had plenty of weather reports, I’ve had situations where I have been at sea a long ways offshore like 1500 miles offshore north of Hawaii, and you can see a storm coming on a weather fax and when a storm approaches, you know it’s going to be severe and sometimes they go through this in life. Sometimes we know that things are going to get rough. What happens is the storms will hit us and they will come in and this tumultuous event will happen in your life and will knock your values out of alignment. Over time it’s almost like if you can imagine a cliff where storms have battered a cliff that the erosion starts to happen. This is very similar to what happens in life. And it’s largely caused by the storms, but also the ego again, the little gremlin guy. There are a lot of things that happen in our life where the ego will dominate this and then the pirate within will come in and feed off of the ego. And a good example of this is for instance is when you’re having a great day and then you go to work and somebody jumps in and gets in your face right away or something maybe if you are in the real estate world, you have a big deal that’s going to close and you get to the closing date and something goes wrong with the lender and you don’t close your deal. You can go from having a great day to instant sadness. And I put a bomb here because largely what happens is it will actually blow your values out of place and, I love this gremlin because he’s guilty of causing this to happen in our life. I hope you like the gremlin is much as I do. What will happen is a lot of times in the workplace when people come to work people are going through a lot of stuff right now and for people that are in upper-level management with the corporations are starting to see and starting to realize is that people are dealing with a lot. And since the recession in 2007 and 2008, I see they call it the great recession now, a lot of people have still not rebounded from that. They are still reeling from that. And a lot of people are noticing that their commutes are taking a lot longer to get to work in the morning. They’re dealing with more stress. I don’t know if you realize this or not but there’s 40% of the people in the United States are living paycheck to paycheck. 40% and the same 40% have no savings. And, for the most part, a lot of people are very concerned about their retirement. I was in San Diego here a month ago and I did a talk for a bank at their headquarters and we had a lot of people there and it was amazing. Some of those folks had worked there for 30 years. And I had this gentleman get up to do an exercise with me and he, I told him to think of something that really made him depressed. He was thinking about his retirement. The reality is that he was probably never going to retire. And some people are starting to realize this and some people were smart with their money and other people weren’t as smart as others and some people just lost it in the recession and mathematically there’s no way they’re going to recover that.

So with that said, there is a lot of things happening in our culture within the last decade that are causing people to really have a hard time dealing with things. And so when this comes into the workplace, one of the major effects it has is that you’re going to see a huge amount of turnover. And what they are finding out is that training of emotional intelligence training that’s being embraced by major companies like Southwest Airlines, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Estée Lauder, for a few examples, and I know there are a ton more, is there seeing their turnover rate go down. They are seeing people are starting to really be in a place of where they can be a little bit more of who they are, their original self, their core essence of who they are. And they’re letting them do that in their finding out that it’s helping them with sales. It’s helping them in a lot of different areas. You know as I was looking at the news yesterday there are some things happening right now. I mean, the politics of what’s happening in this election this year, people are really angry with what’s happening in the politics in this country. There are millions and billions of dollars being sent to other countries and there are things happening constantly and I think people are really starting to take very close notice of that and so any time somebody goes to work and they go and watch the news, they are dealing with these things and usually it’s depressing and they drive to work in their commute in the morning and they listen to the news and there’s more bad news and so it’s getting away from that and being able to clear your mind of that, but it’s almost impossible to escape. I mean it gets you in the grocery stores when you walk through the checkout line, there are newspapers there. There’s constantly some form of information coming some way for the most part. These headlines are just from the other day, you can see the dates on there. Are we losing our values in the West? Are things starting to change and that’s in the New York Times. The stock market, what is fueling the stock market, nobody really knows, it’s amazing to watch and if you’re going to play the stock market obviously you better have a pretty good seatbelt because of the roller coaster ride that is happening there. Last week I know we saw some swings of 600 points. Day after day it’s back and forth. It’s very intense. And this affects the 401(k)s. It affects the IRAs and the different investments that people have in their retirement accounts. So I’m sure that that again is something that really is putting a lot of concern in people’s minds. And then again it could be interest rates, trigger a global that crisis and there’s just a ton of things going on right now in the world economy. Hewlett-Packard, this is right at home here in San Jose is that Hewlett-Packard is laying off 30,000 people. And they are restructuring their entire workforce because they need to. They have to prepare for what is coming down the pike with competition. So with that said, there’s a lot of things to be worried about. And you should worry. People should worry. They should be concerned about retirement. They should be concerned about their families and what they are going to do to make a difference in their futures. But to dwell on that and to be in a place of constant worry is not good. It’s not good for their health, it’s not good for anything.

Is there a way out of it? And I want to talk to you about the crazy eight pattern. And this is something that came from my certification program with the Robbins Madanes Company.

The crazy eight pattern, if you think about, Tony Robbins talks about this, and when you get stuck in a it looks like an infinity symbol, but he calls it a crazy eight. And when you are in a place where you’re having a bad day, and this is what I’m teaching people is that when I go into corporations and I talk to folks is that you can break out of these situations. Because you’re going to have emotions, it’s impossible not to have an emotion. It’s just the way it is. You can you can be a Zen master sitting on top of a mountain somewhere, you are still going to have emotions. You can never get rid of that. So, if you are having a bad day, and some things happen that really is causing you some friction in your life, for instance, you’re driving to work in the morning and you have some bad news. How long does it take for you to go from being sad and depressed when somebody cuts you off, maybe it’s like a little Subaru or those little fast cars and they are doing about 150 and they swerved in front of you and they almost hit you or better yet it’s one of these motorcycle guys that come just screaming up between the cars when you’re sitting in stopped traffic, and I know that’s a big one and a lot of people get really angry. How long does it take you to go from feeling sad and depressed to being really, really ticked off? And it doesn’t take really long, does it? It’s like maybe a nanosecond. And you go right into anger, you going to frustration. I mean things happen very quickly and it’s a very normal thing because the human nervous system will never stay in one place for very long. If I ask you to start crying right now or to get really emotional can you keep crying forever? No, you can’t keep crying. So you’re going to shift. You’re going to go into a different emotion. And you start getting this out-of-control feeling and you feel like you’re powerless to change things in your life. And this is where a lot of people are. And there is good reason for that, but, there is a way out of this. What’s happening is you get into a place of feeling out of control or powerless to change something, who normally feels the brunt of that when you are acting that way? It’s usually going to be your spouse, it’s going to be your kids, and it may be yourself. It may be that you start taking it out on yourself. You may be beating yourself up. And if you are going to work and you’re taking this same type of emotions or this frustration or sadness into work, it’s going to affect your performance. We all know somebody that’s got a great cloud over their head when they go to work in the morning. Maybe they are that way every day. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s your boss. Maybe if you are CEO of a company you are constantly in place and things out are not going good at home and you have got a lot of pressure on you, that’s trickling down through the entire corporation. It’s affecting everything you do in your life. So, you don’t want that to happen. You don’t want when we’re talking about communication between different departments and a corporation, I started a clothing line and I sold it to a corporation back in Alabama and I spent quite a bit of time back there for about a year and helping them get that product off the ground. I spent a lot of time in meetings and, man, there were a lot of meetings. There are a lot of things in corporate America that was really foreign to me. But they are used that lifestyle and it’s a very normal thing for them to go through that. One of the biggest complaints I heard was one department was always waiting on another department. And so when we have interdepartment difficulties or conflict that’s where this breaking free of being in a pattern and getting out of this negative mindset we can start communicating with somebody else, that’s where emotional intelligence communication really makes a difference.

So what happens to people when they are in the situation? They get in a downward spiral. Will actually put them in a place where they will start eating more, maybe they will start doing pharmaceutical drugs, one of the biggest perils we have in our society today is the fact that we have so many different types of drugs and you’ll see these drugs on the TV in the evening and they make them look very appealing and the next thing you know they are going into how these things can cause internal bleeding and you’re going to be squirting blood out of your eyes all these terrible things and it could possibly cause death, the people are still taking these drugs for different things. Even hearing the side effects, there are some people, this country is being medicated by different pharmaceuticals. And alcohol, a lot of alcoholism is going on. You will see in the form of gambling and one of the biggest things is that it takes such a toll on their relationships. And a lot of people don’t know this, but, the number one coaching programs right now is relationship coaching. And a lot of younger people are actually getting that coaching before they get married so that is pretty encouraging to see that. So the only way to break out of these patterns is to look at the events in your life. Look at what is happening in your life and if you really stop and think about your emotions. Just picture this for a minute, picture a thermostat. For those of you who have ever set up thermostat, there are probably people in here who have not set up thermostat. But the way it works is you set a high temperature and a low temperature that will turn the air conditioner on when it is really hot. You set that and for a lot of us some of us are setting our air-conditioner to come on at 80° and then you want the heat to come on when it gets down to 72°. It’s a very short range and a lot of people have the same thing with their emotions. It’s like a trip wire goes off and it’s based on the beliefs that we have in our lives. It’s based on all the things that we’ve learned throughout our life. We set rules. We have different rules that are set to the point of how we react to a situation. So if you can expand that and widen that range up to where you’re slowing down a little bit, you are thinking about things before you react especially if you are in a management position. Especially if you are in a situation where you’re making big decisions. You need to slow down before you react. Listen to the people when they are coming to you with their problem. This is the art of being able to take this type of training and I’m seeing some pretty miraculous things happening with it when you can step back and change the way that you react to the events in your life. Change the rules.

And it comes from what we call a Triad. And largely at your physiology. It’s how you are carrying yourself at work. It’s how you are acting around other people. If you’re coming in with your shoulders slumped forward if you are presenter if you don’t have that pep in your step, you don’t have that positive mentality about things in life, then there is a very good chance the people are going to pick up on that. I’m reading another really great book right now called Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. In this book was actually written in the year I was born, 1959. Kind of dating myself here but, by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone and they talk about having a positive mental attitude, the PMA as they call it, as opposed to having a negative attitude. And you have to have that positive mental attitude all the time, but it really depends on what you focus on. Because if you are focusing on negative things in your life, you’re going to get more negative things. People will not give you the opportunities that you are seeking in your life. And sometimes it’s very hard to stay positive but, as far as I’m concerned, it really comes down to one word and one word only is faith. You have to have faith that things are going to work out for you in your life. You have to be positive and think that that is going to happen and most successful people have that mindset. And again it is the meaning that we give to different things in our life so it’s very important that we slow down. My company is called Pace Yourself Empowerment Systems and the reason I name that company that name is that I’m working with entrepreneurs, I’m working with executives, I’m working with people and the idea is to slow down yourself. Again, it’s like I said before, talking about the I and the self it’s almost like as if there are two of us. So we can have the presence of mind to step back and slow ourselves down and take a good look at what rules we are applying to the events that happen in our life, that are happening in our life. This is where things will start to change.

So the six human needs, we all have six human needs according to human needs psychology and there is certainty, uncertainty, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. And growth and contribution are more optional for more people. This is coming more from a place of a spiritual mindset. In other words if you want to grow, it’s a choice. A lot of people don’t care about that. If you want to be in a place of contribution it takes a little extra effort to do that. It’s something that a lot of us need to work on, me included. I mean the more we can do to help people, the better off the world is going to be. I think you can all agree with that. But the other four, and they are going to be met one way or another. And like I was saying, love and connection right now is one of the biggest topics in this country is there again going back to the recession there are a lot of people that were divorced as a result of what happened during that time. And the divorce rates have continued to spike since then. And there are a lot of people now that are looking for that love and connection. There are a lot of people who are looking for that partner. Or they are looking to belong to something. Meet up groups are through the roof right now because of the fact that they’ve created software app that allows people to be able to connect with other people. And I know people that are actually have like 30 meet up groups going at once. But when we go back to the top of the list, certainty and significance are two of the things that are going to be met either way. And a lot of people want certainty. They want that ability to know that they are going to have that job tomorrow. They want to be able to know that they are going to have a retirement. And significance, a lot of people want to have meaning in their life. A lot of people are looking at their lives and they are starting to look at their hole cards and they are saying this isn’t what I thought I was going to end up with in this point in my life. They are starting to see that maybe they want to do a little bit more. Maybe they want that promotion now. Maybe they realize they need to make a little bit extra money because they’re going to have to work longer. Maybe they it’s a matter of having a job that you really enjoy doing. Things have changed. Things are constantly changing. I saw something else the other day that blew me away. They are saying that robots in 20 years from now can replace 35% of sales jobs. I know it’s not funny, but, when you think about that robots are going to be selling things, it makes you wonder. So technology is changing. Things are constantly changing, really it’s not that funny, but, I get a kick out of robots. But, you know, a lot of people are looking at a variety, too, so that’s something that you could look at that and variety may come up in the point of just wanting more adventure in your life. I know a lot of people are doing a lot of traveling. A lot of younger people are doing a lot of traveling. And so, these needs are going to be met one way or another, but, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are always going to be positive. For instance, you can have certainty in your life, and some people have certainty by dominating their partner. And knowing that they are in control of their relationship and they actually get to be in place of being abusive. And a lot of people don’t want that in her life anymore. They don’t want to be yelled at. They don’t want to be costly bombarded. This will happen in management. People will dominate people. And so it is something to really take notice of. Significance might come in the form of the young person joining a gang so that they could have significance. It could be that they join Isis for God’s sake. It’s just significance can come up. These needs are going to be met in one way or another. It’s just human nature.

So, what human needs are affecting our society right now? It’s a great question, and I think we can all agree that certainty is probably one of the main ones. I think retirement, Social Security, a lot of things are happening. It’s putting a lot of worry in people’s hearts. People want to make sure that they have a good job that they can enjoy for a long time. Significance is really important. Having a good solid relationship, belonging to an organization that has a great culture. Being in a situation where you can work your way up the ladder and be able to be heard when you are at work. And then love and connection, connecting with other people, you know most human beings when they are born need to be nurtured. They need to be held. If they are not held nurtured they will probably die and the bottom line is this goes through our entire life.

So, love and connection is a very important thing. That’s why emotional intelligence is making such a difference in a lot of businesses right now. That’s why I’m talking about heartfelt intelligence. Because when we are talking about love and connection we’re talking about really relating with the people that work in the company. Really caring about them, they’re not just a number. And I know for the HR people on this call or for bosses or people that have to let people go you know it’s not a good feeling. It’s not a good thing and so we want to see our companies be productive. We want to see successes. We want to see good things happening. So who is in control? I’ll go back, let’s recap. Is it the brain, the heart, or the ego? If your ego is running your program, you really need to step back and take a look at that. If your company is running from a place of complete ego, all about the bottom line, hey, profits are great, but the truth of the matter is you’ve got to have good people. One of the biggest industries in San Jose right now a very big industry, are the people who are out finding new talent for companies. There are some big events coming up here in the next few months that are just huge conventions about headhunters and people who are out trying to get talent. There are a lot of people coming to the United States from other countries. I know Facebook is looking for people I think it’s N14 it’s a visa or some type of a visa they’re trying to go through that they can bring more people in to take these jobs and it’s one thing that’s good about this country is that it’s a great place to come to but there’s a lot of people here right now that would love to have those jobs. So does the brain dominate everything that happens in our life or is it possible that we can start looking at implementing different types of cultures into our businesses? That are gonna be a little bit more coming from this heartfelt intelligence? Absolutely, it’s happening.

So, again, what is emotional intelligence? Well there are a lot of interpretations of what that is. It’s actually just two words that mean for the most part that we have the ability to think from a place of a more emotional mindset. And for those of you that don’t know this you can improve your emotional intelligence throughout your life. As opposed to your IQ which is set in stone when you are 13. You can improve your emotional intelligence throughout your life. But what I like to look at it is now that I’ve got a few more tools in my toolkit coming from my coaching program is that it’s how we interpret the rules that control these emotions. That’s where the true intelligence is at. It is being able to step back take a look at why we think what we think and be okay with that. And this is where we can really start to calm down a little bit and start thinking before we react to situations in our life. It might be in a relationship, and might be in your work, it might be anything. It could be anything in your life. And it’s slowing down to be able to see that clearly. So that’s why I’ve been doing some trainings already. I’m getting a real good reception to this Heartfelt Intelligence program and I’ve got the leading with Heartfelt Intelligence I’ve got Selling With Heartfelt Intelligence and the Selling With Heartfelt Intelligence is more a place of communication. How we are communicating with our customers. How we are communicating in our departments in our corporations, how we are dealing with relationships at home. And it just being a place of pure communication and being more present when we communicate with others. If you are a speaker or you are somebody who is into the coaching profession, it’s being able to speak from a place of presence. And really become authentic. Authenticity is the biggest thing right now. I think people want more than anything, they don’t want more B.S. And you know, Donald Trump, like him or don’t like him, at least he is saying what he thinks for the most part. I think you are seeing that with Ben Carson, with Bernie Sanders. These different politicians are being authentic. They’re saying what they think and people appreciate that. While being authentic is very important right now because people are learning that they don’t want anything that’s not authentic in their life.

So I am available to come in to your corporation or your company and I do values assessment, we do some mindfulness training which is a big part of the communication piece. And I also do human needs assessment and I’ll give everyone an emotional intelligence exam to find out where they are at. At what level they are at. And go into these heartfelt communication skills to get people working in sync and to be able to communicate well between different departments or with their peers or their subordinates. And of course the leadership training as well. So, my company is called Chart your Course and that’s the coaching program. And, being a captain, you know I’ve been in some very tough situations at sea. One thing I’ve learned is whenever you set course and you leave a harbor you’ve got a destination. If you are a couple of degrees off of that course it could be the difference between being 100 miles off your course or your destination point when you get to where you’re going. And so the 80/20 rule which is something that was founded by Wilfredo Pereto. He realized that 20% of the wealthy people in Italy owned most of the real estate. And he started to notice that that was that way in a lot of different areas of life. And for those of you that want to get up and do that 20% of your industry, you want to get up into the upper level management, you want to get into a place of higher sales. If you are in real estate you want to be a top producer. No matter what you’re doing a lot of people want to get that. They want to get to that place. But what happens is I was saying you might very well get to a place that, say, a year from now you are doing the same thing over and over again you don’t get to where you want to get to, where are you going to be in five years? And so that’s really the whole concept behind this is getting on a course and staying on course and making sure you’re following your passion you are following your dream of what you want to do in your life. But you are succeeding in life. Because what will happen is that, another thing about boats is there’s a thing called autopilot and they are on airplanes, for those of you that don’t know what that is, and it will steer you to where you want to go. And with the computer age they are getting more and more high tech all the time, but 20 years ago autopilots weren’t that great and I remember a story one time I’ll share with you real quick is that I had this deckhand and he was on the wheel and I explained to him I was going to go take a nap and I explained to him be careful because autopilot is acting very erratic and there’s a very good possibility that we might go off course. And I woke up early from my nap and I walked up there and he was asleep at the wheel and he was literally going in a circle. And I shook the chair and woke him up at the bottom line is is we were just going in a circle I think for like a half hour and thank God there were no other boats around that day but a lot of people will get in this place in their life. You get to that halfway point where there on their course, they are on their track in their life but then they will get into a situation where they are basically going in circles. And so when we throw in the crazy eight patterns on top of that in the confusion of life and the different things we are feeling, it’s really important to be able to look at that and say to yourself am I living a life of just old patterns? Is that what you really want in your life forever?

Again, what my coaching program is all about is helping people get on course and it’s developing clarity, and we do that with the assessments we find out where you are at, where you lacking in your human needs right now? Do you have too much variety, do you have enough love and connection? We get to the point of finding out where you are at. We find out whether where your values are at. Are you out of alignment with your values? And we start building from that. I give you tools on how to build and how to be able to develop clarity around your emotions and how it’s coming in and how to be able to step back for a minute. And most importantly, get in a situation where take your dream if you going to run with it, if you want to promotion, you want to move up the ladder, you want to make a big difference in your company, you want to start your own company, whatever that looks like, and give you the tools to build that and then keep you on track and do what I call mapping and that’s for six month period. And I know what it feels like to be in that place for you just feel like you’re spinning in circles. I’ve been there. And I know what it’s like to be in tough weather and to be in turbulence. And we all have the ability to do great things in life. There is a time I remember sitting on anchor in Monterey Bay in the mid-90s and I literally was sitting there in tears and I wanted a difference in my life. And sometimes it’s hard to make that move. Sometimes it’s hard to inspire yourself to be able to go especially if you grew up in an environment where people kept telling you that you were not good enough. Now going to ask a question if you’ve been struggling in life with making that decision of moving on and you’ve been doing the same thing over and over again you are stuck in that pattern what’s it going to look like a year from now? What’s it going to look like five years from now? So again I offer a free one hour consultation. The next slide will have my information please write this down. If you want to call me, actually before I go to that, I want to announce the Wisdom From The Sea program, I offer a free one hour consultation. Please call me if you want to just have that conversation. Sometimes that conversation will make the difference. And we just go our separate ways. If you see where I can help you build yourself, get yourself on the right course, and get on track in your life then I’d love to talk to you. If you know anybody that you feel is going through some type of a situation where I might be able to help them please give them my number. But this is important. The Wisdom From The Sea Seminar, November 13 and 14, if you want to come and hang out for a couple of days I’m going to go through a lot of these principles that I just talked about. It’s a great way to look at how to start your year in 2016 on the right foot. Get your values back in alignment. Get back on track in your life. Get to where you want to get to. I do have a corporate rate as well. We do honor some type of corporate sponsorship type program. Talk to your HR people, talk to somebody in your company if you’d like to come. Would love to have you, and oh by the way on the second day we are actually going to go on the ocean. That’s right we’re taking 75 people out. We’re going to go out on the ocean for three hours on a very nice charter boat and then we’ll at the end of the day were going to have a little champagne together and go our separate ways on Saturday. So, check it out please give us a call if you’re interested to get more information. Here’s my contact information and we are working on the website right now so if you have any issues getting information definitely give me a call. It’s been great talking to you. The number is 866-985-4441 if you have any questions about me coming to your company doing the training, keynote, if you have any desires to go on the Wisdom From The Sea getaway, I think it’s going to be a really great time, there’s the information again so, please, check it out and we got some time for some questions here and, Sarah.

SARAH: All right, perfect, thank you so much, that was awesome. We have about four minutes for some of your questions, so attendees go ahead and just send those into the chat box now and while we wait for some of those questions to filter in let me just share real quick on some of ways how you can keep in touch with us. You can find HRDQU on our regular social media channels and there you can hear all about our upcoming events and then also if you’re interested in learning more about emotional intelligence the last weekend of September, HRDQU will be hosting a four-day webinar series. So, you can go ahead and get more information on that and register at HRDQU.com.

Our first question is coming from Jim: Are there examples of people in history that are good examples of heartfelt intelligence?

JAMES: Yes, actually there are quite a few people. I think John F. Kennedy was somebody that Profiles In Courage, that is a great book and a great story about the PT-109 disaster, and how he kept his men together through that situation and another great individual and it’s actually his hundredth year anniversary right now and I talk about this guy a lot is Ernest Shackleton. He was another great example of somebody that was extremely emotionally intelligent and had 28 men and they were stranded in Antarctica if you’ve never heard of that story, for two years and they had to survive on a diet of seal and penguin. And he actually saved all of his men. He sailed a 25-foot boat for 500 miles like the distance from Oregon to Mexico in really rough weather. He saved all of his men. He came back. So he didn’t lose it in that situation. He didn’t lose control and his men all loved him and it’s a great story.

SARAH: All right great, thanks. Next question is coming from Blanche: What is the difference between feelings and emotions?

JAMES: The feeling is actually the precursor to emotion. So you’re going to have a feeling, your feeling is going to come from your thought and when you are, again when I’m talking about the amygdala or talking about that first flash warning system that comes into your brain and then it goes right into a thought. It will very quickly convert over to a feeling that you are having and then we will create the emotion based on that feeling. If that makes sense.

SARAH: All right, perfect, let’s try to get just one more in. This one is coming from Vanessa: How do you prompt a staff member to think about EI we recognize he or she could use it?

JAMES: Boy, that’s a great question. I think that, depending if you are in an HR position, I mean I would talk to the HR people. I think the best way to really deal with that is to have somebody come in and do a presentation and give them the test. And I do that. Give them the emotional intelligence test. And I do actually, you know, if you are interested I do have an unabridged version of that and it’s always a great thing to be able to pass that around in the break room or something like that and people talk about their scores. But, find out where they’re at because it’s not a bad thing to be in a situation where your emotional intelligence is low or lower. It’s just simply the way it is, so you can always improve on that. So it’s not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. But if you’d like a copy of that feel free to reach out to me and I’ll give you a copy of that exam.

SARAH: All right, great, those for some awesome questions. We unfortunately do not have time to answer all of them right now on the live webinar. But I’m going to go ahead and save the unanswered questions from the chat and then I will send those over to James and he will answer those for you and we will send those out probably about mid next week so, James, would you just like to add any final thoughts before I go ahead and wrap up the session?

JAMES: Well thank you Sarah, thank you so much for having me on, thank you for attending, and again I say this heartfelt intelligence is a great topic I would love to come and either speak to your company or if somebody has any questions most importantly what it really comes down to is helping people. And if you know somebody who could use my services definitely have them give me a call and it’s a free consultation for an hour and I would love to talk to them. So thank you so much.

SARAH: All right, perfect, and thank you again James and again, you will receive those answered questions probably about mid next week in your email. So, we appreciate your time and we hope you found today’s webinar informative. Thanks.