Hello and welcome back to the Be Well, do Well podcast. I'm excited today to be joined by a remarkable entrepreneur that has written a number of books, publishes daily on LinkedIn and has been a guest on over a hundred podcasts. Please welcome me in joining Phil Johnson to the show, and today we're going to be talking about emotional intelligence.
Welcome to the show, phil Min thank you, it's a pleasure to be on your show.
Thanks so much. Tell us a little bit first what emotional intelligence is. I don't know much about it and I think I've heard you know different expressions and different definitions of it, but I'd love to hear from you what emotional intelligence means to you.
A very simple way of thinking about emotional intelligence is it's the ability to feel the fear that changing innovation triggers in us and moves through it towards what it is we're trying to achieve, as opposed to allowing that fear to keep us trapped in our comforts zone.
Interesting And though it sounds like it revolves around fear and how to get past it so that it's not driving us, but we are in control of the reaction that we have to that fear.
Yeah, we're only actually conscious about three to five percent of the time. The rest of the time, we're relying on our habits to determine the bulk of our behavior and our result. So, becoming more emotionally intelligent. One of the benefits is that enables us to become more conscious of what's going on in us and around us. We're able to make better hopefully better choices.
So right now, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are, you know, sort of stressed out. They're anxious and they're feeling a lot of pressure because of the economy. Things are tightening up, People aren't spending as much. I'm seeing a lot of articles on LinkedIn and on Facebook about how this Christmas is going to be very lean. you know smaller turkeys, smaller gifts, smaller trees.
How does emotional intelligence work when it comes to these external factors that are pushing in on you as an entrepreneur or as a business person?
It enables us to take the challenges we face as opportunities for growth and better results. You become less resistant, less judgmental, less attached outcome and you focus more on the present moment.
Interesting. Now, how does that tie in? Like I said, from what I'm hearing it sounds a lot like mindfulness, And you know I've learned a lot about mindfulness. I practice mindfulness in my business and my personal life. I meditate, but emotional intelligence and mindfulness seem to have a little bit of an overlap there, Do they Absolutely?
They're based, showcased on helping us to stay more present in the moment, in this moment, because this moment is all that will ever exist, and this moment is when we take action. We make decisions, we take action, we generate results, and our ego never wants us to be in this moment. It wants us to be in some mystical future or past moment that's never going to exist. So, but the more present you are in the moment, the more influential you are, the better your results. Thank you.
It's a lot easier said, i think, than done. So do you have? are there some important components of emotional intelligence that help people bring them back to the now?
Yeah, i want to step away from emotional intelligence just for a bit to talk about the root cause of all drama, chaos and conflict and the root cause solution to all drama, chaos and conflict, one of which is emotional intelligence. So let me bend your listeners ear for the next three or four minutes. We're not born with a conscious mind. We don't start to be conscious toward about a year or so old.
We're born with an unconscious mind and we immediately start wiring up our brain, creating the neural network, pathways in our brain that become our habits in order to survive, fit in, get food, those kinds of things. So a lot of those habits we begin to create unconsciously are causing us to give away our energy. And we do it in lots of ways in how we communicate, listen, take responsibility, make decisions, all sorts of ways.
But when we give away our energy, it creates an energy deficit in us. So at the same time we're giving away our energy, we have to be replacing that energy by trying to steal energy from other people, and that dynamic is going on inside of everybody, everywhere, all over the world, all the time. So what I do in the Master of Business Leadership program is I show people how they're unconsciously giving away their energy and I give them better habits to practice to stop doing that.
And when they stop giving away their energy they need to steal. The energy of other people goes away because they don't need it, and the outcome of that work is inspirational leadership, emotional intelligence, higher consciousness of what's going on in you and around you, freedom from ego-based fear, higher levels of trust and engagement, which leads to career, corporate and personal success.
I've helped organizations generate over a billion and a half dollars in revenue and executives advance in their careers by learning to stop giving away their energy. So emotional intelligence, the development of our emotional intelligence, is one of the benefits that occurs when we stop giving away our energy.
Interesting. Can you give me an example of a situation where an executive gives away their energy?
I'll give you an example of about four billion people giving away their energy every day. How's that?
Sounds good.
It's actually the second MBL habit called authentic listening, And the key to authentic listening is not to take anything personally. How somebody feels about you, whether they like you or whether they don't, has nothing to do with you. It has to do with what's going on inside of them. But if how you feel about yourself is based on how somebody else feels about you losing control of your life, you are them.
Definitely them.
Right. So social media what I've just described as most of social media what people bend over backwards to get people to like them so they can feel better about themselves. So they're giving away their energy to determine how they should feel about themselves based on how somebody else feels about them, whether they like them or whether they don't. And it doesn't end there.
because they're giving away their energy, they're simultaneously trying to steal the energy from other people, often using position-based power to control and manipulate to get back the energy they're giving away. So that's an example of the dynamic that's going on everywhere.
It's interesting with social media. I know whenever I post something or I send an email, it's instinctive for me to go and check how many people liked it or how many opens I got, how many replies I got. I never really thought about that as giving away my energy And now I see that I see that perspective, that when I'm doing that, I'm actually looking for validation externally rather than just saying, hey, I just wrote a really great article, or really good post.
If you love me, I love me. If you don't love me. I don't love me.
Right Now. the second half of that is then stealing energy from other people. So one is I've given away my energy by writing this beautiful blog post and waiting for reactions. Now how does the second half work, where I am now stealing energy from others?
Resistance judgment attachment outcome. Boy, you guys are idiots if you don't understand how valuable, how great this article is. I think the current level of employee engagement worldwide, according to Gallup, is around 13%. Low levels of employee engagement are costing the US economy over a trillion dollars a year. So plug-inizations are very, incredibly toxic. There are people giving away and stealing the energy of others. The victims can't exist in isolation.
They have a codependent relationship with each other, but they don't like each other. They don't trust each other and they can never lower their walls around each other, but they need each other. So this is a worldwide problem and it's the root cause of all drama, chaos and conflict everywhere.
So I'm assuming you have a solution to this, or at least a suggestion for this? Yes, I'd love to hear about that.
Stop giving away your energy. The solution to everything, the solution to all the benefits that I mentioned previously, is to become conscious of how you're giving away your energy and develop better habits, to stop doing that. That fixes everything. See, most at best, most organizations are only dealing with the symptoms of the root cause problem, and if all you do is deal with the symptoms, the symptoms keep coming back Until you deal with the root.
that's also why over 80% of all M&A and organizational development initiatives fail because they're not dealing with the root cause, and the root cause involves energy physics.
So give me an example of somebody that's maybe addicted to social media and I use the word addicted loosely Somebody that's dependent on social media to get their validation and maybe even their career. Maybe they are a creator online to create YouTube videos, podcasts, like you and me, and that's their source of revenue. Is somebody that's in that position? be more mindful and less ego driven when it comes to creating content as a living?
Maybe they focus on providing the service without any attachment to the outcome. This is what I'm offering, whether you like it or whether you don't. it's up to you. I'm offering this content. If you like it, that's great. If you don't like it, that's okay. But whether you like it or whether you don't won't determine how I feel about the content I'm creating.
Right, i mentioned earlier in the introduction that you have a daily newsletter on LinkedIn that you promote And before we get recorded, i asked you I'm like, how do you do that? But this makes more sense to me because if you're not attached to the outcome of what people think about that article, it's a lot easier to create content. And I know in the past we had a blog we ran. we posted three blogs a week and we didn't think about whether or not people like it.
One percent of those blogs that we created after six months was generating 90%, maybe even 95% of the traffic. But we would never have known that if we were meticulously thinking about is somebody going to like this or not like this? Should we post this or should we not post this? So that's really that's a mindset shift for a lot of creators that just post, just create, just. you know, as Seth Godin says, just ship it right, get it out there.
Right. So Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb, 1800 experiments to build a light bulb And somebody said Jesus, tommy, that's a lot of failure. He says what do you mean? I just learned 1799 ways not to make light bulb. It was always about making a light bulb. I didn't. I didn't know how long it was going to take.
Right.
And then, you know, when Disney got turned down by over 2000 banks before he was able to generate enough funding to begin construction of Disney World and he actually died before it was completed And somebody at his funeral said, jesus, isn't it too bad? Walt never got a chance to see history and come true. And the guy said well, he did. You know, he saw it before any of us. He could not get smelted, felted, tasted it. He couldn't have endured what he did so that we could all see it.
There's only two sources of motivation that will cause us to leave our comfort zone in the pursuit of better results One's pain. The other one, passion. We have to have an emotional connection to a desired result that we want to achieve that's greater than the fear that's going to get generated in us. We're going to be outside of our comfort zone in the pursuit of that desired result If the emotional connection you have to a desired result isn't stronger than your fear.
You may want better results than you're currently getting, but you will not be willing to do the emotional labor that getting better results requires. And, quite frankly, most people aren't. Most people don't have that level of emotional connection to something they're trying to achieve. So what they do? instead, they try and change everybody else because they're unwilling to change themselves.
They try and control, manipulate others to get them to change, and that's why the levels of employee engagement are so low. It's a big problem.
I feel like there's something in your life that got you to this realization, maybe an aha moment, an epiphany, where you started to then read more about it. Am I right in assuming that In a fairies? would you mind sharing a little bit about that?
Did you ever? did you ever discuss my backstory?
No, it's a great time to talk about it.
Well, four minutes. I can tell you my backstory that took me 30 years to write. Is that something that you'd be interested in?
Absolutely. Let's do it.
I was born with dyslexia. I failed grade three. I failed grade five, was labeled a slow learner, started working when I was nine years old, pulling copper wire to the back of dumpsters. My parents were born in turn of the century, in 1908 and 1909. When, as far as grade eight in school, my dad was a factory worker, we lived in a small two bedroom post-war war two bungalow. My mother died of breast cancer in December of 1967.
In January of 1968, i decided I wanted to do this work And I've been on this path for the for the last 54 years. I became the A&A student for the rest of grade school, high school, university business background, went on to study electrical engineering, became a corporate executive traveling over 60,000 miles per year And I've generated over a billion and a half dollars in my and for the past 42 years I've been an executive coach.
Happy executives, organizations and better themselves had developing our emotional intelligence. Nbl program alumni are currently living in the United States, canada, uk, europe, japan, bosnia Africa, australia, the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. So there you go.
That's amazing. I love to hear the story about you know I'm sorry to hear about your mother and I'm sorry to hear you know the challenge that you had, but that is what made you. you know who you are now And we have to look at that as the opportunity rather than, you know, a tragedy in that sense. So I know you like to write. I'm curious if there's a book that you're either reading now or you've recently read that you really enjoy it.
I would recommend this book to everybody.
I knew Earth okay.
By Tully. What Eckhart Eckhart is incredible. I love Eckhart Tully. He's amazing. What he talks about in his book is what the NBL program create in individuals and organizations.
Amazing, and that's a recent book, isn't it?
He wrote this book in 2005.
And the reason I asked that is that it's great to see how the work you do is now written on paper by a published author And it's similar to the work that you do in yours. Yesterday I had a really interesting conversation with somebody in Australia about the concept of icky guy. Are you familiar with the term icky guy?
A little bit, yes.
Yeah, very loosely and paraphrasing, It's finding that feeling within you that drives you forward, and some people liken it to your passion or your purpose, and we went in depth about. It's not just your purpose in life, it's not just you trying to make more money.
It's a lot deeper than that, and one of the things that came up during that conversation was if there was this specific element when somebody achieves a lot and he narrowed it down to the fact that they have a vision for a bigger future than what they have now, and you talked about this as well a little bit. So what is in your life, what's the bigger future? What are you really excited about for the next, let's say, five or 10 years?
that gets you up every morning and you're excited to work on it.
Meeting with you. There's that I can help become more conscious of what's going on in them and around them. I can't think of a better way to spend my life's energy than doing what I've been doing for the past 22 years, and I'm going to continue to do it for as long as I can. What I do is what hits my passion, hits the way I demonstrate love. It's what living and working on purpose represents for me.
That's wonderful. I think that's a great way to wrap this up. If somebody wanted to learn more about you and the work that you do, where can they find you?
They can reach out to me. I've given you my link to my Zoom calendar And I'd be happy to meet and chat with anybody that would like to meet and chat.
Awesome, So I'll put in a link there, your LinkedIn profile. I know you've got that great newsletter there. I'll also put your Zoom link If anybody's interested. They'll put that in the show notes as well. Phil, thank you so much for this. It's been enlightening and I'm really happy that we had the chance.
Thanks, Amit. I really appreciate the work you're doing.
Thank you so much.