It’s our 200th episode! Today you’ll hear a familiar voice tell a story about how emotional intelligence helped communication in the workplace.
Today’s episode is our 200th episode! And today you’ll be hearing about emotional intelligence in the workplace from someone I think you’ve heard before. Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the top 100 podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement experience and satisfaction since 2017. That’s right, we’re in our eighth year. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you, because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.
And at 200 episodes, I just want to say thank you! Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for telling your friends. Thanks for being in touch. Thank you for downloading. Because literally, it is you that we’re doing this for. It’s your questions and your engagement that really have kept us going for 200 episodes. I had no idea it was going to last like this, and it was going to continue to have this kind of energy and engagement. Because most shows plateau, and we just haven’t. We still have those days, just randomly able to get 1,000 downloads, which is nuts! Especially for a show that’s this niche! So again, thank you so much, and I want to say thank you to all of our guests, including the guest who’s on mic with me right now who is also our audio engineer and my brother Joe Liebel. Joe it’s great being on mic with you congratulations for 200 episodes
Hey Anne Marie, good to be here with you. And yeah, congratulations on episode 200. It’s been an exciting journey to go with you from the ideation of this podcast through to where we are now and to see the series evolve.
– And it really has evolved, hasn’t it? ‘Cause it started out with patient physician communication specifically, and that’s why the title is what it is. And then it became kind of patient/provider communication. And then with, I think team -based communication and healthcare, we got into more interprofessional communication. And then when it broadened to public health, public health really brought in some questions about multi -sector communication, right? Because there are always, public health is always having to bring various folks cross sector work together. And all of us are working in our workplaces. So I think that’s the kind of inter-professional has become a bigger part of the show.
Because this show is based on what people ask about. And the work that I do as a consultant, the trends that I see as a researcher, the conversations that I’m a part of, and the things that people just write and ask me about. So if you haven’t been in touch yet with questions that you have, go ahead and go to healthcommunicationpartners .com, click on contact. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also write me an old -fashioned email. Now we’re at more of a kind of work communication focus at both individual and systems levels, whatever your work is. But obviously we’re going to tend a little bit more to the health sector. So it’s really a holistic look at work communication.
And I’ve been thinking about, should we update the name of the series to reflect this focus? I am genuinely not sure. So if you have thoughts on this, please let me know. But here we are at episode 200. And I know, Joe, you and I have been on mic a handful of times
– Throughout the years, we have.
– Yeah, so for this I thought I’m gonna do something that we haven’t done and I really want to turn the show over to you and I thought I could you know find out what you want to talk about because you’re in the health sector as well right you’re in health IT.
– Yeah so I work for a software company that provides software services and data to life sciences clients and health IT related services. So when you had reached out about opening up this topic for this special episode, this landmark episode, I was actually going through some challenging stuff at the time in my professional life. And I was managing a difficult project with an upset client. And amid all this, I felt like I was being bombarded daily, as probably a lot of us have felt, with news at a national and global level, that was really finding that to be distressing and stressful.
Amid all this, an email comes in from our company CEO and founder. Now he does this regularly on like a Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, send out a company email, talk about topics that he feels are relevant across the company. Sometimes our vision and value, sometimes current events. And that was really what this one was about. And it cast a spotlight on what a lot of us have been feeling in our, in our life, kind of at the national news level, let’s just say, and the stressors coming from that, and how that might be impacting our industry, our clients and our personal lives. And gave some guidance on how to cope with that. So that in turn made me look back at all of these challenges I was going through, in work and in life, and it kind of pointed me to a topic that I learned about several years back, and then I thought, let’s turn to this.
– That's great, you’re absolutely, you’re answering the first question, which is what’s the issue that you’re facing? And so what I’m hearing from you is the kind of stressor on stressors, right? We’ve got our own lives that are going on. And then we’ve got the kind of the wrapping of the national kind of tension and stress that’s definitely been heightened lately. And that’s got to affect our communication at work. It’s got to affect our communication at home, right?
– And so how are you–the second question that I ask all of my guests, I get to ask you–how are you dealing with the stress on your communication?
– Yeah, so the thing that I had turned to and went back to explore a little bit further, is the topic of emotional intelligence and resilience. And how that can help us simply take pause, take a breath, assess and reflect on all the individual stressors that seem to kind of compound each other. And then build up resilience in the capacity that we have to respond with a cool head, and choosing a path that serves us best. That’s not reactive, it’s not a fight or flight reaction, but it’s more of a strategically thought of, cool -headed approach to the individual stressors. And how to kind of peel them away and deal with them potentially in different ways so that we can have focus and clarity.
– And thanks for that. You’re already teeing up like, what my next question is, what are you learning from thinking about emotional intelligence when it comes to your communication. ‘Cause I’m already hearing you say things like, that I love about this show, which is reflective practice. That you’re already– emotional intelligence works well with reflective practice, right? Because it gives us some tools to stop and pause. It gives us ways to kind of parse out what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what’s running through our heads, what we’re encountering in our professional realm. So what are you learning from taking emotional intelligence as a concept or as a set of tools to help you as a communicator at work.
– Yeah. So just to give you some context, I am mostly a remote worker. So meeting with my clients over Zoom or other remote tools. And one of the things that emotional intelligence at least helps me to do is to take a step back and assess and reframe the situation. This case, a project through a series of issues and failures was not tracking the schedule, clients upset. And so like, how do you deal with that? Well, first you have to deal with it. You can’t just avoid it, ’cause then things will get worse. But we may have a tendency to do that. So You have to take it head on. You take it head on, you don’t want to be combative, you know, the fight part that we might feel like we have to charge into something. But when you think about: everybody’s remote, you get into a meeting together and there you are. You have no casual interaction context, generally not co-located or anything like that. So you really have to prep yourself for these interactions.
– That’s really, that’s true. Thanks for saying that, you know, as you’re saying it, it’s occurring to me. Yeah, we don’t talk enough about how much it’s, I don’t know if it’s harder. I don’t think it’s necessarily any easier to do work communication when you’re fully remote or even mostly remote. So thanks for bringing that up man. No, go ahead.
– Yeah, and in that sense, you don’t have the same opportunities you do in person to necessarily build and foster a relationship with your coworkers even, with your other remote coworkers. So team cohesion, you’re just kind of thrown into those meetings together. And that makes it particularly challenging. And so emotional intelligence has taught me to say: okay, take a moment, take a breath, realize, peel part the things you’re stressed out about. Maybe it’s not the best that I listen to national news in the morning right before going into a meeting.
– You know what I mean? Just have a little bit of clarity, some mindfulness. And then approach things with a cool head. Realize that your customers, in this case, these were customers on the other side of the Atlantic. So they might not have been having the best day. They might not be seeing me in the best light right now. So how to empathize with them. And then try to repair a relationship so that you’re working together as a team.
– What I really like about what I’m hearing too, is the sense of grasping the agency that we have, grasping the power that we have, which is over our own communication. Which is over how we respond in the moment, right? And not letting all of these multiple stressors just have their way with us and take us away from our intentions. But coming back, like you were saying, just pause. Taking a breath, and kind of regaining control over one of the few things in this life we do have control over. And that’s our communication. So what’s next for you, man, when you’re thinking about emotional intelligence and communication at work?
– Yeah, so I didn’t mention how I always really learned about emotional intelligence in the first place.
– Oh, right. What’s that story?
– My previous job, going back about eight years, when I was new there, I threw my hat in the ring for when they needed people to help build out their self -paced training, their recorded training assets, which were mostly technical training and data and technology and so forth. But one of the assignments that they gave to me was on recording training on emotional intelligence. It was like emotional intelligence 101. I was like, “Oh, what is this? It’s not technical.” I was really curious. So I not only recorded that, but I kind of internalized the content. And it made me think, why is this company that’s mostly like a tech data services company, why are they pointing their people towards this kind of training? It’s a soft skill, it’s an interpersonal skill, but it must be something of value. And I’ve become a strong believer that it is. So, you know, that was when I was introduced to it about eight years ago.
And so what I want to do is that my current job is really, you know, evangelize this to my colleagues. Whether we are external client -facing or not, we all have customers, we all have colleagues. And emotional intelligence can play a role in those relationships, in those communications. And even at home too, you’re going to terrible day at work, when you’re going to deal with your people at home. And it can still help to center you and give you, you know, peel back those stressors, and then make decisions that you’re comfortable with in the long term in your communications.
– I love this. Thanks so much, Joe. And what I’ll do is I won’t put you on the spot now, but maybe if you can find if there’s been articles or books on emotional intelligence videos that have been helpful for you, and you want to share them with me before we go ahead and post this out, I’ll put the links in the show notes [below] for folks who want to take a look at emotional intelligence for their communication.
– Absolutely. I have some things to share it for sure.
– Awesome. Awesome. Well, it’s been a treat having you on the mic, man. Congratulations again for 200 episodes. Holy schmoly. And thank you again to our audience for listening. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners with Anne Marie and Joe Liebel today.
Optimal : how to sustain personal and organizational excellence every day
by Goleman, Daniel, author.
Publisher, Date: New York, NY : Harper Business, and imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2023]
Fierce resilience : combating workplace stress one conversation at a time
by Beltran, Edward, author.
Edition: [Trade paperback edition].
Publisher, Date: Oakland, CA : BK Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., [2024]
Web reference: https://www.theotherkindofsmart.com/ei-quiz
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