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Welcome to Episode 278 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. I am on a two-week trip to visit my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson, as well as officiate a burial service for my late father's last remaining sibling, my aunt, who died not long after her 99th birthday. So it's going to be a good trip. We're going to be with family, and for me, that is important. So because of that, I have a two-part rebroadcast coming up. I have found that emotional intelligence is very much related to self-differentiation. When we have higher emotional intelligence, it makes it easier to know our own goals and values and to pause and express ourselves in healthy ways. So without further ado, here is episode 278, the rebroadcast of How Emotional Intelligence Helps You to be a Non-Anxious Presence, Part One of Two.

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Before I get into emotional intelligence today, I want to do a quick review of the amygdala hijack. Understanding this helps to understand why emotional intelligence is so important. When we encounter any situation, information is first processed by the thalamus in the brain. What we see and what we hear goes through the thalamus and is then sent to the neocortex for processing. The neocortex is the executive, the rational part of our brain. It's the thinking part of our brain. If the neocortex determines that our emotions are involved, then the information is sent to the amygdala, which has more control over our emotions. However, by design, a small amount of that information that the thalamus processing goes directly to the amygdala. In other words, the neocortex is bypassed, and what is processed goes directly to the amygdala without our thinking brain having the opportunity to process it. As you may know, the amygdala is responsible for our fight, flight, or freeze response. So when this small amount of sensory information goes directly to the amygdala and bypasses the neocortex, it enables us to react quickly to potential threats. Now, this is great when we encounter a sabre-tooth tiger, but it is much less helpful when we encounter our mother-in-law.

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The important thing to understand is that the amygdala hijack is programmed into us to help protect us from physical threats. However, because physical threats are so rare these days, it most often occurs when we encounter a perceived emotional threat. This is where reactivity comes from. We respond without thinking when we perceive that we are threatened. This is why emotional intelligence is so important. The concept of emotional intelligence was developed in the early 1990s and has been worked on by a variety of researchers ever since. According to the research, emotional intelligence is an important if not the most important variable in personal achievement, career success, leadership, and life satisfaction. As you will see, high emotional intelligence is a characteristic of self-differentiation. The ability to be a non-anxious presence is not possible without the skills that are recognized in emotional intelligence. I want to share some quotes from different researchers defining emotional intelligence, and these quotes come from Emotional Intelligence: An Overview by Dr. Monaranjan Tripathy. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. The first quote comes from Salova Sylvie and Meyer, who were the original people to coin the term emotional intelligence. They say it is, The ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.

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As you can see from this definition, emotional intelligence involves self-regulation, self-awareness, and intentionality. It's the ability to understand what's going on inside of us as well as inside of others, as well as the ability to regulate our own reactivity and then act in healthy ways with intentionality. The second quote comes to Ruven Baronne, who says, Emotional intelligence is "an array of non cognitive emotional and social capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one's ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures." This definition speaks to the ability to deal with surrounding togetherness pressure. With self-awareness and intentionality, we are able to recognize when there are pressures to conform, and then we are able to make a decision whether to move towards conformity, that is, towards connection and togetherness, or move towards individuality, that is, towards self-definition. In either event, it is emotional intelligence that helps us to recognize the situation and to make a choice. Finally, Byron Stock defines emotional intelligence as, The ability to acquire and apply knowledge from your emotions and the emotions of others. You can use the information about what you're feeling to help you make effective decisions about what to say or do or not say or do next.

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This definition of emotional intelligence speaks to the ability to recognize emotional process and separate that from the content of the situation. By understanding the emotions of others and what is going on within us, we are able to self-regulate and respond appropriately. For example, when somebody is angry, we can recognize emotional process that they are angry and not necessarily take it personally, especially if we recognize that that anger is directed at somebody the else, and we are being triangled. Developing emotional intelligence has the capacity to improve our relationships and our communication with others, to reduce stress, increase empathy, and increase our ability to act in accordance with values, our own values, as well as to learn from our mistakes. It can also help us to increase confidence, positive attitudes, and creativity. So the question is then, what are the primary domains of emotional intelligence. Daniel Goldman is a psychologist and science writer for the New York Times. He has popularized emotional intelligence by taking the research that has gone on before and synthesized it into a model that people can understand. According to Goldman, there are four main domains or four main constructs in emotional intelligence.

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These are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. I'm going to go through each one of them and define them and then make the connection to a family system's approach to being a non-anxious presence. The first main construct of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. This is the ability to read your own emotions and recognize their impact while using your gut feelings to guide your decisions. You have likely heard me say before that self-awareness is essential to self-differentiation because without it, we will be unable to self-regulate. We will not know what's going on inside of us, and then we will not be able to intentionally choose how to respond. So self-awareness is something that we talk about frequently when we're talking about self-regulation, when we are talking about self-differentiation. The second construct in emotional intelligence is self-management. And this is the ability to control your own emotions, control your own impulses, and then be able to adapt to the changing circumstances around you. Now, this is different than adaptivity where you just give in. It's being able to respond and be flexible to what is going on. This is managing yourself. This aspect of emotional intelligence encompasses self-regulation.

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A person who is not able to self-regulate is neither emotionally intelligent nor self-differentiated. This idea of self-management means that we can control our our adaptivity or our reactivity, that we are able to be conscious of what is going on with our emotions and the circumstances around us. The third construct in emotional intelligence is social awareness. This is the ability to sense and understand and react to others' emotions while understanding what is going on in the system, in the social network of which we are a part. This type of awareness of emotional process in individual interactions as well as in the system itself is extremely important in being a non-anxious presence. Emotional intelligence enables us to recognize the higher order things that are going on and separate them from the content. We are able to see what is happening in others and in ourselves apart from the content of the situation and then manage our emotions accordingly. Finally, the fourth construct or domain of emotional intelligence is relationship management. This is the ability to inspire others, to influence them, to develop relationships with others while managing conflict project. This is the essence of being a non-anxious presence.

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This is self-differentiation. Relationship management is the ability to maintain a non-anxious presence even in difficult situations. We cannot don't 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 in a positive way. When others experience us as a non-anxious presence, it has a calming effect which often enables them to become more self-aware and intentional. In In summary, I would say that emotional intelligence describes actually what self-differentiation looks like. It describes what is going on inside of us as we try to figure out how to be a non-anxious presence. Next week, we will dig into what you can do to develop your emotional intelligence so that you can function in self-differentiated ways so that you can be a non-anxious presence. That's it for episode 278.

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Next week, I will get into how emotional intelligence can actually help you to be a non-anxious presence. And remember, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com. You can subscribe to my weekly email newsletter, my Two for Tuesday newsletter at thenonanxiousleader.com or via the link in the show notes. Until next time. Thanks and goodbye.