There is more and more information on the web about emotional intelligence. This video is about how to improve your emotional intelligence. 

All right, welcome. Welcome to the webinar today, this free class called demystifying emotional intelligence. And demystifying emotional intelligence is about number one being more effective as a human being as a leader. And if you lead teams, lead high-performing teams, my name is Robert Grossman. And I will be leading the webinar this morning. For those who are watching it on YouTube, I’d appreciate it if you would hit the subscribe button, like this video, and maybe even share it. And especially, we’d love to hear a comment about what you thought about this video. So please do that, that’d be wonderful would greatly appreciate it. I also want to let you know that the end of the webinar will be a free offer. And it is 100% free; it is not a sales, lieu, or anything like that is a free opportunity to sign up for a 100% complimentary coaching session with me. And you can bring in a challenge you’re having with emotional intelligence, and we’ll work on it. And there’s no obligation; there’s nothing to sign up for afterward unless you want to. So just stay until the end of the presentation. And you have an opportunity to do that.

All right, a little background about me people always asked me where the name Black Diamond leadership came from. And there are several reasons why I called my company Black Diamond. One of them. One of them for me is skiing. I love to ski, and that’s me when I was about six or seven years old. When I was skiing, looks like that was at Mammoth or could be in the local mountains outside of Los Angeles. Here. You can see that metal stake in the ground or that metal pole. Those haven’t been used in a very long time. So yeah, this picture was a while ago. And I’m showing this picture because one of the dreams I had as a little boy when I was on ski was on without skiing was to be on ski patrol. And in my early 20s, I took an advanced first aid class, and the instructor, one of the instructors at the end of the course, said, hey if anybody wants to be on a ski patrol, we’re looking for patrollers in the local mountains outside of Los Angeles. And, of course, I shot my hand up right away, and four months later, I was a candidate for a ski patrol and spent 15 years running the ski patrol. And that’s me, the little circle bottom right-hand corner a little younger. But that is our ski patrol. And I was a team leader. And so I ran the entire weekend, and we had probably 30 to 40 patrollers on the weekend, and we were a very busy mountain. We would average 50 to 55 accidents or sleds a day, which was a lot, and I just loved it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. And also formulated a lot of the techniques that I teach about how to create a high-performance team.

So a little bit more about me, just a little background. I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a minor in Business Administration; I spent three years working for IBM and went to their sales school; phenomenal experience taught me a lot about communication and sales. Then I started my business in 1993 as a presentation consulting firm. It morphed into doing presentations and videos; then it morphed into producing the entire program; everything from creative design, all the pre-production, set plan through on-site, coordination of all the AV, and running the show was a great business.

And it was during that time, towards the end, when I realized that it was time for me to do something different. And the other thing is what I do now with Black Diamond leadership. I was also a Vistage chair, a co-membership organization with their training program. I went through a three-year intensive training program for all the work I’m doing now and did another course and other job along the way. About two years ago, I was certified as a psychological safety consultant and coach, which gave me access to a very powerful assessment platform for psychological safety. And that’s a whole different workshop. So let’s get going here.

So I want to share a quick story called Roberts’s almost professional demise. And it was back when I was producing meetings. And we’re about the 10th A year, 10th 12th year of this business, and we were producing an award show for a large consulting firm, and it was a marketing event. It was a client-facing event for them. And it was recognized as the fastest 50 growing technology company in a given region and is now used to produce la Orange County, San Diego, and Portland. So we had the showdown as we knew it year after year. And this year, we were down in San Diego; we’re in a brand new hotel. The sleeping rooms hadn’t even opened yet. And we were the first event there. So we’re getting set up, and everything’s ready to go. It was a lunch event. And then I noticed that this guy in a tuxedo came up to me; it was on a tech riser in the back of the room. And he said, Hey, your pipe and drape surrounding your tech riser has a gaping hole. We need you to fix it.

I had what I call a key moment; I was very upset about this, which was unusual because I was actually known to be very calm under pressure. And I didn’t like what was happening. So I conjured up this voice, and I said, Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it. And he said, sound, and you should. And he started to walk away, looked at me and I said, What’s your problem, said nothing. What’s your problem said nothing, are like kindergarten, right? And he walks a couple more steps and turns around one more time. And this time, I stood up, and I was about to share some kind words with him. And I noticed that in front of my eye and in the very front of the room, my client, the managing partner, was going over her scripts, oblivious to these two kindergarten kids having a little argument over a little hole in the pipe and drape. And I knew at that moment that if I continued, I would probably lose that client forever. And it could even be a potential demise of my business. So I took a deep breath. And I sat down. And my audio engineer looked at me in a panic. And he said, Robert, I’ll fix it. Don’t worry, like, okay, great, thank you. And I sat there for a moment and said, what,

why am I so upset about this? What doesn’t really matter, right? Now, what really matters is I need to shift this; I need to change what’s going on. So I took another deep breath, and I got myself cleared my head, and I walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder. I’m gonna stop right there. And I’ll tell you the rest of the story towards the end. But essentially, what was going on was this person was questioning my authority, my ability to leave a room to build out the room properly, and I just didn’t like it very much. So let’s come back to you now. So you’re in the right place on this webinar. If you have a burning desire to improve yourself, you also want to be a better leader. And you’re committed to creating a better work environment. And I want to add one more thing, and you’d like to improve relationships in every aspect of your life. And if that’s if you’re interested in one or more of those things, you are in the right place. So I promised that I would talk about why emotional intelligence is important. And then, we’ll move into what emotional intelligence is. And then, we’ll spend a little time talking about how to improve your emotional intelligence.

So why is it important? Well, I believe that to be an effective leader, in order to be an effective team member, you need you must have a high degree of emotional intelligence because it leads to other things. So, for example, at the fourth level of leadership, or the destination, is being accountable for your behaviors and actions and holding other people accountable for their behavior and actions. In other words, we want behaviors and actions that support the mission that improves psychological safety. And we want to change behaviors that take away from that. Well, to have accountability, you must have trust in your relationships with other people; you need to trust them, and they need to trust you. To have trust, you must be able to manage challenging conversations in an appropriate way. Or you will tear down trust to have challenging conversations. You must work on your personal leadership. You can call it emotional intelligence and self-mastery, but it really is personal leadership; managing yourself first, you cannot really engage in a challenging conversation if you’re emotionally triggered. It just doesn’t work. You can’t have empathy for others. If you’re triggered, it just doesn’t work. And if you’re triggered in your conversations or things are always taking you off to a game because they’re triggering you, trust is going to be difficult as well.

You know, there’s a wonderful man he lost him several years ago. His name is Zig Ziglar. You probably heard of him. He’s one of the leading guys in personal development and success. And he very clearly said You must manage yourself before you can lead someone else. So why is this important? Let’s look at the process of going from personal growth up to effective leadership. So the first domain is self-awareness, emotional self-awareness; you must be able to manage your own emotions and must be able to recognize first that you’re actually having an emotional response to things that you get triggered. And once you have that emotional awareness, once you recognize how you respond or react to challenges and events in your life, whether it be communication from somebody, whether it might be a missed opportunity, whatever it is, you must be aware of your emotions. When you do that, then you can move into self-management, which is emotional self-control, adaptability in multiple situations, not getting caught, you know, going down one way you can, you can actually, you know, be adaptable in the current situation. And if you need to move left, you move left, move right, move right. And then there’s achievement orientation, and then a positive outlook, on yourself, on work and others, then we move into social awareness, we were able to have empathy for others, and also organizational awareness, what’s going on outside of your department outside of your domain outside of your area. Finally, we move into relationship management, which is being able to influence other people and coach and mentor other people, resolve conflict more effectively, and then be able to establish teams and teamwork and be an inspirational leaders. So this is the process that we go through in work to achieve these different areas. So another reason why emotional intelligence is important is this. And we all know that life can offer wonderful blessings and beauty and joy. And there’s a lot of good things in life, a lot of good things. But we need that look very far to discover that life does have adversities. Most lives are characterized by some degree of difficulty and struggle, whether it be traumatic or just everyday hassles. And, you know, we wish that our adversities will go away, we wish that they would dissipate, but they don’t; they just seem to be coming at us, seemingly an unending series of challenges. So this is the work that we want to do so, to recognize that this is just part of life. This is how we’re wired as human beings. But to really drive the point home about why this work is so important.

I want to read a quote to you from Daniel Goleman, whom some say popularized the term emotional intelligence. He is an avid author, writes books on emotional intelligence, and also delivers speeches. But he wrote If your emotional abilities are not in hand if you don’t have self-awareness if you’re not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, that no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. Do you agree with that? Give me a yes or no and chat. That’d be great. Do you agree with that? All right. The other thing about having emotional intelligence, or rather, a lack of emotional intelligence, is it destroys trust; you can only imagine when if you’re a leader, and you are not consistent with how you respond to challenging events, some days you’re calm. The next day, you’re upset in the morning, but you’re good. An hour later, you’re yelling, right? That breaks down trust in your relationships. Also, if your team members don’t know how you’re going to show up, from one minute to the next, they’re less likely to bring ideas to you or solutions to problems; they’ll tend to hide because they just don’t know how you’re going to be. And that’s an important aspect of developing emotional intelligence. Now, Harvard Business Review wrote an article about this, they did a study basically saying that if you take two people with equal levels of emotional intelligence, we back up, you take two people with equal technical competencies, but one has a higher degree of emotional intelligence, the one with a higher degree of emotional intelligence will move up faster and will make more money in their career. They also realize that if you take two people with one person who has a higher degree of technical competency than the other, but the person with the lower degree of technical competency has a higher degree of emotional intelligence, they will still move up faster and make more money in their careers. That should be reason enough for you to embrace this work and improve and work on your own emotional intelligence. I want to share a quick case study I’m working with a group of leaders at a very large company and we did emotional intelligence and then we had a group coaching All. And we’re also working on psychological safety. And one of the leaders said, you know, I want to share a unique situation that happened recently, that kind of shocked me, and said, Well, tell me the story. So I was given a presentation to my team. And, and, and I, I apparently misspelled the word twice. And somebody on my team, somebody reports to me, in the middle of the presentation, raised their hand and pointed out that I misspelled the word. And I said, Wow, well, so would you do? And he said, he smiled. And he said, I simply said, Thank you for letting me know. And I’ll fix it after this presentation. I know that seems reasonable; what would you have done differently before? And he said, Well, I probably would have been embarrassed, I probably would have said something snide, I would have been condescending, I would have ridiculed this person. And if I had done that, I know that I would have ruined the psychological safety of my team. But doing it this way, I improved it. I said I’m curious, did you still feel like you wanted to respond in the older way? And he said, Yeah, I really did. But then I use the tool called the response chain to interrupt it. And at the moment, I was able to manage my emotions and instead do something. Instead of being disruptive or destructive, I was able to really build trust and psychological safety on my team. So Buddha said, do not learn how to react; learn how to respond. And I think that reacting is a normal way of human beings, how we act, how we respond, how we react to our distressing moments. And you’ll understand why in a moment, so it’s really learning how to respond to our stressful situations. And this takes us into what emotional intelligence is.

So one of the questions I’m asked often is, is emotional intelligence real? Or is it some, you know, popular thing that’s gonna die out soon? Or is it you know, whoo, whoo, can’t fire. That’s all feel good about things. And, and I’m, you know, without a doubt, in my mind, it is real. And I’m going to show you why it’s real. So we’ll take a quick look at the human brain. And we’re only going to focus on two parts of the human brain. That is the limbic brain system, which is the older part of our brain; it’s also where our emotions reside. And then there’s the prefrontal cortex, which is a newer part of our brain, that’s also called the rational brain. So when we experience something, we experience an event or communication, wherever it might be. We experience it first, emotionally, first, emotionally. And then we need to learn how to engage our rational brain to really make sense of what’s going on. Here’s why that’s important. Inside the limbic brain, the system was a little tiny clan called the next point on it, called the amygdala; there we go, called the amygdala. And the amygdala is the part of our brain that is really responsible for our survival. It is the triggering that triggers an event when we feel threatened, fight or flight. So it immediately begins to flood our bodies with epinephrine and cortisol and other hormones to either make us really strong in the moment or to be able to run out of there as fast as we can to get away from the danger. Here’s the challenge, the amygdala and, in fact, the emotional part of our brain doesn’t know if the event that is scariness is real or not; it cannot tell the difference.

So I’m sharing this with you because we’ll want one example if you ever walked in in the woods and you heard a rustling in the bushes, you might turn around and say, oh my god, there’s a Bengal tiger coming out, and meet me. Right? Well, the chances of there being a Bengal tiger are slim to none. But your brain can’t tell the difference. So you can you recognize the feeling all of a sudden your body is charged, your heart rate increases, you tighten your jaw, you become hyper-aware of what’s going on around you, until you realize, ah, yeah, no, it was just a chipmunk, or whatever it was. This is the same thing in a conversation. If somebody criticizes you or makes a suggestion during a presentation, you might perceive that as some level and attack, at some level, at some level, a conversation doesn’t go the way you want it to go, or somebody says something that you find insulting.

There are so many different things that could trigger this response, whether it’s real or not, right? So when it happens, we get into this tunnel vision, right and that, and become very hyper-aware of what’s going on around us. Actually, we Do not do that. I’m sorry, we become very hyper-aware of looking for whether or not I’m going to fight, I’m going to fight and get my way out of there, or I’m going to flee, I’m going to run and avoid the situation. So in, with emotional intelligence, you can actually stop this process; you can actually break that response. And it goes back to the balance between the amygdala and your cortex. The amygdala is saying one thing, and your cortex needs to determine whether or not it’s a real threat or not. And you’re going to understand how all this works at the moment when we show you a model. So how do we improve our emotional intelligence? What do we need to do? Where do we start? What’s the first step? Well, the first step to conquering what I call your key moments when they need to find a key moment right now; a key moment is an event that happens it is the communication received is the person when somebody criticizes us when you miss a flight, it’s when something happens, somebody cuts you off in traffic, right? That is the key moment. It’s just the event. That’s what happened.

So the first step is to generate awareness that we have key moments. And in fact, I remember, after I finished all my training, one day, I was driving in Los Angeles, and somebody cut me off in traffic. And I started doing some very creative communication with this person, including some sign language. And all of a sudden, I stopped myself and I said, Holy cow, man, I’m having a key moment. This is cool, right? And it really was an interesting moment. And from that point forward, I started recognizing every time I was having a key moment, and from there, I could do the work that we’re going to talk about in a moment. Another way to look at awareness, it’s a, it’s a mental state of mind, where we’re conscious, we’re awake, we’re present, we’re paying attention to what’s going on around us, we’re paying attention to how others are feeling and how we’re feeling.

Another way to define it is being alert, present, and focused on what’s happening. So I want to introduce to you two different models. The first model, we call the Self Mastery model, and you can see right in the middle, and big, red big red box is a key moment. And how we respond to our key moments will really determine our success in life, our happiness in life, and the quality of our relationships. And so there are really two ways that we can respond to a key moment. And one way is what I call the pathway of survival. And that’s not good, right? We don’t want to just survive; we want to thrive, right? And so, so some of the characteristics of survival is when we respond to a key moment by blaming others, we resist reality, we become a victim, pretend we’re a victim, we don’t take any responsibility for what’s going on. And we really lack any vision about who we are and how we want to operate. On the opposite side, which is the pathway of self-mastery, we look to see where we’re responsible. When we’re in the middle of a key moment, we look at multiple ways to solve a problem, we engage our emotional intelligence so we can determine whether or not it’s a real thing or an imagined thing, right? We would embrace reality if I didn’t say that already. We exercise responsibility. And we’re always clarifying our goals and our values. Share a quick story with you.

Another quick story. I was a couple of years ago, before COVID, I was engaged to go to Poland to work with a technology team; there were people that were mostly interacting with us based project managers. And the owner of this company hired me to come out because he felt that his team members were reacting strongly to these US-based project managers, Eastern European programmers, and US-based project managers. Well, so I was really excited about this project. And I remember walking through the airport up to my gate, and I looked out the window, and there was my airplane, and the engine was open. And I thought, oh, okay, we’ll see what happens. An hour went by other people that were working around the engine laughed at the engine was still open. And then finally came the announcement that the plane was going to fly, that we needed to go get our bags, and then go back to the counter ticket counter for the airline, and that they would put us on other planes’ other flights. Well, man, I was mad. I was walking down, and I was steaming. And at that moment, I said, okay, but you’re having a key moment here. Calm yourself down. And I did. I took some deep breaths, and I went got my bags, and I’ve gotten wine. And I noticed everybody was yelling and screaming at the ticket agents, right? As if they caused the plane to not work. When I got up there. I said, Hi, boy, you’re having a tough day today, aren’t you? And she looked at me with sadness in her eyes and said, Yeah, you have no idea, and I said, Well, I do. Let’s see what’s going on here. I’m sorry for my fellow passengers, and hey, this is what I really need. I’m doing this presentation, and I need to be in Krakow by this time; any way you can help me, I’d really appreciate it. You know, I know you got a lot going on right now. But maybe you can help me and do a click, click, click, click, click. And next thing I knew, in two hours, I was on a first-class flight to London, London Krakow. So, you know, I don’t know how my other fellow passengers if they had the same results I did. But I made a difference in that person’s life. And that goes back to my personal values of something that the decision, that choice that I made many years ago, when I was a little boy, that I was going to strive to make have a positive impact on every single person that it comes in contact with. All right, the second model I’m going to show you is called the response chain. And you see the first three boxes of the response chain; it’s called the key moment response chain. And I’m gonna go over this really quickly with you. So we’ve mentioned the key moment is what happened; you may also look at it as the event. So when we look at the key moment, we don’t add a lot to it, we don’t talk about the meaning of it or anything like that, or why it happened, just what it is. When we have a key moment, we experience it through our paradigms, and our paradigms are really a constellation of our core beliefs and how we see the world. And the way I see the world differently, the way that you see the world because it’s made up of, you know, who we are, where we’re from, how we were raised, a whole bunch of different things, our life experiences, but it’s a think of it as a set of glasses or a set of filters. The old saying, If you wear rose-colored glasses, you think the whole world is rose-colored. But it’s not that the paradigm operates in the same way. So depending on your paradigm and your core beliefs, you give the key moment you have thoughts about it, or you have a meaning about it, you give it meaning, right? And it’s like the spin you put on it to make sense of what’s happening. So when the key moment occurred with the airplane, right, in the first at first, I experienced that through fear and doubt and uncertainty, and I was getting mad, and my thoughts were, oh, man, I’m gonna miss my plane, and I’m gonna lose a client, right? And then I got mad at myself for not choosing a different airline. Right. So based on our thoughts, we have feelings, the real key moment happens, we experience it, and we have thoughts and meanings about it. And then we have feelings and our feelings are both in our bodies, and also in our minds, right? So I mentioned that you might have, you may tighten your chin or your jaw when something happens, you may feel your heart rate increase, you may have sweat on the brow, right? You may feel confused, may be sad, you may be angry, you may be frustrated; whatever your feelings are, it comes after the thoughts or meaning that you give to your key moment, and based on your feelings will determine your behavior. What do you do immediately following the key moment? Do you behave in a way that’s positive or behave in a way that’s negative? So depending on your behavior, you’re going down the pathway of survival, right? And then you got to look at the results that you get going down the pathway of survival. So, for example, if I had walked up to the ticket counter and started yelling and screaming at that poor woman, you know, maybe I wouldn’t have been on that plane, right? Maybe I would have been on the plane the next day, who knows? Right? So the other option is to go down the pathway of self-mastery. And we do that; we are looking to see where we’re responsible, we’re awake or present, and we’re learning about ourselves every step of the way during these key moments. And then, we look at the results that we can generate when we go down the pathway of self-mastery.

So I want to go back to the thoughts part of it for a moment because it’s important to understand our automatic thoughts, right? They’re, they’re unconscious, they’re spontaneous, usually negative, they’re very believable by us. And oftentimes, they’re irrational. So remember, I said that you have an automatic thought after the key moments. And it’s a great place to start looking at to see how we can change our thoughts about it about the key moment, which then impacts the rest of the response chain. But before we can do that, we also have to look at our common distortions in our logic or our reasoning and how we see things. And this kind of goes back to those core beliefs, right, the paradigm. Right. So there are definitely some very specific distortions that we use in this work. Number one is black-and-white thinking. So when you’re in black and white thinking, it’s either this or that, there’s no gray area, it’s one or two. Either you like me, or you hate me; there’s nothing in between. Then there’s overgeneralizing, where we see one event is the truth. Right? So you make a mistake on one presentation well; therefore, they’re all bad, or a manager doesn’t treat you right; therefore, the whole world organization is bad, right? You can’t trust anybody in management. That’d be overgeneralizing. Catastrophizing is making the event bigger than it actually is. Right, my significant other left me, and therefore I will never be happy again. One that I like to work on a lot, and that most of my clients work on a lot, is mind reading, where we actually believe we know what the other person is thinking. And we actually the reality we have no idea until we check in. But if we think we know what they’re thinking in a situation, you know, for example, if I’m leading a presentation, and somebody makes a comment about it, and I consider that comment to be inappropriate, I might be thinking that that person is trying to sabotage me, where possible, all they were doing was asking a question, or pointing out a mistake, nothing more, nothing less. Then there’s fortune telling, where we already know how things are going to turn out. There’s labeling. Labeling is when we place a label on someone or something, which really oversimplifies the way it really is. One might be, you know, some I’ve heard this one before from managers, you know, employees don’t care about the company. That’s a broad label for many people. And then there’s personalizing, where we feel it is our fault when things go wrong. If I had been a better manager, who would have met our numbers? If I had been a better father, my son wouldn’t have had problems, right? So these are the distortions in our reasoning that we spent a lot of time working on in the workshop and in coaching to really understand them. And when you have that key moment, and you look at the meaning that you’re having, and you look at the distortions you’re using, then when you remove those distortions, you come up with a whole brand new meaning, which can be a lot more empowering than maybe the way you’re feeling right now. So when we look at overcoming our key moments, it’s really based on the principle of intent is your intent to protect when you’re having a key moment, which is, you defend your egos by justifying your behavior, and you blame other people for what goes wrong. When you do this, you might feel better temporarily, but you fail to learn and grow from your experiences. And you tend to keep repeating the same types of mistakes. The other is the intent to grow. And this is when we seek to use our key moments to understand ourselves better and learn from our experiences. And this is when we stop focusing outward and making ourselves victims of the events of our lives. Instead, we look to see what our part is in the experiences and how we can grow and change. So this is deep personal development work. And the question is, you can ask yourself right now, are you do you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, just by the fact that you’re on this webinar today? You probably have a growth mindset. So when we look at how we grow in some people, they’re afraid of growth because they go outside of their comfort zone; it doesn’t feel good, right? It’s intimidating. But I’m here today to tell you that you have to step outside that comfort zone. And that’s where success happens when you start to challenge yourself.

So I want to let you know that this work, this workshop, and this online webinar are really about you. And maybe you’ve been looking for a way to be more effective at work and in your relationships. Maybe you want to be a better leader, and maybe God, you’re exhausted by the conflict on your team. Or maybe you’re asking yourself, How can I master my emotions and be more effective? There are a couple of opportunities, and I’m wondering where you fit in. Right? Number one, you just feel this is great information. And thank you. And that’s fine if that’s how you feel, right? Or you might be thinking I’m curious, and I want to learn more about how we can work together. Or you might be thinking, wow, this is exactly what I need or my team needs. And I want to find out now how I can work with you. So I’m going to tell you in a moment how you can do that. But first, I need to finish the rest of my story. So remember that, that the maitre d came up and told me there was a gap and my pipe and drape and I was the Hulk and kind of exploded like a volcano and got really mad and got myself together and realized I had a key moment. didn’t take the time to figure out why because that wasn’t really important. I just knew that I needed to interrupt that process right then, right there. And I got off the riser, and I walked over to this guy; I wish I remembered his name. And he was in a huddle, by the way, with three or four other guys in tuxedos. And they’re all talking, and he was pointing his finger back at me. He didn’t see me because his back was to me, and I walked up to him. I tapped him on The shoulder, and I’m a little bit taller than he is. But I was a lot taller. And he kind of requests for a second. And I smiled and thrust out my hand and said, Hi, my name is Robert Grossman. And I’m the executive producer of this event. And in fact, I’ve been producing this event for over 11 years. And I bet you, and I have the same goals. We want our mutual clients to have an extraordinary experience here. I want people in the room to hire me for their next projects. And I imagine that you’d like people in the room to want to hold their next event here in your brand new hotel. Because yeah, Robert, that’s exactly what I want. And I said, perfect, that my guys fix the pipe and drape. And he goes, thank you. So Well, hang on. They fixed it. And I’d like you to come back and take a look at it. To make sure it meets with your approval. He says, are you serious? And I said, Yeah, I’m serious. I’m a guest in your hotel. And I want this room to look perfect the way that you want it to look. So a big smile on his face. And we walked back and, you know, the pipe and drape were kind of pushed together. No big deal, right? And he turned to me and said, Robert, thank you so much. This has been a really great experience so far working with you. And I look forward to having a great event. And he went his way. And I went back up on my riser and looked over in the show notes. And about five minutes later, he came out with a clipboard in hand and said, Hey, Robert, can I bother you for a second? Sure, what do you need? What’s up? And he said, Well, you know, I know that you have a program, you have a show flow, and we have ours, and I just want to line them up. I want to make sure that when we drop salads and the main course and whatnot, that we’re not interrupting your show, can we go over everything and, and we’ll fit in into your gaps and things like that. So absolutely. I gotta tell you guys, a man in 20 years of doing that work, that’s never happened before. So we did that. He walked back, and I went back to looking at my notes and stuff. And about 15 minutes later, he

came over and said, Hey, I kind of have a question for you. Should we open the doors yet? The event wasn’t about starting for 15 minutes. And I said, Well, you know what, let’s go outside, take a walk around together. Let’s see how many people are in the foyer. And we’ll make a determination. Based on that. We went outside, we walked around, and we decided not to open the doors yet. And then we did it again. 10 minutes later and opened the doors. It was a smooth, seamless, beautifully executed event. It was perfect. Every aspect of the event was perfect. And when the event was over, something else happened that had not happened before seven people came running back to where I was sitting, sitting. They said hey, we were with Qualcomm little fortune 500 company back then, that we’re doing an event just like this next month in San Francisco. And we’ve already determined that we want to fire our current company and hire you instead if you’re available. And I said, Well, that would be wonderful. I would love to support your event. And sure enough, we were available. And then, after the event, we talked about how to work together, and we did produce that event for them. When we were all done in the hotel, everything was packed up, and I was getting ready to leave. I wanted to find the maitre d, and I wanted to see how the event was for him. And so I finally tracked him down. And I said, well, so how was the event for you? You said, Robert, you’re not gonna believe it. Six people came up to me after the event and scheduled appointments to talk about holding their next event at our hotel. I consider that to be a huge win. Now, was it the fact that he and I collaborated was the fact that I controlled my emotions and instead created a partnership with him? Maybe? Who knows for sure? But I would like to believe that that had something to do with it, for sure. I felt great about it. He felt great about it. Right. My team felt great about the events. And then he had these wonderful results afterward. So that’s the end of that story. So now, we’re not going to ask you. There’s a barcode on your screen right now. And I’d like you to take out your cell phones and access that barcode. And it’s going to ask you for code and put it in SMB. What this will do is ask you to take a brief survey about this webinar, and I’d like you to answer it honestly. Tell me what you got from it and what you like to see differently, and then there’ll be an opportunity to schedule your free coaching session if you want to take advantage of it. If you don’t, that’s okay. You don’t have to click on that button. But I would really appreciate it if you’d fill this out. It’ll help me to improve what I do dramatically, and it also will give you a very easy way to interact with me and schedule that webinar. So I want to open up for some questions. Let’s see, got a couple of questions here. Number one, how long does it take? I’m gonna make an assumption that talents take to improve your emotional intelligence. Well, it’s a journey. It’s a lifelong journey. I’ve been working in this area now for 15 years now, maybe a little bit longer. And I’m still learning about myself. It’s like pulling back the layers of an onion, right, and peeling back one layer. And then there’s more to go. And I’m always learning more about myself and how I respond to various key moments. Where really, where I am right now is focusing a lot on some of my core beliefs. But the difference between me and maybe you and people that I work with initially is it’s really similar going to the gym, right? So, you know, if you’re, if you’re doing going to the gym five days a week and taking classes and lifting weights, and why decide after not working out for five years, and I’m going to join your workout and workout just like you, right, you can only imagine what would happen, it wouldn’t, right, it would fail. And that’s what emotional intelligence is like you, and there’s no difference between you and me. I don’t have any magical powers. I’ve just been practicing this longer than you have. So it’s a journey. And you’ll see some immediate results. When you start working on this, you may have some, and you may not have some, some I don’t want to call failures. But missteps where you lose your cool, I lose my cool; still, it’s just, you know, how we’re designed as human beings. But over time, it gets better and better and better. And in my life, my relationships are better my business is better. My ability to help people is dramatically improved. I’m a much better father because of this work. So

Every aspect of my life has been touched by this. Okay, the next question is can you do this virtually? Well, yes, I can lead these workshops, virtually COVID was a blessing in disguise for us. And even though these workshops are designed to be in person, they work really well virtually as well. We see how many people you know, and class size can be anywhere from 18 to like 30, maybe. And that’s it for the question. So, hey, guys, thank you so much for being on this webinar. Again. You know, if you’re watching this on YouTube, do me a favor. If you got value out of this, subscribe to my channel, it would mean a lot to me. Like this video, if you liked it, and I’d love to hear any comments that you have in the comment section. Keep your eyes out for more workshops. I think we’re going to do one in a couple of weeks on coaching conversations. All right. Take care and be well.