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Welcome to Episode 123 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and today is the second part of a two part series on how emotional intelligence can help you to be a non-anxious presence.

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Last week I covered what emotional intelligence is. This week, I will cover how you can develop your emotional intelligence. Before I do that, let me do a quick review.

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The concept of emotional intelligence was developed in the early 1990s and has been worked on by a variety of researchers ever since. I mentioned last week that emotional intelligence is an important, if not the most important, variable in personal achievement, career success, leadership effectiveness and life satisfaction.

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There are four elements to emotional intelligence. They are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. The first, self-awareness, is when you are able to recognize your own emotions and how they affect your thinking and your behavior. When you do this, you know your strengths and your weaknesses and it gives you self-confidence. Self-awareness is essential to self-differentiation because without it you will be unable to self-regulate. You will not know what's going on inside of you and you won't be able to intentionally choose how to respond.

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The second aspect is self-management. This is when you are able to control your impulses, the feelings and behaviors that would happen automatically without your ability to self regulate. This enables you to manage your emotions in healthy ways to take the initiative, to follow through on commitments and to adapt to changing circumstances. Self-regulation is an essential part of self-management, and if you're not able to self regulate, you can neither be emotionally intelligent nor self-differentiated.

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The third component of emotional intelligence is social awareness. Social awareness enables you to be empathetic such that you can understand the emotions, the needs and concerns of other people, as well as pick up on their emotional cues. When you have social awareness, it helps you to feel comfortable socially and to recognize the power dynamics that are going on in a system. In family systems terms, social awareness enables you to understand emotional process in the individual interactions as well as the system itself. Emotional intelligence enables us to recognize the higher order things that are going on and separate them from the content. It enables us to separate process from content.

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Finally, there is relationship management which enables you to develop and maintain good relationships, to communicate clearly, to inspire and influence others, to be a team player and to deal with conflict in healthy ways.

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This is the essence of being a non-anxious presence. This is self-differentiation and the ability to be that non-anxious presence in difficult situations. We cannot underestimate the importance of being a non-anxious presence. When we are able to respond in self-differentiated ways, in leadership and personal situations, it has a tremendous ability to inspire and influence others. It also has a calming influence on those that we lead, as well as the system itself, enabling people to be more self-aware and intentional themselves.

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In other words, self-differentiation and emotional intelligence breed self-differentiation and emotional intelligence in others. So the question is, and that is the topic of today's episode, how do you increase your emotional intelligence?

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I found an article on helpguide.org called "Improving Emotional Intelligence." I will post a link to the show notes. I want to use this as a guide to go through how you do this and what the family systems implications are.

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The rubric for emotional intelligence lists self-awareness first, which on an ongoing basis is very important. Being aware of what's going on inside of you, as well as how your automatic responses were formed in your family of origin is very important.

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However, in practice, self-management comes first. If you aren't able to self-regulate in the moment, it makes the other aspects of emotional intelligence difficult to implement. The most important thing is to be able to self-regulate your automatic responses, to be able to self-regulate your reactivity and your adaptivity.

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When it comes to self-management, I find it helpful to distinguish between stress and anxiety, stress is external and happens in the moment. We feel pressure to meet a deadline, pressure to conform, feel like we're not up to the task or we just feel overwhelmed. This is stress, but it comes from outside forces. It comes in relation to some pressure that we are feeling.

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On the other hand, anxiety comes from within. And while stress is present in the moment, anxiety tends to take our focus to the future or to the past. When we are anxious, we are experiencing failure in advance or we are experiencing regret or sadness or self-loathing or anger or some other emotion from previous experiences that come back to the present.

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So the first thing you can do to develop your emotional intelligence is to be able to distinguish between stress and anxiety and work to relieve the stress of the moment as quickly as possible. By doing this, you make it less likely that anxiety will creep in. Anxiety, coupled with an automatic response, almost always gets you in trouble. On the other hand, self-regulating and addressing the stress of the moment gives you an opportunity to do things differently. According to the health guide, this involves quick stress relief.

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They write, "The best way to reduce stress quickly is by taking a deep breath and using your senses. What you see hear, smell, taste and touch, or through a soothing movement by viewing a favorite photo, smelling a specific scent, listening to a favorite piece of music, tasting a piece of gum or hugging a pet, for example, you can quickly relax and focus yourself."

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The key here is to stop the amygdala hijack in its tracks. By addressing the immediate stress, it makes it less likely that you will digress into automatic, reactive, anxious behavior.

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Now, in stressful interactions with others, it may be difficult to view a favorite photo or smell a specific scent or hug a pet. So the best thing you can do is focus on your breathing. And this leads to the next step in self-management, in self-regulation, which is to get your thinking brain involved. The best way to do this is through breathing, because it's been shown that when you breathe quickly with shallow breaths, it keeps your brain and fight, flight or freeze mode.

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However, when you breathe deeply, especially when you breathe deeply and exhale longer than you inhale, you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest response. So breathing can not only relieve the stress of the moment, but it can get you into thinking mode. It can move your brain from that hot state to that cold state.

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The old adage to count to 10 when you're angry actually has some truth to it. Whenever you feel yourself triggered in a stressful situation, the most important thing you can do is pause. Don't allow your automatic responses to take over. Stop the amygdala, hijack in its tracks. Be mindful of what's going on and activate your parasympathetic nervous system. This will enable you to get that brain into thinking mode so you can be more self aware.

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This leads to the next component in emotional intelligence, self-awareness. The concept of attachment posits that our current emotions and the way we experience them are rooted in early life experiences. So in the long term, the best thing we can do to increase self-awareness is to do family of origin work.

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When you examine the patterns of interaction, including conflict, fusion, surrounding togetherness pressure, reactivity and adaptivity, in your family of origin, you become more aware of what's behind your automatic responses to stress and anxiety. This helps you to be self-aware in terms of what is actually going on inside you in those moments. It's important to do this work without judging others. This is not about who's to blame, but about understanding yourself better. This kind of self-awareness of the long arc of your life is the basis for self-awareness in the moment.

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When you're able to self-regulate, to manage your response, you can then recognize what's going on inside of you. This is a key to self-awareness. This gives you the chance to respond differently than you would normally do without thinking.

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When you are in the moment, the most helpful thing you can do is observe without judgment. This is the essence of mindfulness, which I covered in Episode 117. When you are observing what is going on inside of you without judgment, you are able to better be yourself.

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You don't say things like, "I shouldn't be angry" or "I should be more forgiving." That just sidetracks you. If you are able to accept what you are feeling, that gives you power over them and this leads to greater self-awareness. You can't help how you feel. The question is, what will you do about it.

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When you are not thinking your automatic responses are typically not helpful. When you observe without judgment what you are feeling, you have a chance to accept those feelings for what they are, which gives you power over them.

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And this leads to social awareness. Social awareness also depends on being mindful in the moment. Being able to observe the other without judgment helps you to look more clearly at the emotional process that is going on and remove yourself from the content. This increases your ability to show empathy and remain emotionally connected without reacting or adapting.

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Another helpful practice in developing social awareness is reflection when you take the time to reflect on interactions that didn't go well. This will enable you to observe things without judgment. But at the same time, ask yourself what was going on at the time. What about the background of the other was driving them? What was the emotional process that was going on? Was there a triangle? Were they displacing blame? Were they defining themselves or were they defining you? Reflecting on your interactions with others will help you to better manage your relationships in everything that you do. It will enable you to remain emotionally connected to others while being able to define yourself in healthy ways.

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Self-management and relationship management improve greatly with this kind of reflection, with this kind of social awareness. Which leads to the final step in emotional intelligence, and that is relationship management, being able to have healthy interactions in your relationships. Self-management, self-awareness and social awareness will help you to figure out the best way to respond in a given situation, but at the same time, the Help Guide recommends that you also monitor your body language, facial expressions and posture, communicate what you're really feeling, even if you say otherwise. Being aware of what you are communicating nonverbally will help you better be a non-anxious presence in the moment.

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The second thing that this guide recommends for relationship management is humor and play. This is straight out of Edwin Friedman's playbook. Being humorous and playful brings down the temperature in the room. It helps everybody relax and be less anxious. Now, you don't want to do this disingenuously, but to the extent you can lower the emotional stakes for yourself, you will be able to be more playful in the moment.

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I've always said that the higher the perceived emotional stakes, the harder it is to be a non-anxious presence. When we believe that what we do and say may jeopardize our relationship with another, it makes it hard to be a non-anxious presence. On the other hand, if we realize that by staying emotionally connected and being ourselves, we actually have the best chance of going deeper in connection with the other. We are better able to be playful, to be humorous, to be a non-anxious presence. Convincing yourself that the stakes are not as high as you really think they are will enable you to be more humorous and more playful in the moment.

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Which leads to the Help Guide's final suggestion for relationship management, which is to embrace conflict as a normal part of a relationship. People are not always going to agree. The question is, how will you disagree? Are you able to say what you believe while giving the other the freedom to disagree? Are you, as Marshall Rosenberg says in nonviolent communications, able to make a request and not a demand? Are you able to understand what the other person is feeling and needing without judgment? When we develop our capacity to lean into disagreement in a healthy way, it lowers the emotional stakes overall. It makes it easier for us to embrace the conflict, to embrace the disagreement, to embrace the difference.

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This leads to a final suggestion that I have, which is to practice in low stakes situations. Whether we are talking about emotional intelligence, nonviolent communication or working on self-differentiation, these are all related in that they are easier to understand and harder to do. If you are intentional about practicing in low stakes situation with friends, family members that don't make you anxious, coworkers that you like, you will get better in the more difficult situations. Practice may not make perfect, but it will help you to get better.