How To Be the Emotionally Intelligent Leader of Your Own Life

As I get closer to my exit from the traditional safe career path of being a Doctor I’m starting to feel sensations which need to be expressed in writing.

Venturing off in a new direction to an uncertain destination raises a contrast between safety and risk—

Like the mould that grew in the kitchen of my old student house, its getting harder to ignore.

Its a weird feeling, I don’t want to go back to being a GP, but I’m scared of the risk of starting my own business.

I find myself on the precipice of a cliff edge waiting to make a leap of faith.

I’m well aware that I’m going to fall and its not going to feel good whilst I’m dropping. But the fear of falling is one thing, the fear of how long I’m going to be hurtling through the air before I start flying is another.

For me mentally there is no going back I’m stepping off that cliff now and if I don’t make it I would rather hit rock bottom than wait around any longer.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not still full of fear and anxiety at the prospect of it. It just means it’s a risk I’m willing to take so that I can fly towards my dreams of freedom.

What I need to summon now is a parachute of Emotional Intelligence and Self-Compassion to smooth and control my descent.

I need to feel relaxed and comfortable knowing that if I do hit the bottom I’m not going to die.

I can pick myself up and start climbing again.  

I’m tired of feeling scared to do the things I know are beneficial to me.

I want to raise awareness of the principles of emotional intelligence in order to help reassure and encourage myself as I embark on a solo journey of my own creation.

Where I end up is 100% down to me.

I want to be my own emotionally intelligent leader.

Its time to explore the influence emotions have over our actions and behaviours.

Emotional influences

Emotions are a vital aspect of what makes us human and separates us from unfeeling purely logical machines.

Lets consider the following examples of the effect of emotions:

• Love (Positive) Parental Heroism to save their child’s life

• Love (Negative) Clouds awareness of abuse and manipulation

• Fear (Positive) Avoidance of activity that may result in death

• Fear (Negative) Avoidance of activity that may result in growth

• Joy (Positive) Brings people together for good

• Hate (Negative) Brings people together for evil

The problem isn’t the emotions themselves but it’s our ability to control them.

As we walk the path towards Self-Actualization we find its fraught with triggers that set off our Emotional alarms.

In fact without emotion there would be no Self-Actualization.

Without feeling love, passion and joy how could you find meaning and purpose in life?

The question is how do we tell the difference between the genuinely life threatening Emotional Alarms and the False alarms that obstruct us from progressing forward?

The answer is Emotional Intelligence

We need to be able handle the negative aspect of emotions that inevitably arise otherwise that smooth relaxing descent will turn into a terrifying free fall that disables us from spreading our wings.

Emotional Intelligence in Practice

I want to show you a thinking exercise that helped me understand Emotional Intelligence.

Its from the book ‘Coaching for Performance’ by Sir John Whitmore.

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Recall someone you loved being with when you were younger – not a parent, but perhaps a grandparent, a teacher, or a role model.

When you were with this person:

1. What did they do that you liked so much?

2. How did you feel?

Take a moment to think about the person’s attitudes and behaviours, write them down :)

 Now have a look at the lists below. Do you see any of your answers?

The person that you thought of has high Emotional Intelligence.

These are the behaviours and impact of Emotional Intelligence.

For me outside of my family that person was my first under 12’s Basketball coach. As well as having to physically look up to him, I looked up to him emotionally as well.

He was someone I respected, I felt he trusted my potential even if I messed up. I felt safe to take on the challenge of becoming a better basketball player.

Modern day Life Coaching originated from Sports coaching.

The skills which the best sports coaches used to maximise performance levels in athletes were transferred to help business’s maximise performance in their employees.

Coaching really took off when business executives saw the value of this kind of leadership style to nurture growth and development in their teams.

The coaching industry is still primarily based in the original business and executive area— but our personal lives are just as important as our professional lives.

This is where 1 to 1 Life coaching is able to combine the two.

Inner-Self Coaching

There’s a common saying that goes “treat others the same way you would want to be treated.”

What we need to do is adapt this saying and focus on the relationship with ourselves.

It becomes,

Treat yourself the same way that you would want to be treated by others.

It doesn’t make sense, surely if YOU know how YOU want to be treated then it’s a given that you would treat yourself that way.

There would be no logical reason not to.

So if logic isn’t the reason then what is?

Emotion.

Why else would a lot of people choose to treat themselves much worse than they treat others?

I think its because we struggle to conceptualise things which go on internally inside our own minds… Stay with me for the next section.

Harmonising Head and Heart

To help with this understanding lets come back to my 2 favourite neuroanatomical structures that I introduced last week.

• The Amygdala -Emotional brain

• The Prefrontal Cortex- Logical Thinking brain

Thats the only jargon you need to know.

Here’s last week post in case you missed it.

Consider 2 different scenarios to demonstrate how the Prefrontal Cortex and Amygdala work together.

1)In the Will Smith movie “I-Robot”, there is a scene where Will Smith is trapped in a car accident with a young girl hanging precariously outside the vehicle.

The robot arrives to assist them. The little girl pleads for help and Will Smith urges the robot to save her, but the robot calculates Will Smith has higher chance of survival so chooses to save him and leave the girl to die.

This serves as a perfect example of the potential consequences of pure Logic (Pre-frontal Cortex) with no Emotion (Amygdala).

2)Imagine you are offered an opportunity to give a webinar to teach people about a special interest of yours.

(Logic) You consider all the logical aspects of it such as learning the interest in greater depth, developing your teaching skills, and gaining exposure which could result in significant future rewards.

(Emotion) However then you start to think about that time you were in a public speaking situation and it didn’t go well, you messed up or failed in someway.

You start to ‘feel’ anxious and fearful. What if you’re not good enough?, What if you embarrass yourself?

You decide to avoid the opportunity not because its bad for you or doesn’t align with your ultimate goals but because its made you ‘feel’ bad.

 Humans need to use logic/thinking and emotion together in order for us to thrive.

The majority of information we receive about the world (apart from in emergency scenarios) goes to our Prefrontal Cortex.

Its here that we think and decide how to respond appropriately.

As we’ve seen in the examples above human compassion relies on the Logical Prefrontal Cortex consulting the Emotional Amygdala for further emotional interpretation.

The task of the Logical Prefrontal Cortex now is to decide whether to heed the emotional information from the Amygdala or to override it.

The Logical Prefrontal Cortex therefore plays an executive role in managing our emotions.

If we want to be Emotionally Intelligent, its this Executive that we have to Coach

Its not about Head over Heart,

Its about achieving the perfect balance of Head and Heart together.

How to improve your Emotional Intelligence

The degree to which we are led by our emotional impulses is in large part down to the funtioning of our Prefrontal Cortex.

Think of this as your Executive self which leads the emotional self to ensure rational actions are always taken towards your goals.

As an Entrepeneur YOU are the Executive self, YOU are the leader.

You can’t rely on anyone else telling you what to do.

Its YOUR dream YOU’VE got to make it happen.

There are 4 components to Emotional Intelligence:

1. Self-awareness

2. Self-regulation

3. Social awareness

4. Relationship management skills

For our purposes of Self-Leadership I will close this weeks letter by discussing Self-awareness and Self-Regulation.

Self-awareness

Get familiar with your emotional tendencies.

What triggers you and why. Pay attention in different situations in order to understand.

For example,

What?- I used to get frustrated when people gave up too easily.

Why?- In my experience living with a chronic illness- Sickle Cell, I’ve faced more challenges in life than most normal people and haven’t given up easily.

Effect- My feeling of frustration was sensed by the people I wanted to help and made them perform worse.

Result- I became more patient, not only with other people but also with myself. I’ll always push myself but now its a more calm and controlled process than before.

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Practice Mindfulness Meditation.

Who’d have thought, yet another benefit!

Other activities can be helpful but only if they allow you to be aware of your thoughts without judgement.

Self-Regulation

Stress is inevitable, it doesn’t matter how committed we are or well intentioned we are. When stress arises it flares our emotions and messes up our plans and habits.

We need to learn healthy coping mechanisms to manage stress and regulate our emotions effectively. This might include:

• Deep Breathing Exercises

• Physical Activity

• Rest/Breaks/Holidays

Developing impulse control:

Give your Logical Prefrontal Cortex more time to decide an appropriate rational response to situations where your emotions are triggered.

As kids whenever me and my brother triggered my mum she used to start counting to 10 out loud.

It had a double effect of letting her emotional impulse pass and also making us feel like it was about to go down and we needed to stop misbehaving!

Self-Regulation, Self improvement, Self Leadership

• Resist the urge to Sleep in or snooze your alarm

• Resist the urge to eat the whole bag of cookies or cake

• Go on the run you planned even though its raining outside

• Do that piece of boring work you don’t want to do.

• Practice that new skill even though you suck at it

Essentially anything that you need to do to succeed/progress/achieve but you don’t want to do requires Self-Regulation.

We rely far too much on our emotional brains making us ‘feel’ like doing it.

We never feel like doing it so it never gets done.

Unless it becomes an urgent task with a deadline affecting or controlled by other people- thats when the emotional brain makes us ‘feel’ like doing it, in order to avoid the anxiety and fear associated with appearing bad to other people.

The ugly truth is that you have to practice doing things you don’t want to do but need to do regularly.

Reflect on the positive outcome of doing them to increase your awareness of the resulting positive state.

This will strengthen your prefrontal cortex so the next time the emotional brain says they don’t want to do it- The executive will put its foot down.

Summary

• Emotions have positive and negative effects on our actions and behaviours

• Becoming a successful Entrepeneur requires Self-Leadership

• Emotional Intelligence promotes the growth of ourselves and others

• Coaching is Emotional Intelligence in practice

• Emotional Intelligence is finding the right balance between Logic and Emotion.

• We can Lead ourselves by improving our Self-awareness and Self-Regulation.

Thats all for now

Lewis

P.S

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