Growing your emotional intelligence means growing your ability to choose what you say and do–because of and in spite of your emotions.

Self-management is your ability to choose what you say and do based on your awareness of your emotions (Bradberry and Greaves). To understand self-mastery, we have to go back over the role of feelings—to give us information and to help us know when to pay attention and what to pay attention to. 

• “Emotion” means “to move”
• It is important to feel the whole range of human emotion
• Advantages of self-management
• Aspects of emotional intelligence related to self-mastery
• Growing our self-mastery

• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Bradberry and Greaves
• Daniel Goleman
• Standford Marshmallow Experiment
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

• The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
• The Power of Self-Compassion
• Disrupting Your Autopilot
• Seeing Yourself in the System
• Leading Change and Managing the Resulting Anxiety

Emotional intelligence is more important than IQ, technology, or strategy when it comes to mission achievement in your family, in your business, or in your community. 

In our last podcast, we talked about the importance of disrupting our autopilot when it comes to change. In that episode, we mentioned the crucial importance of self-compassion as part of that process. We’re both really committed to self-compassion as an indispensable part of leadership and change. We don’t see it as an add-on or a luxury or a good idea; we believe that it’s central to how we engage as leaders—with ourselves and with others. In this episode, we talk about why we think this is so important to leadership and how we can practice it in life-changing ways.

• Fears about self-compassion
• What research shows us
• Self-compassion vs self-esteem
• How to grow our self-compassion or self-kindness

• Brene Brown
• Kristin Neff

• Disrupting Your Autopilot
• Seeing Yourself in the System
• Leading Change and Managing the Resulting Anxiety

Change is not just a set of ideas, deep desire, or good intentions. It is a set of practices and in this episode, we explore some of those practices. 

• Identifying the behavior you want to change
• Identify the impact on you and on those around you
• Give your word to yourself and a few trusted colleagues that you are going to change your behavior
• Reflect: Learn to see it in the rearview mirror
• Clean up the messes
• Celebrate the wins and have self-compassion 

In the last podcast, we talked about how leaders do two things - they lead toward a vision and they manage the anxiety that shows up as they work to get deep commitment to that shared vision. In this episode we are going to dig a little deeper into the second part of that conversation - leaders managing anxiety in the face of the pursuit of a vision.

• Effective leaders learn to notice anxiety and see patterned ways they (and others) express it.
• Leaders work on seeing self – without shame or blame – as part of our humanity.
• Leaders give others the same gift – seeing their reactivity as part of their humanity without shaming or blaming or taking things personally.
• Leaders learn to see self in the system in real time and to, when possible, disrupt those patterns and learn new ways of being.

Leaders both lead change and manage the resulting anxiety in order to get commitment to a shared vision.

• Leadership is in part about helping the church to care about vision, mission, purpose. (example: Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Jesus)
• When leaders attempt to help the congregation set and pursue a direction, the process of change creates anxiety.
• Leaders have to learn two skills and exercise them simultaneously - the first skill is that of achieving the mission and the second is managing self in the anxiety that mission achievement produces.
• To fully understand how leadership functions, you must understand that it takes place within a living system.
• What is a living system?
• Differences of opinion feel threatening and left to our natural reactions, we will react in anxiety.
• What does it mean to manage yourself in an anxious system? 

When we first started coaching leaders we gave almost exclusive attention to teaching individual leaders the principles of organizational change. At first, we saw some positive changes, but when we tracked the results over time, we discovered that when we as coaches pulled out of the process, the process stalled - and sometimes it devolved into destructive conflict.

As we tried to remain curious, we were convinced that leaders needed to know the principles of organizational change, but what also became clear is that this was not enough. What is also needed is the personal
transformation of the leader. That goes back to what you were saying earlier: it’s the individual and the organization; it’s the being and the doing.