The People Builder

Do you fail to listen, interrupt, and find fault with what others say, or do you listen well, seek mutual understanding, and welcome differing opinions? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Master Trainer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation on empathy by talking about another key ingredient of Social Intelligence, Effective Communication.

As we talked about last week, demonstrating Cognitive, Emotional and Compassionate Empathy can really help us as we continue to navigate the effects of this pandemic on our lives. Going into battle, so to speak, dominating conversations with our own bias and opinions creates an environment where someone has to win and someone has to lose. It's not healthy and definitely not what we need right now.

In the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, we hear the prison captain justify the beating that he gave Paul Newman, who played the prisoner Luke, by saying to all the other prisoners, "What we've got here is a failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So, you get what we had here last week. Which is what he wants."

It's like he's saying that when people speak up for themselves or express their views and concerns, they want to be beaten up and put back in their place. I would suggest a different way of looking at it. Perhaps I just want to be heard or release the pent up emotions and stress that they're experiencing. They might be going through some really challenging stuff in their life in that moment and really need some help.

Whatever the situation, I'm fairly confident that they're not looking for a beating. When we have empathy, we seek first to understand before being understood. So, let's take a look at what effective communication is and how we can use it to be more compassionate and understanding.

Famous playwright George Bernard Shaw said it so well. "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." For many years, I saw communication as speaking and being heard. If I said something to you and you heard me, I had communicated. I was under the illusion that Shaw was talking about.

Communication is a process with many moving parts. And if we leave any of the parts out, we have ineffective communication. We have senders who encode what they send based on their own beliefs and biases. We then have a receiver who decodes what they heard based on their beliefs and biases.

In the middle of all that, we have a lot of noise from media, family, friends, our own inner dialogue. Sometimes the message comes through distorted and that's where the misunderstandings originate from. This causes conflict. So, let's take a look at three things that we can all do to improve our communication.

Number one is to listen more than we speak. When we are seeking to understand, it's far better to listen than to tell the other person what we think. The more that we learn this crucial skill of listening, the better we will be attuned to what is not being said. We talked about that last week. So, listen more than we speak.

Number two is to keep focus in the logical brain. When we are involved in any type of communication, if we allow the emotion of what's being said to trigger our thoughts and our behaviours based on our previous experiences, and we've talked about that over the previous weeks, then we're going to have a reaction to what's being said.

But, when we get it up into the prefrontal cortex, into the executive command center of the brain, we can then listen and use our Cognitive Empathy to find out what's actually being said. And then we can process that in a logical way and respond.

And number three is to ask more questions than we make statements. Questions are so powerful to gain understanding, whereas statements can put up barriers and put up roadblocks. So, I encourage you, as I encourage myself, to become really good and proficient at asking more questions. 

Effective Communication is a key ingredient of Social and Emotional Intelligence and something that we all might consider doing a little differently, if we want to restore unity of purpose across the world and beat this pandemic and take back control of our lives. By the way, even though I'm going live each week to support you, my listeners, the topics that I'm choosing are the ones that I need to work on in my own life right now.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue our conversation by learning the powerful art of active listening. I'll see you then.

Can you see things from other people's perspective or do you tend to act without considering how others might feel?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence during this time of COVID-19 by having a conversation around a crucial competency called empathy.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/the-healing-power-of-empathy

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au

Can you see things from other people's perspective or do you tend to act without considering how others might feel? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence during this time of COVID-19 by having a conversation around a crucial competency called empathy.

Right now, I'm seeing many examples of a lack of empathy, whether it be on social media, whether I'm listening to the news, or if I'm downtown at the local shopping center. Whether it's stereotyping people, whether it's not being tolerant of differing views, or whether it's coming across just being uncaring with a total lack of concern for others and being trapped in our own agenda.

To restore a greater sense of unity and peace for everyone right now, let's consider how we might do some things differently. Things like being more attentive and attuned to the feelings that are coming across in what people are saying or listening without an agenda and showing sensitivity and understanding of other people's perspectives and feelings. To do these things differently, we need to understand and to develop the skills around empathy.

There are three types of empathy. There's Cognitive Empathy, which is having an understanding of what people are thinking. There's Emotional Empathy, which is having a sense of what they're feeling and the emotions that they're going through. And then there's compassionate empathy, which is at a deeper level, which spurs you on and inspires you to take action to help.

I know in my own life, this is something that I work on all the time and I'm not perfect at it. And as we've talked about before, that's never going to be the goal. I do have a sense of what other people are feeling, and I'm very attuned because of the development of Emotional Intelligence.

And for us to be able to do that, we need to go back to where we talked about self-awareness and we need to have an understanding of what emotions we are going through ourselves so that we can recognise what others could be going through as well.

So, let me give you three tips on what we can do when we develop empathy, when we've developed this skill and this crucial competency of Emotional Intelligence, that allows us to be more socially competent.

Number one is to suspend all judgment. A lot of times, when I witnessed what I've been witnessing and when I've done it in my own life and had to check myself on it, the core of the challenge is judgment, whether it's judgment on ourself or judgment on the other people or judgment on the whole situation.

So, when we suspend all judgment, it takes it out of the equation. So, we can go into the situation, whether it's something that we're seeing, whether it's something that we're reading, whether it's something that we're listening to with an open mind, just like we do when we are getting feedback from others when we ask for it.

The second thing we can do is to listen to what's not being said, to go deeper than just the surface level. So, when we suspend all judgment, we're in an environment where we're able to do that. So now, using active listening, we're able to sense and feel the underlying issues that someone might be going through or in that situation.

And number three is that when we want to get involved in a conversation, whether it be on social media, face to face, on the phone, however we're doing it with our body language, we need to first acknowledge what we think we've seen, what we think we've heard. A lot of times when I've fallen foul to this, it's because I've made a decision that this is what this person's trying to say.

This is what their real agenda is. This is who they're aligned with. This is whatever. So, by reflecting back and asking questions, rather than reacting with a comment, we're able to find out what the real story is.

So, empathy. It's a key competency of Social and Emotional Intelligence and one that we can all brush up on a little bit. Right now, there's an environment going on and around the world that can bring out some behaviours in us that are a little bit surprising. It's not how we might normally respond or react.

So, if this episode has touched you and ignited something in you to want to know more, make sure that you get in touch and ask your questions, whether that be in the podcast, on my YouTube channel, or in the various social media outlets that you might be watching this or listening to it and ask questions. I'd love to help you because we could all do with a little bit more empathy around the world right now.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week, where we will continue to talk about competencies of Social and Emotional Intelligence that will help us go beyond COVID-19 and enjoy every aspect of our life a little better. I'll see you then.

Get involved with your own behaviour change process by getting SUPPORT and ACCOUNTABILITY from other people.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/support-and-accountability

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au 

Get involved with your own behaviour change process by getting SUPPORT and ACCOUNTABILITY from other people.

Are you able to keep the safety on your triggers and your hot buttons or are they open and ready to be pushed all the time?

Are you able to keep the safety on your triggers and your hot buttons or are they open and ready to be pushed all the time?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence and our Behavioural Self-Control by learning to identify our triggers and our hot buttons.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/disarming-your-hot-buttons

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au 

Do you find yourself always calm and control in emotionally-charged situations or do you go into complete overwhelm and lose control of your behaviour?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence by learning to manage our disruptive emotions.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/managing-disruptive-emotions

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au 

Do you find yourself always calm and control in emotionally-charged situations or do you go into complete overwhelm and lose control of your behaviour? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence by learning to manage our disruptive emotions.

So, let me start by saying that managing emotions is not about getting rid of them. Emotions are there for a purpose. Our emotions are cues and clues and signs to help us to navigate what's going on around us and within us. The way we feel gives us an indication of how we are processing external stimuli. And depending on whether or not that is linked to a highly-charged experience, a memory or a belief structure that you have, that will determine whether or not you respond in your logical brain or react out of the emotion.

I don't know about you, but this is a major problem that I've had to work on for my entire life. I've been able to learn through my studies in Emotional Intelligence how to employ a strategy so that even though I have the emotion going on, whether it's positive or negative, I can allow the decision-making process to happen from the logical brain, from the prefrontal cortex. 

As we've talked about before in our neuroscience 101 that our brain has certain parts within it that control different functions. And if we look at it from just an overall holistic view so that we can understand what I'm talking about here today, we have the limbic brain, as some people call it, which is deep in the center of the brain, which, linked to the hippocampus and our emotional memory, have a couple of sensors there, little almond-shaped nodes, called amydalae and what they do is they determine whether or not there's a threat by the data that's coming into the brain.

So, all data except smell, which is in the olfactory system, comes into the brain via the thalamus and what it does, it then distributes that data to the limbic brain and to the neocortex at the same time.

Now, depending on what the amygdala finds when it does that threat assessment, it will determine whether or not that data continues to go to the logical brain. If the amygdala senses that there's something that we need to fear, there's something that we need to put a hold on what we're doing, we need to fight, we need to freeze, whatever it is, then it will give the signal, "Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!" And it'll actually cut off all the sensory data from continuing to go to the logical brain. 

The prefrontal cortex is the executive command center just behind our forehead here and it's the front third of the cerebral cortex, the neocortex, and it makes good decisions. It's there for emotional regulation. It's where our creativity takes place and where we decide on logic what we're going to do. So, if our emotional situation traps how we feel and traps all that data down in the emotional brain, then we just go over and over it in our head as an emotional thing that's happening, asking ourselves, "Why does this happen?" And then we react based on our beliefs, our previous experiences, et cetera.

So, what we want to do is we want to learn a strategy to get it back up into the logical brain so that we have a greater chance of responding in a way that's healthy; healthy for us and healthy for others, rather than react. People say that we should avoid overreacting. What I like to do is put a distinction on it that says, "Let's not react to anything, unless it's in an emergency situation." What we want to learn to do with our emotions is always to respond. So, let me teach you a process that you can take away and use right now to be able to keep yourself in a managed state when you are going through emotionally-disruptive experiences.

Now, this is a five step process and the key elements of this process is that it provides a couple of things. It firstly provides the power of the pause. When we experience something in our emotional brain, we can go from that original thought to a learned, ingrained, conditioned behaviour just like that. So, what we want to be able to do so that we can get out of the emotion and back up into the logic as we want to be able to pause and break that pattern. The second thing that it does is it helps us to light up the logical part of our brain by asking a series of questions and going through a process that is logical. So, let's have a look at it.

Step one: what we want to do, firstly, is we want to recognise and name the emotion that we're going through. As we've talked about before, the first thing we've got to do is increase our emotional vocabulary so that we actually know which emotion we're going through and when so that, in the moment, we know which emotion so therefore, we know which one we're managing. Because there's a different strategy for happiness or feeling happy than there is for feeling frustrated, for example. So, step one is name the emotion. 

To do this, we ask the question, "What is the emotion I am going through right now?" So, there's two things here. The first thing we've done is we've engaged the logical brain by asking a "what" question. A "what" question is looking for data. It's looking for information. So therefore, it's going to light up the logical part of the brain. The second thing that we've done is we've initiated the power of the pause. So, the first thing we do is name the emotion. 

Step two in the process is to audit our thoughts. I love the word audit in this context because an audit is a logical process. When you have an audit done on your taxes, they look for information, not for story. So, when we do an audit on our thoughts, we are, once again, engaging in a logical process and we're looking for information of things that we might be thinking that are creating the emotional disruption. To do this, we ask the question, "What am I thinking right now?" So, step two is to audit your thoughts.

Step three is to decide on the outcome that you want. When we are in emotionally-charged situations, when we've got a pattern of reacting, we forget what it is that we want in the first place. I don't know about you, but there's been many a time where I've got into the emotion of something and I've totally forgotten the logic of why we started the conversation or why that situation even happened in the first place because I got trapped down in the emotion. So, step three is to decide what do you want to happen right now.

And the question we ask ourselves is exactly that, "What do I want to happen right now?" So, once again, we have engaged in a process, in a logical question, so that we get focused on what it is that we want to happen. So therefore, we're able to have a strategy and a response that is going to move us towards that outcome.

Step four is to control the sabotage. I don't know about you, but I know that even though I know the outcome that I want, I can do and say things that will make sure that I don't get there. And I'm not even talking about those unconscious sabotage strategies that we all run, I'm talking about consciously reacting or saying something that is definitely counterintuitive to the outcome that I've decided that I wanted. So, what we need to do here is metaphorically put a piece of duct tape across our mouth to stop and avoid that sabotage. So, to do this, we once again ask some questions and we can do this two ways.

So, the first question we can ask is, "What could I do right now to sabotage that outcome?" Or as we get more in tuned with this new process and it becomes second nature, we can ask the question, "What is one thing that I can do right now to move towards that outcome?" So, depending on your level of maturity in this process as to whether or not you would use the first one, the second one, or a combination of both, the key element to remember here is that we're asking a "what" question so that we're keeping it in the logic and we're pausing around what we would normally do in that situation. 

Step five is to decide on the strategy. It's like a chess player. I'm not a great chess player. I know the fundamentals of the game. I can play a game of chess. However, I've never put enough effort into it to be like these masters who know five or six steps in front, moves in front, what they're going to do. I just move a pawn or move the king or move whatever I need to move to stop that thing from happening that I think might happen.

And that's just like working in the emotion, but what a great chess player does, it has a strategy that says, "If that move there takes place, I'm going to do this one." Or, "If that move takes place, I'm going to do this one." Or indeed, "I already know five steps, the five moves down the track where I'm going to move."

So, in this controlling and managing our emotional situation in this disruption, step five is choosing a logical path, a logical strategy, a next step that we can do so that we can respond. 

For example, if I am feeling frustrated, the strategy for feeling frustrated would be to remove myself from this frustration, remove myself from the thoughts that are creating the frustration. My strategy could be to ask questions, to get clarity around the misunderstanding around the emotions that I was going through before I allowed myself to get frustrated. So, step number five is to decide on a strategy.

So, there you have it, five steps that you can go through where you name the emotion, where you audit your thoughts, where you decide on the outcome, where you control the sabotage, and where you decide on the strategy so that you can respond and get the outcome that you want. Managing our emotions, as I said, is not about getting rid of them, it's not about ignoring them or suppressing them, it's about acknowledging them, feeling them, and then having a strategy to use them to help us to go forward in a logical response.

Well, that's it for me this week. Join me again next week when we continue to look at our behaviour and how we can change our behaviour to get the outcomes that we want. I'll see you then.

Do you have to consciously think about your poor behaviour to get it to come up or does it just turn up out of the blue without an invitation?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence and our Behavioural Self-Control by talking about changing our behaviour patterns.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/changing-behaviour-patterns

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au