Use emotions to connect with your customers at a deeper level

145: How high-performing teams use emotional intelligence to win more customers

Want to connect with your team and your customers on a deeper level? Work on improving your degree of emotional intelligence. Here's how.

Today we are talking about emotional intelligence, and why it is so essential to both building a high-performing team and delivering the kinds of experiences that help you win more customers.

And to dive into this topic, I chatted with Justin Bariso, author of the new book EQ Applied. Justin is also a consultant, and a columnist at Inc. where more than 1 million people a month read his column.

We can learn a ton from Justin, in particular how to make your emotions work for you rather than against you.

Key points:

  • Why emotional intelligence is essential to deliver a remarkable customer experience
  • Practical ways to get better at managing your own emotions so you can better care for the emotions of others
  • The downside of not focusing on how you make your customers feel
  • How leaders can get started improving their degree of emotional intelligence
  • How to build emotional intelligence as a competency within your organization
  • How to show empathy for people who have experiences that are vastly different from your own
  • The one thing you need to remember on your journey to increasing your emotional intelligence

Listen to the 38-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

How emotional intelligence better helps you connect with the people you are serving

Sonia Thompson: Hello Justin, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Justin Bariso: I’m good. Thank you, Sonia. Thanks for having me.

Sonia: My pleasure. Alright. Well I’m super excited about this discussion, so let’s go ahead and dive right in. Tell me about your company Insight.

Justin: Sure. So I started Insight, let’s see, I guess about seven, six or seven years ago when I moved to Germany. So long story short, I was not seeking entrepreneurship, it kinda found me out of desperation because I had moved, we moved here when we had children to be closer to my wife’s family. Due to change of events I didn’t have a job and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do so I started off helping foreign executives, mostly ones living here in Germany, with their communication skills so they, many of your listeners might know this, Germans generally have a very high level, they speak a high level of English, but where things get lost sometimes is in the subtle communication cues, they speak a very direct form of English, which can be good. I’m from New York so I know how that goes and I’m a big believer of being honest and direct, but sometimes, depending on the audience, it can misinterpreted as arrogant or just a lot of misunderstandings, so that’s how Insight started.

I was helping these executives with their communication style and everything from emails to presentations, any dealings they were having with English speaking companies and American companies, that kind of thing. But it’s grown since then because as I started writing about my experiences, and I got a column on Inc. Magazine, inc.com, so the digital version of Inc. Magazine, and the focus of my work really became emotional intelligence because what happened is I found that I was giving a lot of advice to these executives and to these teams on, not just the communication and the English language, but how they’re handling their emotions because they would get frustrated that they were getting, a lot of their communication was getting misinterpreted and then they would start telling me about the problems they were having internally and in their teams, you know, their own teams, their German teams, and so I had gotten a lot of training on this.

I spent 13 years with a major nonprofit in New York and that’s really where my education came from, my practical, every day management education. They taught us a lot about putting people first and treating people with empathy so this became my primary work, writing about it, sharing it with others, and so nowadays that’s what I advise companies on, is how they can reach customers, but also internally people at an emotional level, how they can motivate them, how they can better engage their employees, how they can solve conflict management problems, and a lot of this is individuals too, they’ll write in because of my column and I love engaging, or yeah, engaging with readers. I give a lot of free advice, believe it or not, but you know what? It comes around because they spread the word and clients will come in asking for help with whatever problems they have.

Sonia: That is fantastic, just, well it’s fantastic that people are more and more starting to recognize that developing in these softer skills is just as important as some of the hard core skills and the products and services that you offer because it’s all about how you make other people feel, right? So if you’re able to connect with them in a way, that’s not always the easiest thing to do, it really does pay dividends so I’m super glad that you’re doing it and people are seeking it out as well.

Sonia: Now you mentioned that this is the focus of your work. Now you just published a book, it’s hot off the presses, EQ Applied, which is all about emotional intelligence. Now, what is emotional intelligence, just so we’re all on the same page and why is such an important trait for businesses?

Justin: Sure, so many listeners may have heard of emotional intelligence the last couple of decades actually. It was about 20 years ago when it first became very popular through Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, and basically, emotional intelligence is just how do you manage your own emotions and how do you manage others’ emotions. It comes down to how do you deal with conflict? How do you deal with internal conflict? So when you’re extremely emotional, all of us have made decisions when we’re in a very emotional state that we wish we could take things back or we wish we could have handled things differently, and that’s basically what emotional intelligence is.

The way I define it, I make it very simple, very practical, one sentence. Emotional intelligence is making your emotions work for you instead of making them work against you.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: So, you could get into a lot more details of that but that’s basically what it is.

Sonia: Okay. And how does emotional intelligence, whenever people are making it work for them, how can they make it work for them to deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Justin: Yeah, well, I think you quoted, it’s actually a famous quote, a couple minutes ago, which is, “People will forget what you said. They’ll forget what you did. But they’ll never forget the way you make them feel.”

Sonia: Right, right.

Justin: And that’s so, so true because people do business with businesses because of that emotional experience they have and there’s many ways that manifest itself. It may be that they do business with someone because it’s very, very convenient, or with a company because it’s very convenient, it’s very quick, it could be because they have great customer service, it could be because they like the way they’re treated when they go into whatever the business is or whatever they have, experience with the company. So naturally, that’s really what it comes down to it, it’s in many, many different ways, but what kind of experience are you giving your customer?

If they feel good emotionally with what you’re offering them then they’re going to keep coming back. As opposed to, something could be a good deal, and that’s great and that may keep some customers coming back, but only if they still connect emotionally with that company, if that’s very important to them, the fact that they’re getting something a good deal, they’re getting something very inexpensive, the minute they have a bad experience with that company it’s easily going to turn them away, you know?

Sonia: For sure.

Justin: We can see that right now with the airline industry. Actually, it’s interesting because the data is showing that people continue to come back for the cheapest airline tickets but the companies are still so concerned with the bad PR that they’re getting because they know, potentially, how quickly it can change and how quickly people can go. This is why companies like Southwest, like JetBlue are doing so well because not only are they offering a less expensive plane ticket, but they’re also working on the customer experience.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: And you see that becoming more and more important to the larger airlines when in the past they just didn’t care because they said, “Well look, they’re still buying from us, they’re still flying with us,” but now they’re seeing that these smaller airlines that are concentrating on both, the success that they’re having and it’s influencing how they move forward as well.

How smart companies use emotional intelligence to earn customer loyatly

Sonia: For sure, for sure. I imagine there are plenty of stories and you just kind of gave that anecdote there with the airline industry, but what would you say is one, and you’ve done a lot of research over the years, do you have a favorite story of when emotional intelligence really worked in favor of a business and how they were dealing with their customers?

Justin: I have a bunch. Starbucks is one I tend to write about and talk about a lot, for both good and bad. Starbucks, for many people they’ll know, well they’ve been in the news for some bad reasons lately, but I might reference that again in the future. But years ago they were really doing bad because they lost touch with their target customer and the business, this is when Howard Schulz first stepped away from the company and they really started going downhill over the next several years, and when he came back he realized, “Look, we’ve gotten away from what we’re trying to do, which is create an experience for our customers.” When he came back he was able to conduct this turnaround and he started connecting and, again, offering a valuable experience. People don’t pay four or five dollars because it’s a great cup of coffee, you know? Regardless of how you feel about Starbucks, it’s because Starbucks began offering experience that many people valued and so he was able to turn them around.

Apple is another example of Steve Jobs coming in and saying, “Look, we’re trying to do way too much stuff. Let’s narrow it down a few things. Let’s do them very well and let’s connect with our customers emotionally.” And then we know what happened with that.

And then the last one, you asked for one, let me give you three. The last one that’s one of my favorites lately is Tesla.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: Now, Tesla, you know, I personally think Elon Musk is a genius. He’s not perfect. He makes mistakes and he’s made mistakes recently, but he’s a genius in that he’s been able to build this entire company based on an emotional connection with his customers and he does that through social media. This guy has, I don’t know how many millions of followers because it’s growing every day, and he’ll sit down and he’ll, you know, he’ll go, it’s not really a tweet storm, he’s sharing his thoughts, randomly, on Twitter and he’ll respond to the first few or ten or whoever that respond to him. So many people love Elon Musk and he’s built that company up. We’re talking about a company that has not made a profit traditionally that is barely selling anything and they, last year, became the most valuable car company in America.

Sonia: Oh my goodness.

Justin: Now that’s changed slightly since then but that’s built solely on him connecting emotionally with customers and also with his employees, you know? I write a lot about his employee emails and how great his communication style is. I don’t work in Tesla, I’ve never worked directly with them, so this is all that we see from the outside because I know that, you know, they’re like any company, Tesla has issues and some have come to me with those too, but generally speaking, I think Tesla’s a perfect example of how to build your company based on emotion and that’s where it becomes important and that’s what I write about a lot in the book. It can’t be purely on emotion, okay?

Sonia: Right, right.

Justin: Because, like anything, you have to balance emotion with other things and emotional intelligence is the exact same thing. It’s a great thing to have and it’s very helpful but it has to be balanced with other qualities as well.

The four abilities of emotional intelligence

Sonia: For sure, for sure. Now I really enjoyed going through your book and I could see practical applications for both my business life and my personal life, which is always a great thing. I feel like they’re always sort of connected. One of the things that sort of intrigued me were your four abilities of emotional intelligence. Can you walk us through those?

Justin: Sure. So I didn’t invent these by any means. The first one that I saw them in very similar terms was Daniel Goleman and he did that in connection with at least one other coauthor in his book Prime Leadership, he’s written a lot about it since then and others have different takes. But basically it comes down to those four, he calls them four domains, I call them four abilities.

Justin: So we start with self-awareness, so your awareness of self from your own emotions, how your emotions affect your thinking, how your emotions affect your decision making, and that’s both in the moment and also long-term, so how does it affect the mood I’m in right now, how does it affect how I will feel about something over the long term, the short term.

Justin: The next step after self-awareness is self-management. So based on this knowledge that I have of myself, am I able to manage my emotions? Now some people come to me and they say, “Do you really want to manage your emotions?” Well, here is an example of why you do want to at times.

Sonia: Okay, okay.

Justin: So let’s say I’m extremely upset about something, I read something, or I’m having a conversation with my partner and it just takes a turn for the worse and now, if I continue to let my emotions run wild, I’m probably going to say or do something that I later regret.

Justin: Whereas, one practice, which we call the pause, which the pause is basically just taking a few moments to slow down, to see the big picture, to say wait, you know? It seems like such a basic practice, and it is, but it’s, I say it’s easy in theory and difficult in practice, okay. Because we’ve all been there where it’s like we know we should stop the conversation or take a break and don’t and we keep going and we yell or we say something that we wish we could take back later, so this is self-management.

If I’m able to take a pause and say, just shut my mouth and be quiet because I know if I keep going I’m going to say something that I regret. Whereas if I just let my partner speak, or if I say, “You know what, you know, I need ten minutes,” and I go take a walk or I take ten seconds and I calm myself down and I count to ten and I take a few deep breaths, then often times I can bring myself to a place where the conversation becomes more manageable and it can be more rational and sometimes it takes stopping the conversation right then and coming back to it 20 minutes later, or an hour later, or a couple days later. But those type of techniques are where you can manage your emotions and you’ll be happy for it. You’ll handle the situation in a much better way.

Sonia: For sure.

Justin: The same thing with email, right? We’ve all written an angry email and you come back an hour later and you’re like, “Why did I write, why did I send this out?” as opposed to, if you have to write the email, write the email but don’t send it, right? So, take a break, go for a walk, come back to it, and then usually even 20 minutes later you’re like, “Oh, no, no, no I don’t want to send this,” and you rephrase it and you can write it in a much more emotionally intelligent manner. So that’s self-management, okay. That’s number two.

Number three is social awareness, so your awareness of how other peoples’ emotions affect them and their decision making. So going back to that conversation, let’s say I’m having a conversation with my wife and she starts to get heated. Okay, so I start to realize, okay, I may be very emotionally balanced in this conversation but I notice through her tone, or remarks she makes, okay wait a second, she’s starting to take this personally, she’s starting to get sensitive about this, and that now, will affect how I continue to go on in the conversation.

We can have that with our workmates, our colleagues, our friends, so being able to recognize other peoples’ emotions and how it’s affecting them and it really has to tie in with empathy-

Sonia: Yes.

Justin: … which is a quality, I think we might talk about more later, but it’s a quality that a lot of people want and think that they have but it’s a lot harder than people think.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: But anyway, empathy is really tied into social awareness. And one other thing I’ll say about social awareness, a lot of critics of emotional intelligence, of empathy, will say, “You know, you can’t really read another person’s feelings,” and that’s kind of true to an extent, and knowing that can really help because a person may be smiling and you think you know why they’re smiling, or they may be in a certain mood and you think, number one, you know what their mood is and you’re wrong, or number two, you think you know why they’re in the mood they’re in and you’re wrong.

Justin: Acknowledging that too, that these are all educated guesses and so, it’s like anything, just because we can’t read other peoples’ minds or emotions, doesn’t mean that we don’t try because trying to show empathy to someone is going to get you in a lot better place than you would be otherwise.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: So, it’s just making those educated guesses and trying to understand people, realizing, hey, you might be getting this wrong and adjusting to that. If you realize, okay, oh no, I don’t think I’ve got this, I don’t think I’m reading this person right, then you can adjust to that as well.

Justin: And now we’re getting into relationship management and that’s the fourth ability is using all this knowledge about yourself, your own self-management, your ability to manage your own emotions, you’re awareness of other peoples’ emotions and thinking, and using that to manage your relationships. So it doesn’t mean trying to manipulate people, which that is an element of emotional intelligence, I call that the dark side of emotional intelligence. You’ll see people that try to manipulate others with the knowledge they have about their emotions.

I’m highly against that and that’s one reason I teach people about this quality, so they can protect themselves from that. What I try to advocate is using it in a way to manage situations so that you can help people make decisions they’re proud of.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: So, in other words, you realize, again, going back to that same example, you realize they’re starting to make an irrational decision, a decision they may regret later because they’re in a very emotional state, so recognizing that and being able to handle that type of conflict or, just long term, how to build trust in your relationship over time. Things like that. That’s all relationship management.

How leaders can increase their emotional intelligence (and their teams)

Sonia: Very good. There’s so much there and it’s all needed, all necessary. What would you tell a leader, and I’m sure you do this all the time, who wants to grow in emotional intelligence, whether they feel like, “Oh, this is not my strong suit at all, I really need to get better,” or they’re even decent at it and then they just want to get even better at it so that they connect at a deeper level with others. What would you say is the place that they should start in terms of working this scale?

Justin: Well, as you know I talk a lot about those techniques in the book, but I could really narrow it down, at least as a start, to two things. One is perspective taking.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: So, getting the perspective of others and understanding how others view you.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: Now, that’s again, to be done with balance, okay. Because you don’t want to try to become a different person to please other people, but it’s more about we, you know, it’s like an illustration I use is the sound of your own voice. When we hear our voice, when I hear this podcast I’ll be like, “Aw man, that’s how I really sound?” Because the way we sound to ourselves is completely different from the way others hear us.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: And so it’s the same thing with the way we’re perceived, the way we perceive ourselves is so much different from the way others perceive us. So getting that perspective, asking people that we trust, whether it’s colleagues that we trust, friends that we trust, the people that are close to us in our lives, asking them for perspective.

Justin: And I have a list of questions in the book like, “How would you describe the way I make my decisions?” “How would you describe my genuine mood?” or “How would you describe the way my mood affects the way I make decisions?” This is just a small sample of the type of questions that getting perspective from others can help round out the way you see yourself because in reality you’re going to have a set of data that you see that you know internally that they won’t have but they’re going to have data to give back to you and that feedback can help you to have a more well-rounded view of the real, you know, the real person, who you really are. So that’s step one is getting that perspective taking.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: And then two, taking time to reflect. That’s something that’s become harder and harder to do nowadays because, why? We’re tied to our phones. We’re constantly communicating. We’re constantly checking. We’re constantly learning, which is good, but we don’t take as much time to sit back and think, I think, as we have in the past.

So scheduling time to just block out time in your schedule to just sit down and think. And you know, you can think when you’re on your commute. You can think when you’re walking or when you’re taking the train or when you’re driving or these other times, and that’s great, but there’s, you can’t underestimate the time of sitting at your desk with nothing in front of you and taking 20 minutes to half an hour to longer to just sit back and reflect, you know.

A lot of people talk about meditation nowadays and there’s different forms of meditation, and the type of meditation I really preach is deep concentrated thinking, not emptying your mind, but thinking focused on your own emotions, on your own actions. Why do I do the things I do? In an instance where I acted in a way that I regret, why did I act that way? What things led up to that? This is a lot of things we get into in the book is how your experiences and how your habits affect your reactions and how you can actually change those if you’re reacting in a way that you don’t like or in a way that you wish you could change, how to do that, but it begins with that self, making time for self reflection.

Sonia: Got it, and it’s a great starting point and something that definitely takes a lot of commitment to be able to make sure that you’re going to be able to improve. What about for those leaders who they’re performing well on, they got a high level of emotional intelligence, but they know it’s not just about them because they’re not the only ones who are working to serve their customers. It’s about the team. It’s about the organization and the culture that exists. What advice do you have for how they can get others, or they can cultivate a culture within their team or within their organization that has emotional intelligence as a competency?

Justin: Sure, sure. As with anything, you know the best way to encourage others to do something is to set the right example, right.

Sonia: Yeah.

Justin: So one example I used recently that I think has mainly been a good example, and I wrote his pronunciation of his last name down because I’m still learning it, so Dara Khosrowshahi, he’s the relatively new CEO of Uber, and he’s made a lot of very concentrated efforts to turn Uber around, to turn around their culture, which is not an easy thing to do because a culture is really baked into a company, so I think it’s going to take years if he’s successful at being able to do this. He’s not a perfect example, you know, as none of us are. A lot of people will ask me, who’s a good example of emotional intelligence? It’s hard to say because emotional intelligence is tied in a lot to motive too and it’s difficult to tell why people are making the decisions they are. So I try to identify, instead of identify people that are emotional intelligent, I try to identify actions that are emotional intelligent.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: So one example is an email he wrote some months ago, soon after he took over the reins at Uber. It was after what happened in London where they actually banned the Uber app and there’s been a lot of conflict there. He wrote an email to employees saying basically, “Look, we should not be surprised that this happened because there are consequences to decisions we’ve made and actions we’ve taken as a company and this is basically the consequences that we’re suffering.”

Justin: And instead of, like, painting out the city of London to be the enemy, or like, oh, they’re anti-innovation, or you know, instead of responding that way he said, “What can we learn from this example about the actions we’ve taken in the past, about the consequences we’re facing now, about how we can change things in the future?” And I thought that’s a perfect example of a company leader showing how to learn from experience, how to self reflect, so I would advocate that company leaders do that. When they mess up, when a company messes up, take responsibility and spell it out for your employees, “Look, this is what we did wrong, this is what I’ve learned from it, let’s take some time to reflect on how we can do better.”

Justin: On the smaller scale you could do that together as you’re meeting with company executives or your team members, whatever, you could actually do that in a meeting together. Amazon does a great thing that’s been getting a lot of press lately. They’ll actually start their meetings with silence. This is a trick I’ve adopted in a lot of my meetings. You take the first 20 to 30 minutes of a meeting, which seems like a waste of time, like you start it with silence with a long well-thought out memo and everyone in the meeting reads that memo. Okay?

And it gives them a chance to really pour over it and that’s how you can do it together in a meeting is you give them a memo where you talk about lessons learned, that kind of thing, but you know, to make sure, because people come into meetings unprepared so give them 20 minutes or 15 or whatever, adjust it to your own company culture, but give them some time to pour over it, to think about it, and then discuss it together. Okay? And that’s one way you can really inspire self reflection and learning from those type of experiences, but that’s how you can set the example and inspire your people to do the same.

Sonia: Cool. So all this is rich information here. I love it. Now, as more and more businesses are starting to have customers who are diverse, whether they’re in the US and they see the changing makeup of all the different populations of people, there’s about to soon be a minority-majority, or whether it’s you’re a global business and you’ve got companies, customers from all over the world, what is the intersection, or is there one, between cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence? How do they work together, if at all?

Justin: Definitely. So, I’m a big believer in cultural intelligence. One of the reasons is I grew up in a part of the United States, and due to my family background too, that was very multicultural. My father’s from the Philippines. My mother is American but with Portuguese and Irish roots. The part of the US I grew up in, Norfolk, Virginia is predominately African American.

So most of my friends growing up in school were black Americans, and so we would watch a news report … I can still remember, for example, when OJ Simpson went on the run, okay? And I remember it clear as day. We were watching this on the news. We were all riveted on the television and then afterwards I talked to my parents about, I talked to my friends about it, and everybody has different emotional reactions to that experience. Why? It’s based on their personal experience. It’s based on their culture. It’s based on their background and what they’ve experienced.

So that goes to show how important cultural intelligence is because we’re limited by the experiences we’ve had, by the background we’ve had, so getting to know, and that’s why diversity in companies is so important and I’m glad to see companies reaching out to get more diversity on their boards, to get more diversity in their employees because then they’re able to relate to more perspectives and different types of customers.

But at the end, so even though there are different emotional reactions, the emotions themselves are the same.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: Okay? We all get angry, we call get happy, we all get sad, okay? The reasons why are different across cultures, but the more you learn about different cultures … You know, in the beginning it’s all differences and it’s like, “Oh man, this is different and this is how…” but what I like to concentrate is how are we alike? Okay? Knowing the difference is important and that will help you navigate those relationships, but for your relationships focus on how are you alike because we have much more in common than we have different, and focusing on that.

Justin: And that’s one way, for example, empathy, if you’re talking to someone and they talk about something that makes them angry and you think, well that’s not a big deal … We’ll go to race just because it’s so easy to talk about. Many white Americans find it difficult to identify with a black American’s experience because why? Because they’ve never experienced that before. They’ve never been pulled over for no reason. They’ve never been treated unfairly because of the color of their skin. So instead of trying to relate to the experience that they’ve never had, try to relate to the feeling because we’ve all been treated unfairly, somehow, some way, whether it’s because of your sex if you’re a woman, or if it’s because of something else in your background or you’re just in a situation where you’re different from the others in that situation, you can relate to the feeling of being treated unfairly.

Justin: So that’s the key in working across cultures, and really, in empathy in general. Try to relate to the feeling another person has, not their experience because even if we had the same experience, we’re going to feel somewhat differently than they did, we’re going to handle things differently than they did. But if someone’s angry, okay, try to understand why are they angry, or try to understand, when have I been angry? Why was I angry? And relate to that feeling. “Okay, so you feel angry. Yeah, I know what it’s like to feel angry.” And that can help you to understand them better and to hear them out because you want to be heard out when you’re angry and the fact that you give them that time and attention and effort will inspire them to listen to what you have to say and that builds trust in the relationship.

Sonia: Yeah, I love that because it’s the building the trust is there’s so many layers to it. There’s empathy, there’s time, you know, basically acknowledging someone else’s feelings and at the same time being able to communicate your own. So I think trust is an integral component of being able to earn the loyalty of your customers, so if I think if businesses thinking about I have to earn the trust of my customers and that will reap the dividends that will get them thinking about how they interact with them in a different way.

Justin: Definitely.

Sonia: Justin, this has been fantastic. Where can people find you if they want to read more of your work, they want to get your book, how can they get more from you?

Justin: Yeah, so when this podcast airs, I believe the book will be officially launched-

Sonia: Yep.

Justin: … So you can find it on all major platforms, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere where you typically buy books it should be available there. You can also check out my website directly, so EQapplied.com, and it should have links to the book. Also, if you don’t want to buy the book, you just want to read my take on emotional intelligence and see how it manifests itself in the real world, that website will also take you to a list of my most popular articles and just real life examples, both in business and also from my personal life and from others’ lives where you can see, “Oh, this is what emotional intelligence looks like in every day life.”

Sonia: Got it. And they should definitely buy the book because it’s great and it’s super helpful, but I’ll have all that information in the show notes so people can find it. Any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who want to apply emotional intelligence as a means to consistently deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Justin: Sure, I would just say don’t get complacent because emotional intelligence, it’s like any skill, really. You have to continually practice it and renew it. For those of you that play musical instruments, you know as good as you play that instrument, if you stop practicing then you’re going to get rusty and eventually you would lose the ability altogether to play, so emotional intelligence is the same way.

Justin: Just when you think you’ve got it, you know, and you’re making good decisions, balanced, rational decisions is the moment where you get caught off guard in a situation and really, that’s going to happen anyway. We’re all going to be a victim of our emotions at some point, but continuing that self reflection regularly, continuing that perspective taking can help us to do as good as possible and can help us to remain in practice so that those situations will be fewer and further between and most the time you’ll find that even when a situation, you’re confronted with a situation that you become very emotional that you can use that as a power for good, that you can use it as a catalyst too, because there’s nothing wrong with getting emotional, it’s just a matter of learning to harness those emotions and make them, again, make them work for you instead of against you.

Sonia: For sure. Again, thank you Justin, this has been super cool.

Justin: Thank you very much, Sonia.

Show notes:

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7 Essential elements your business needs to consistently win more customers

  • Framework based upon in the trenches experiences from 150+ business and thought leaders
  • Science-based explanations to support why the elements of the blueprint work
  • Action items to help you get some quick wins

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