Writing page after page in a journal may not be a sustainable daily routine for most people. However, answering these questions just a few times can help you change the way you think. An excellent way to hack your emotional intelligence (EQ).
Tyler Small: I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence. Today, I want to talk about keeping an emotional intelligence journal. Now this is very different from the micro journaling that I help people do in the coaching. So not micro journaling, but rather this is more of a long form journal. Not something that you have to keep every day.
[00:00:27] It could be helpful, but. I've found it very difficult to actually write like a page or multiple pages in a journal every single day. I've personally filled up about 25 to 30 journals in my life, but that was like, write every day for a week or write a few times a day for, year after year kind of thing.
[00:00:51]And certainly not every single day of my life. So for some reason I'm not able to keep up that amazing habit that some people do of writing a page every single day. And so I, having not been able to do that myself my recommendation is just write in a journal a few times.
[00:01:08] What is that journal? What form does it take? It could be a document online. It could be an email to yourself. It could be a scrap of paper, a cheap notebook, or even something as fancy as a leather bound book. That's with blank pages in it, a fancy journal. It doesn't have to be though. It doesn't have to be.
[00:01:28] So six questions that I recommend asking yourself in order to hack your own emotional intelligence. This is a fast track method of reflecting on what's happening during the day. And some of these questions might be more obvious to you. Some of them might be less obvious.
[00:01:50] Some of them may be easier to answer and some of them may be more difficult. So I want to propose these questions to you during this episode. And have you think about answering these questions, taking a few minutes tonight tomorrow morning after lunch break, whenever to write down your thoughts.
[00:02:13] The first question I recommend asking is. What did I feel today? And if you're just starting out on your emotional intelligence path this could be a difficult question to ask. Everybody has feelings. And at the same time, it's sometimes difficult to recognize the feelings that we have. A good place to start,
[00:02:37] maybe, did you feel angry today? Or did you feel, scared or anxiety? Did you feel really happy at some point during the day? And just to recognize what feelings you had today.
[00:02:55] The second question is how did I handle it and the best way to handle, feelings, of course we could go on about none optimal ways to handle feelings, ways not to handle feelings.
[00:03:09]We could go on and on about inappropriate ways to handle anger and fear, et cetera, running away, hiding, avoiding conversations, et cetera. But in either case I think a great hack for emotional intelligence in general, just handling your feelings is to go through three steps. Pause, embrace and manage.
[00:03:28] So whether the feeling is positive or negative you can do these three steps, pause, embrace, manage. Taking deep breaths often helps me to go into, okay, now I'm going to process my feelings. I know what I felt. I was either really happy or really sad or whatever. It's frustrated with someone and I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through these three steps.
[00:03:51] Pause, embrace, manage. Pause is that deep breaths. Especially if you're considering this right as it's happening or very soon afterwards, pausing helps you go into self-reflection mode. It helps you to, to not be too manic or depressive about your feelings, but to have that more even keel,
[00:04:12] thoughtful management of them. And there's this scene from a movie that we love to watch around Christmas time, it's called Elf. And this movie is just a classic comedy and this this character at one point runs into a meeting that's this really important, high stakes meeting and he says, I'm in love. I'm love. And I don't care who knows it. And he's really happy he's experiencing these really positive emotions, but he didn't take the time to pause. Maybe he had pause, but he didn't manage it very well.
[00:04:46]Obviously in this scene highly recommend the movie Elf. It's super funny. Especially from an emotional intelligence perspective of somebody who has a lower emotional intelligence in many ways, but is still very kind. And in the end wins the hearts of those around him. Anyway, pause, embrace, and manage.
[00:05:05]Even if you're having a really positive emotion, then, to pause, realize what you're feeling. Embrace it. Oh, this is wonderful. I'm feeling really good. It's great to celebrate. I'm feeling really good. That's a really positive, productive thing you can do in order to put yourself in a good state for helping other people.
[00:05:26] Then the last part is to manage. So what do you do with it? Like I, I would, if you can link your good feeling to another person. Did someone inspire you? Did someone smile at you that caused you to face a situation differently that day? Who helped you in order to do that? And maybe it was mostly you, but who can you thank for contributing to that positive experience or who can you share that positive experience with? Maybe somebody needs to pick me up. Maybe someone around you just needs a little support and, using that pot of positive emotion, that positive energy, you can take that to another person and share it and give it away. That can be a huge deposit into a relationship, especially one that needs a contribution.
[00:06:17] So on the negative end, what is, what does that second question mean? How did I handle it? What's the ideal way to handle an emotion and same process, pause, embrace, and then manage. So take the deep breaths.
[00:06:30] Embrace. Okay. I'm feeling angry right now, or I'm feeling frustrated or I'm feeling betrayed. I'm feeling betrayed right now. I'm going to embrace that and I'm going to own this feeling that I have nothing wrong with feelings, even negative ones, and then to manage and say, okay why am I feeling betrayed?
[00:06:47] Maybe there's some stupid things that I've done that have contributed to this and work on those things. Maybe there's something really awful that someone's done to you and consider. Okay I can go and seek revenge and get them back. Or I can maybe put that on the shelf. I can make a list of perceived offenses on my side of the fence and I can try and separate the complaints from the real concerns that I have that are obviously really difficult for me to deal with on an ongoing basis. And I want to fix those. Probably the right time to handle those is not when you're overwhelmed with the feeling, but in a really positive way after you've contributed to the relationship enough where they care enough to respond in a positive way.
[00:07:37]So handling those emotions, sometimes you have to shelve it for a little bit. Until you can catch them in a positive state to help you deal with it.
[00:07:47] Here's another question to ask number three, , as you're journaling, what emotions did I observe in others? So sometimes we're just thinking about ourselves, but using our eyeballs to observe facial expressions, body language, using our intonation using those advanced listening skills to pick up intonation. That was different than the normal. What emotions did I observe in others?
[00:08:16] Number four, how did I support other people in managing their emotions? So you see somebody that's happy, you might say, wow, you seem very happy today.
[00:08:27] You see somebody that, that appears to be in a peaceful mood. Then you might say, wow, you seem very peaceful and calm today. Why is that? And when other people share their positive emotions with you, that could be a huge contribution to the relationship from their perspective.
[00:08:46] They love to share the happy things, the positive things that are going on, and it can also help boost their emotional intelligence.
[00:08:55]Someone's feeling a negative emotion. The worst thing you could do is say, wow, you look like poop today. Don't do that.
[00:09:02] For a negative emotion that you observe in someone else, you might say something like, Hey, I noticed that you're not yourself. I noticed you don't seem yourself today. Is there something I can do to support you? And that can make an enormous difference. There's a lot of ways to ask that question, but just in general, asking yourself, how did I do at supporting other people to manage their emotions?
[00:09:26] That can help you really hack your emotional intelligence, looking back and creating the expectation for yourself that in the future, you're going to do a better job at these things.
[00:09:38] Question number five that I recommend asking in your journaling is where are my relationships today? Where are my relationships this week?
[00:09:47] And of course I always recommend using the ultimate relationship question, on a five star scale, how would you rate our relationship? And there's a lot of ways to introduce that specifically by framing it as I'm working on my relationships. I know I've made them a bunch of mistakes.
[00:10:08] I know our relationship, isn't five stars. So I want to make some positive changes. I know I need to change. And I just need a little honest advice. Can I ask you a question and then. On a five-star scale, how would you rate our relationship? So that's a great way to measure the relationship, to understand exactly where they are.
[00:10:31] I think as human beings, I've discovered from the data that I've collected, that people are typically very surprised on the average, when they ask a person to rate the relationship that it's typically a little lower than they would have expected. If you think all of your relationships are five stars, then probably they're not. So asking people is often very helpful.
[00:10:55] Question number six is what am I doing about it? So there's the sidekick question that I always recommend after you ask the ultimate relationship question, asking the sidekick question. Oh, wow. What can I do to make it better? And that's a very specific, questions. Sometimes you don't get specific answers sometimes it's not actionable, but the information that you receive can be very helpful as you ask follow-up questions. How can I make a Five-star Experience for you today? ,
[00:11:24] so this is a very numbers oriented, very measurable, very actionable approach . To hacking your own emotional intelligence. Using those numbers allows you to make these squishy theorial feelings, very tangible, very concrete. All of those experiences average out to that score as perceived by the other person.
[00:11:50] Now, of course, there's a lot of bias. There's recency bias and recency bias is the one I love to use right before you ask the question, you can go over to double check on five star experiences that you've provided for the other person. Hey just to double check, I wanted to make sure I reached your expectations on this report.
[00:12:10] I submitted, on a five-star scale, how would you rate it? That report or how would you rate the experience of having me complete that report for you? And if it's a five then great. You're there, that's an anchor point in getting the score for the ultimate relationship question to go up. Now, if it's not a five, then you can get feedback.
[00:12:35] Oh, tell me what I can do to get it to a five. Then you get these gold nuggets of feedback in order to feed your next contribution.
[00:12:45]So writing in a journal, even just once or twice or a few times, and answering these questions can help you hack your emotional intelligence can help you get thinking in the right ways, asking them regularly would be even better. But just getting into the habit of thinking about these types of questions can go a long ways in building up your high performance relationships at work.
[00:13:08] And just as a summary, I'm going to read the questions one more time. Number one, what did I feel today?
[00:13:15] Number two, how did I handle it? And I recommend pause, embrace, manage.
[00:13:22] Number three, what emotions did I observe in others today?
[00:13:27]Number four, how did I support others in managing their emotions today?
[00:13:33] Number five, where are my relationships? And that includes asking the ultimate relationship question, because typically our assumptions are a little bit inflated.
[00:13:44] Number six, what am I doing about it? And that includes asking the side kick question, how can I make it better? And working through that.
[00:13:56] Hope you've enjoyed this episode about keeping an emotional intelligence journal. If you do it once, that's great. If you do it regularly, that's fantastic. And the more you do it, of course, the more helpful we'll be .
[00:14:10] I would say, if you do this one, two or three times, it's going to go a long way towards creating those thought patterns that help you develop high-performance relationships at work and beyond.
[00:14:22] I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.
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