Mastering Emotional Intelligence (EQ) for Entrepreneurial Success

Welcome to Season Two of the End Game Podcast! This is my first solo episode for Season Two after having two remarkable guests in the first two episodes of the year!

In today's episode, we dive into the world of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and its role in entrepreneurial success.

Discover the parallels between EQ and IQ, and learn why a high EQ is crucial for effective leadership. I'll share insights on self-awareness, emotion control, and the importance of state management in challenging situations.

Find out how developing a genius-level EQ can enhance communication, conflict resolution, and feedback skills. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, optimizing your Emotional Intelligence is key to lasting success.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy as we unravel the secrets of mastering EQ for entrepreneurial excellence. If you find value, share, subscribe, and leave your comments. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, teaching you to exist today, expand tomorrow, and create your ultimate end game. 

Understanding Emotional Intelligence (EQ) (00:34)
IQ vs EQ in Leadership (02:14)
Managing Your Own Emotions (05:03)
Perceiving and Handling Others’ Emotions (07:05)
Assessing and Developing EQ (08:54)
Effective Emotional Communication (11:27)
Conclusion (15:42)
Closing (17:59) 

Transcript

0:02

Hey everyone, welcome to the end game podcast season two, where I bet you didn't know what you didn't know. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. Today I'm here to talk to you about mastering emotional intelligence or EQ and how that can create entrepreneurial success. So sit back, relax. And enjoy today's episode. First and foremost, I want to talk to you about concept of what is emotional intelligence or EQ and it's EQ just like it is IQ because it is emotional quotient. Meaning, how do you relate to your peers or, you know, someone your same age in that direct relationship to, for IQ, it's intelligence, and there's a standard deviation, and there's an average. Same thing with EQ. There is someone who has emotional intelligence, and there's a median, there's a mean, there's a standard deviation. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today is this idea of EQ and just how important it is to your success. as an entrepreneur. Understanding EQ and entrepreneurship really begins with how do you define EQ, right? So the definition of EQ is really twofold. It is both your awareness of your own emotional intelligence or your own feelings or your own control of your own feelings. As well as your ability to read the room, right? Your ability to understand the emotions and everything that may be conveying emotions from those around you. EQ is actually comprised of your self awareness, your ability to be in touch with and control your own emotions, as well as your ability to be in touch with or be able to perceive. others emotions. And it turns out that just like IQ is quite important for leadership positions or those who rise to the top from an entrepreneurship perspective, and frankly in a recent Harvard business study, you would actually say more so. And what I mean by that is in a recent study, they're actually able to show that IQ is necessary. However, that alone is not sufficient. So having a high enough IQ is necessary to become a leader, a CEO, an entrepreneur, you know, a coach, a mentor, a manager, but that alone is. Of true leaders, those who both embodied the skill set and really were able to show that in a workplace environment, true leaders had the IQ, but ones who are truly successful over 70 percent of the time actually had very strong or very high EQ. So this idea that just being incredibly intelligent will lend itself to directly correlate to your ability to be a strong leader is candidly not true. The reality is having the IQ or some minimum thresholds of IQ are really important to ever be able to get into that position. But those who are truly effective leaders, again, To me, that is directly correlated to effective entrepreneurs are those who have the ability to read the room, right? So that situational and social awareness actually I've talked about very early on in my journey as the end game coach is actually critically important to your longer term success. as someone who's going to lead others through the good times and the bad, right? So EQ or emotional intelligence, the ability for you to be aware of your emotions. And I said, your ability to control your emotions, right? So what you find in that study and in other situations around it, individuals who may be really good at understanding or perceiving emotions from others, but have a very poor self awareness of their own emotional state. Or ability to control their emotional state actually, again, tend to not be successful. And you can think about this probably in your own experience with either managers you've had, bosses you've had, other co workers you've had, who ultimately end up weeding themselves out, or really don't have followership, or, you know, the business in itself doesn't succeed super well. Or maybe it's a franchise, you know, your franchise does really well. And you maybe have a boss or a leader who had a very high EQ, an example where maybe a different location or franchise or business didn't have that. So all the same systems and processes, all the same rules of the road and regulations, but what really made the difference in the success of this location versus the lack of success in this other one came down to the. You know, if you think about it now, may have actually come down to the EQ of the leader in that role, in that location. So your ability to manage your own emotions is critically important as being a leader. And I'll take that one step further, which is it's not just a self awareness. It's not just the ability to manage. It's also this understanding of not sufficient and actually. What it showed is what I've learned in my career, which is called state management. So your state is who you are, who you are being, right? Are you being forgiving? Are you being gracious? Are you being excited? You know, what emotional state are you in? But more importantly, how do you manage that state? Because if stuff gets hard and your automatic state is to go into isolation, or something difficult arises and you cannot do conflict resolution, and so you run away from conflict like the plague, or again, a very stressful thing happens at work and you get angry. And you get, like, physically angry, outwardly angry, or inwardly angry, and you end up isolating or running away. In any of those instances, if you're not both self aware of the fact that it's happening, and then able to do something to help control it, you are putting yourself in a poor emotional position, and therefore you lack or your EQ might be lacking. So again, as you think about your EQ, there's the part of being aware of what it is or being aware of situations or being aware of emotions that arise and when they arise. And again, thinking proactively about that, you know, when X happens, I know that I feel Y and I know that I display X being really good about that. And then taking that one step further and being able to be really good about managing that. Right. So this goes back to Mindset, it goes back to meditation. It goes back to all the core elements I've talked about, about how you become an effective manager or a great entrepreneur or a successful CEO lies in the ability to be level headed, to be able to manage your emotions, even in the most complicated and difficult of situations. And that will empower you and empower your team to be better. And again, EQ is not just your self assessment and your ability to manage state. It is also that ability to assess and perceive and understand the emotions of others and do something about it. So if you have an employee or you have a situation where someone is noticeably upset and you just keep escalating it, you don't deescalate the situation. If you have an employee who's getting louder and angrier and you're attacking. You are leaning in. You are getting louder. You're not doing what you should be doing. You're, you're not practicing good emotional intelligence. So it is the ability to be self aware is ability to be aware of others and his ability to handle those emotions, yours or others in an appropriate way. That is someone who displays. The critical pillars and attributes of high EQ. Again, this has been studied many times over. Actually, there's been a few studies from Harvard Business School as it relates to EQ and leadership. And that is not just, again, the self awareness piece. It is also how we measure our own EQ. It is how we use self assessments. There are, you know, a lot of those out there. There's a disc assessments and Myers Briggs assessments and. There's all these tools to measure one's personality and attributes and traits and skill sets. It's then what you, how you learn to deal with those. So knowing someone's a high D on a disc assessments, one thing, but knowing how to manage someone who has a high D on their disc assessment, who is your employee is a totally different thing. And so it's not just being able to assess or being aware, whether that's by self or by others, it's also being able to take action around it appropriately. And that is someone, if you combine the two, if you can be both aware of self and others and be able to manage self and others in terms of state management, that is someone who truly achieves that next level degree, you know, that genius level of EQ and not everyone has to be a genius. You don't have to be a genius to be a CEO. In fact, again, in many situations, there are managers or entrepreneurs who very much lack EQ. And, you know, whether it's through perseverance or IQ or other attributes, they may overcome that. And if you have sufficient IQ and you have a genius level EQ, you arguably are going to end up being a better people leader, and better people leaders tend to be better leaders. Again, I urge you to think about how you might help develop. Your both self assessment tools, but also your tool, your tool belt, so to speak for how you handle your emotions, right? I would go back to meditation. Mindfulness go back to journaling. This is where having a mentor or coach is critically important because if, you know, you have someone that can help you get to where you need to go and do that quicker, better, faster than you figuring out on your own and you kind of burning. And. Things to the ground in the meantime, you will be perceived as and become a better people leader sooner in your entrepreneurial pathway. And that will get you closer to success, frankly, closer to a culture and a team that will get you to success. So how you cultivate your own EQ, by the way, if you have a genius level EQ and your employees have the opposite, that is another recipe for lack of success, right? That is another recipe for disaster. You have to be good at your EQ and you need to develop yours to a genius level, ideally over time. And you also need to help your team. Develop theirs because by the way, they're no better, if not often worse at self awareness and emotional intelligence and, you know, how to handle your state or how to manage your state and stressful situation. So the more you can develop yours and the better you can get in the tools you can use, the more you can mentor and coach as part of being a leader to your team, who are also likely statistically pretty poor at times at. EQ. So effective emotional communication is something else to point out here, and that is, I mentioned a little bit earlier, everything in life is either a cry for help or a loving response. Every response is a cry for help or loving response. And so if someone is escalating on you and getting more and more angry, and your response is to just get more and more angry at them, think about how effective communication is when you have two emotionally charged individuals effectively yelling at one another. Right. So you have to, this is where you have to really get that tool set in place, do some personal and professional development and know when's the right time to pull out the right, you know, when's the right time to pull out a tool. And then what tool do you pull out in that moment? So that you can actually help turn the person's emotional state around and give them the capability of doing so and not just feeding into that yelling back and forth at one another. Or again, if you're don't have great EQ, that tends to mean you're not really great at conflict resolution and that might actually mean the opposite rather than. getting more and more angry around another and voices elevate or escalate, it might mean the anger turned inwards leads to isolation or fleeing, right? So like a fight or flight response could be a maladaptive response to a difficult situation. And so you can imagine how effective you are being a leader and a manager when your response to a difficult situation is to isolate or to become inwardly angry and run away. And so we, as we think about The ability to assess the tools to use. We also have to think about the way in which we communicate that. And Oh, by the way, EQ feeds very heavily into your ability to both give and receive feedback. But I'm sorry, if you're in this day and age and you are a leader and you're not able to do conflict resolution or tackle difficult situations head on, or you're not capable of. giving feedback to someone in a way that's empowering or receiving feedback in a way that isn't immediately negative, you know, again, you're likely falling short on what you could do to optimize your EQ. Quick thing on feedback, just in general, this isn't necessarily just around EQ. Although those who have higher EQ tend to do better with this, which is feedback certainly can be perceived and often is as negative. And there's this kind of rule of thumb around sandwiching feedback. That is kind of start with some clear statements, give some positives, provide maybe the not so positive, and then reiterate everything, including reiterating the positives. The only thing I'll add to that You know, kind of hamburger approach to feedback is the meat in the middle matters, you know, if you're going to eat a excellent kind of gourmet hamburger or something that isn't quite so much the meat in the middle matters. And so when you're providing feedback again, it doesn't really matter how high of an IQ you have, although it certainly makes it easier. The higher it is, we know that the brain will automatically trend towards the negative six to eight times more so than the positive. So what that means is when you're building that middle layer, when you're building the burger, you really want to have six, seven, eight positives for every not so positive feedback item. And those don't have to be. Super elaborate. They don't have to be incredibly complicated, but the reality is, if you can kind of build your sandwich with enough positives, you should be able to slide in even for the least, you know, some of those who have the least EQ on your team, you should be able to slide in some of that more critical or constructive feedback, build back on the positives as you exit the conversation and give them that sandwich. You know, as a conversation hole and statistically, scientifically, those who have higher EQ are more capable of giving and receiving feedback, which in a business is really important in helping to mitigate longer term erosion in culture, communication in your business more broadly. So in conclusion, a couple of highlights here. Number one. We know that IQ is really important for getting to a level of leadership and entrepreneurship, and that is necessary, however, rarely in and of itself sufficient. One of the key drivers of success from there is your ability to develop. Optimize and become an emotional intelligence genius and have very high EQ as it relates to EQ. Again, that is your ability to self assess accurately and hold yourself accountable. Be able to look in the mirror. It's also your ability to assess others, emotional states, and then the ability to do something about it. If your emotional state or someone else's emotional state or your collective emotional states aren't where they need to be. Your ability to then go that next layer down that have a tool to turn to, to do something about it. We know that effective managers are way better providing and giving feedback if they have higher EQ. And we know that effective communication is critically important to the maintaining the development of and maintaining of successful businesses. In the culture they're in, and if you do not do these things and you have a genius level IQ and nearly zero EQ, you may be able to rush out the gates and develop some and be an entrepreneur. And candidly, you might even be able to overcome through a lot of other things, your poor EQ, but your life, your employees life and your business. And your personal life will be a heck of a lot better if you take a little bit of time to do some self reflection and some reflection on the tools that you have to manage your state and the state of others and really develop and hone in and optimize your emotional intelligence. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I'm here to teach you how to exist today so you can expand tomorrow and create the ultimate end game. of your wildest desires. If you like this episode, please share it, subscribe, watch it again. By all means, leave comments or reach out. Very excited for season two and very excited to hear from anyone who might have questions, comments about this episode. Talk to you soon.