Have you ever wondered what your blind spots are? In this episode I share why I bought worthless train tickets for my son and I, and I give some tips for overcoming our blind spots.
Here is the link to the video I mention --> https://youtu.be/IGQmdoK_ZfY
Tyler Small: I'm holding in my hand, a train ticket that I bought for $8 and 60 cents on the 10th of January, 2021, which was a Sunday. And my son has one just like it. I think his was half price. So I spent somewhere around $15 on these tickets that we've were never actually able to use. And we'll never be able to use.
[00:00:27] Because the train doesn't run on Sunday.
[00:00:32] I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence. So the reason I wanted to tell you about this little train ticket that I hold in my hand is that I had a series of blind spots, a huge blind spot as a before. And as I was purchasing this ticket and afterward it was a Sunday.
[00:00:52] And. We try not to do things that cause other people to have to work on Sundays, we try and make a day of rest. But at this particular Sunday, we had decided that we were going to take the train for reasons that I won't discuss. So we drove to the train station and Eli, my nine year old son.
[00:01:15] And I ran up to the ticket sales booth. That's a little kiosk with a digital screen, and we didn't know when the train was coming. We assumed it could be any second. And so we quickly bought a ticket for the full day use so that we could get to where we were trying to go. And we each had our ticket in hand and we ran.
[00:01:38] Through the tunnel underneath the tracks up onto the platform, we're rating waiting for our train there. We had rushed through the whole processes to make sure that we could make it. We had purchased our tickets and we were huffing and puffing as we stood on the platform. We actually ran down to the platform in order to look at the schedule, the printed schedule behind the plastic cover.
[00:02:04] And we're looking, reading down all the days of the week. And we realized that the train doesn't run on Sunday and I had Eli even look and he's, what do you mean doesn't run on Sunday? I said look, do you see these days? And find the Sunday schedule. And he said the Sunday schedule is probably just printed in a different place.
[00:02:26] So we walked all the way down to up and down the very long platform looking for. The Sunday schedule the elusive Sunday schedule the non-existent Sunday schedule. And of course we found that there was no train at all. We had just wasted our money. In fact, and I kept this ticket because I thought it was such a good reminder of what happened.
[00:02:51]And it wasn't just that we didn't go to the platform and check first. We actually, there, there are schedules printed about, and as we walked back to our car, in fact, we saw, Oh, there are these large, bright pink signs everywhere that say no service on Sundays, no Sunday service. And. No Sunday service sounds like it's a church that doesn't meet on Sunday.
[00:03:16]No service on Sundays is pertaining to the train there. And there were these large signs everywhere as we walked back to the car and we thought, we could have seen those signs. If we were a little more perceptive, we didn't want to see the signs. We just wanted to get to the platform.
[00:03:33] And so the reason I bring up this story is because we had this huge blind spot. Our goal was to ride the train on Sunday and our blind spot was the huge signs have said the train does not run on Sunday. Now as an aside, I'm not sure why they don't. Shut down the kiosks on Sunday.
[00:03:56] I think that would make sense. So that fools don't waste their money as I did. But back to my point, it's my fault for having this blind spot and not being more open, having such a narrow focus. And in fact, this happens all the time with communication. And I think that one of the ways that we can hack our own emotional intelligence.
[00:04:18] Is to identify our own blind spots. Now, how do you find a blind spot? That is in fact a blind spot because by definition then you couldn't see it. If you didn't know it was there. And so I have a few reflection questions for you. And also a silly video that I'll mention at the end.
[00:04:36]But the self-reflection can help a lot. A coach can help a lot more feedback from others is the most effective way to get into a habit of getting feedback from others. And we've talked about in past episodes, the ultimate relationship question and the side-kick question, ultimately, relationship question is on a five-star scale.
[00:04:56] How would you rate our relationship? The sidekick question is how can I make it better? How can I make it five stars? There's a lot of ways to introduce those questions, which we go over in other places, but. I wanted to give you some questions to think about some specific questions to ask in order to identify some of your blind spots.
[00:05:16] Here are some of these questions. Do I talk too much? Do I know when I'm in a bad mood? Do I interrupt? Do I talk too loud? Do I allow others to interrupt me? Chronically?
[00:05:41] Do I allow others to tell me what I'm saying and direct the meaning that I want to produce? And sometimes these things happen. Just naturally, and it's not a problem. These things happen sometimes. If it's a chronic habit, that's offending people
[00:05:59]that's another problem. And so oftentimes to be polite, if somebody interrupts us once or twice, and we're having a really excited to conversation, that's not a problem. Over the phone, sometimes it's difficult to not interrupt each other or over video chat where there's slight lag that throws our brains off.
[00:06:16] When someone starts talking, you don't know until a fraction of a second later when , the signal comes across. And so that's something that we're always having to work with in this world of technology and remote working and telecommunications. I can point out a specific situation when I created a problem.
[00:06:36] So in the last episode, and I wanted to see if this was a blind spot for you. Or if you noticed what was going on. So had a very very experienced, very gifted person on Alan Larson. Super cool guy. Who's the managing director of global learning and development for continuum global services. And I was asking him some questions.
[00:06:59] I asked him a question and then he said something. And then I said at one point Oh this, and this is that what you meant? And I'm not sure that was what he meant. But I put words in his mouth and I didn't mean to do that, but I that's what I did. And on my part, that was terrible etiquette.
[00:07:17]And reflecting back on it, I thought, wow, that was not good. Like I've never seen a really great podcast host put words in somebody's mouth like that. And that, the only polite thing to do when someone asks is that what you mean? The only play thing to do is to say yes as Allen did, he was a very good sport to me, I think.
[00:07:36]But I wanted to see if you caught that me putting words in Alan's mouth in the last episode, I thought that would be a really interesting if you listened to it. Did you realize what I was doing there? Did you say task on Tyler for doing that? Did you catch that? Do you feel like you ever do that or do you allow other people to do that to you?
[00:07:57]often.
[00:07:58]
[00:07:58]if you notice that someone's doing it often and it's become a habit, then of course it's an unhealthy habit. And if it's a blind spot that I hope you're able to find it. Lots of other questions I could ask you in fact, in that episode he gave a resource that is a 15 question, emotional intelligence assessment.
[00:08:21] And and there, the link is in that description of the episode and that'll help you answer some really interesting questions about emotional intelligence about yourself. It gives you a score. And then on the bottom it shows the three different categories that it has a low, medium and high, and you'll be able to see the scores are out of 75, by the way.
[00:08:44] So if you get a 69, then that means yours is high. It doesn't mean that, as you might suspect out of a hundred, so it's actually out of 75. But these are just different ways that you can catch. Blind spot self-reflection. As I said, it's a great way. Alan mentioned carrying around a little notebook and noting when you have changes in your emotions in order to hack your emotional intelligence and a another way through coaching and also through, through getting feedback, as I mentioned earlier.
[00:09:18] So the last thing I'll give is just a silly thing but something that shows us how our brains work how obvious. A blind spot can be once it's not a blind spot anymore. There's a video and I'll include the link to it. But the challenge is to watch the video and count how many times that the players on each team passed this basketball back and forth.
[00:09:43] You may have seen this video before it shows how much can change in certain ways. And. And and where we're blind spots can occur. So I'll put that in there. I'll put the link in. It's really fun. If you've seen it before, then you can show it to other people
[00:09:58] It's very interesting as you count how many passes there are see if you can count correctly. So that's all I'll say about that. I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence. I wish you all the luck in the world in finding your blind spots.