Dr. Travis Bradberry Thanks.

Dr. Travis Bradberry First, the reason that emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is important is it’s such a critical skill. It’s one that we all possess, and the difficulty is our brains are hardwired to give emotions they apprehend. We have an emotional reaction to events before we’re able to think rationally about them. This is a big issue because we have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day. Our brains are hardwired to react emotionally to what we experience. People who are emotionally intelligent tend to do very well in life. They’re able to achieve their goals and interact with people more effectively.

Dr. Travis Bradberry It’s something that the vast majority of us are not taught in school. It’s something that people need to learn. That connects to Emotional Intelligence 2.0 as well. Some others books have been written on emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness. The popular ones, in particular, are very conceptual. They teach people what emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is. But, my company TalentSmart, has been training and teaching emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness since 1996. A big thing that we heard and learned from people is that they don’t want to know what it is. They already know what it is. They want to know how to use it, and that was the premise behind Emotional Intelligence 2.0. The book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 shows you how to increase your EQ. It shows you what it is and why it’s important, and how it operates. But that’s the smaller portion of the book. The larger parts of the book are these 66 strategies that are aimed to increase your EQ, and that’s our focus. It’s how you can go about improving your EQ.

Dr. Travis Bradberry Sure. Emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is your capacity for understanding emotions in yourself; how well you understand them and how effectively you use that information to respond to them. On the social side of things, emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is how well you figure out what’s going on with other people not just emotionally, but what they’re experiencing, what they’re trying to communicate to you, and how you use that information in managing yourself to manage relationships more effectively. There are four skills for emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness:

1. Self-awareness.
2. Self-management.
3. Social awareness.
4. Relationship management.

Dr. Travis Bradberry I think it’s something that people intuitively understand based on their experience. We’ve all seen that individual that may have made it at the top of his or her class or went to the best school, and they’re just kind of a train wreck or a bull in the china shop around the office or their life. What’s holding them back is emotional control, self-awareness and being able to relate and connect with other people. It’s easy for them to understand intuitively because they see it in action. But that’s really different than actually being able to do something with it. I should also add that the academic research backs this up. It says your IQ only explains about 20% of how you do in life. People with average IQs outperformed those with the highest Iqs 70% of the time. My company is mainly focused on the workplace, and we’ve done a lot of studies comparing people’s emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness scores to their job performance, and we find that it explains about 58% of how people perform in their shows and professions. Emotional Intelligence and EQ is a far greater indicator of success than your IQ.

Dr. Travis Bradberry It’s an interesting process. There are a couple of things you need to know. Increasing your EQ is a very individualized process. That’s why we include the test with the book. When you read Emotional Intelligence 2.0, there’s an envelope in the back with a scratch off passcode that you can use to go online and take our emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness appraisal test, and it’ll give you your scores. It also shows you which of the book’s 66 strategies will increase your EQ the most. This is something that we believe so strongly in that we kind of put our money is where our mouth is. Because before we published that book in 2009, we’ve been selling that assessment separately for $40 for a very long time. I speak to large groups several times a year, and when I would give keynotes, I would say “I can’t tell you how to increase your EQ because it’s a personalized process and what works for one person may not work for another.” I found over the years that it was unsatisfactory for people. I started writing on LinkedIn. A couple of years ago, I joined the influencer program and written a bunch of articles. It was about 200 so far, and I found that some did much better that people liked, and I got to thinking about them. I realized that these are three things that apply mostly to anyone who can use it to improve his or her EQ.

Dr. Travis Bradberry I’ve since incorporated this into my talks. I call them my three silver bullets for increasing your EQ.

1. Get your stress under control.

Stress is a necessary emotion. Without it, we don’t take action. We’re kind of in sort of boredom-depression land. As stress increases and motivates you to act, and you achieve optimal performance. The problem is, when stress becomes prolonged or too severe, you move into anxiety land and you melt down where you’re less efficient. Our brains are wired that we need stress. But, we need to be able to manage it to be more efficient. Getting your stress under control and being able to have techniques that you use that calm you down are really critical to increasing your EQ, emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness. I’ll give you an example of that. There’s study conducted at UC Davis where they taught people to cultivate what they called an attitude of gratitude. The experimental group in this study, received a calendar reminder several times a day, and the instructions were just to pause and think of something that they were grateful. Everyone else just did what they normally do. What they found is that reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol by 23% in the experimental group. Having these little techniques like you’re practicing gratitude for someone else, breathing techniques, or mindfulness, can bring your stress levels down and keep your stress from getting too severe.

Dr. Travis Bradberry Yeah. It’s a matter of being cognizant of it and aware of what you’re experiencing and then being able to react to it and do something different as a result. That leads to my second silver bullet which is a big one for a lot of people. 2. Clean up your sleep hygiene. During the day, as a byproduct of normal neuronal activity, toxic proteins build up in your brain. These proteins can only be removed adequately or removed when you get an adequate sleep; it’s a certain duration of sleep and high-quality sleep. A lot of us can’t get more sleep. If you have kids, you have to get up early for work. Perhaps there are only a certain number of hours you’re only going to be able to sleep. But something that almost all of us can do is to improve the quality of our sleep.

Dr. Travis Bradberry If you have a couple of glasses of wine or take a Benadryl or an Ambien, or anything to make you feel sleepy can significantly impair the quality of your sleep, and diminish your brain’s ability to remove these toxic proteins from your brain. The way emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is affected is these toxic proteins diminish self-control. It’s one of the biggest things that happen from fatigue. It also makes you fat although it doesn’t have anything to do with emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness. It’s just an excellent motivation for a lot of people. When you don’t get enough sleep, your metabolism slows, and your body produces the hormone that makes you feel full. Sleep hygiene is a big one. I’ll mention one more thing that can help people when it comes to sleep hygiene. That is no blue light in the evening. Sunlight in the morning is high in blue wavelength light or blue frequency light, and this halts melatonin production. It makes you feel alerted. In the afternoon, if you think about sunsets, they’re warm. They’re orange and red, and sunlight in the afternoon is very low in blue wavelength light. That allows your body to produce melatonin and prepare you to go to the sleep. Being exposed to natural light is all well, and good except, what we do after dinner is we bathe ourselves in blue light. It comes from computers, from the iPad, and it halts your melatonin production. It makes it harder for you to fall asleep and when you do fall asleep, you have a lower quality sleep. That’s another big one about cleaning up your sleep hygiene.

Dr. Travis Bradberry Yeah, sure. 3. Get your caffeine intake under control. I usually get groans from the audience when I bring up this one. Caffeine causes your body to release adrenaline. If you drink too much of it, you might have a low EQ moment right then. But the biggest problem that it causes for people is it’s bad for your sleep hygiene Caffeine has a really long half-life. It has a six-hour half-life. So if you’re having an espresso at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and you want to go to bed at 9, 50% of that caffeine is still going to be metabolically active in your body. It’s going to keep you awake and as the blue light, if you do fall asleep, is bad for your quality of sleep. My suggestion to your caffeine intake under controls is just tried not to drink too much. But when you do drink caffeine, try to stop around noon or midday. That allows enough of it to work its way out in your system that your sleep should be alright.

Dr. Travis Bradberry Yes. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence.

Dr. Travis Bradberry It all hinges on self-awareness. Not only are there differences in how you feel emotions and the type of things that push your buttons. There are physical differences too. People have their circadian rhythms. People have different levels of sensitivity to blue light.

Dr. Travis Bradberry People certainly have varying levels of sensitivity to caffeine and how it impacts your behavior. Part of self-aware is to understand how the stuff affects you and having your regimen for managing that and getting things under control.

Dr. Travis Bradberry One other thing I’ll add is that in studying emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness, we found that it has an adamant connection to earnings. We find that every one point increase in EQ adds about $13,000 to people’s annual salary. If EQ impacts your job performance, it ought to affect your earnings as well, and it certainly does.

Dr. Travis Bradberry Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Travis Bradberry Thanks for having me.