Emotions are Contagious: Spreading Emotional Intelligence | Joelle Hadley | TEDxArrowheadRanch

so I'm standing on this mountain in Telluride Colorado it's a ski run called sea forever its elevation just a mere twelve thousand four hundred and seventy feet and the vertical drop is three thousand feet I'm terrified my heart is pounding my stomach's in knots and even though I'm freezing cold my hands are actually sweating you see it had been 12 years since I had been on a pair of skis a bad back had kept me off the slopes and in a lot of pain I had done everything I could to avoid surgery but the time came that I needed to go under the knife and after ten years of waiting I went under the knife and I woke up from that surgery with the one thing I feared the most paralysis from the top of my left thigh down I didn't feel a thing I couldn't move there was no pain there was nothing after getting over the shock and a second surgery and after five long months of physical therapy rest healing and prayer I eventually got full use of my leg back but here I was a year later standing on top of this mountain terrified and rusty on these skis I mean what was I thinking I was putting my surgery at risk let alone every other bone in my body and perhaps even my relationship because my fiancee was an expert skier and he had just taught me how to ski down this hill I mean the pressure was on but despite the pressure and despite these circumstances I had a tool that I could use you see I had the self awareness of the chemical changes that were happening in my brain and the physiological changes that were happening in my body I had the awareness of what was going on and the fact that if I didn't manage that I would not make it down that hill safely I knew what I needed to do to access my skiing skills I needed to focus I needed to breathe and I needed to have gratitude and I knew if I did that it would get me down that hill in one piece and get me to where the same people are in the lodge drinking Bailey's and coffee right I was practicing emotional intelligence emotional intelligence it's not an oxymoron I promise you it is this uniquely human skill set that most of us don't know we have let alone use or really value and understand it's really the balance of our heads and our hearts and it's this interesting intersection between our souls and science and as a corporate culture consultant and expert my mission is to help people like you love their work and love their life I've seen what emotional intelligence can do it changes life and it's changed mine and it can change yours it makes us happier it makes us healthier we're better leaders we're better in our relationships we make better decisions and we're more resilient and today I hope you'll go on a journey with me to master your emotions and it is a journey none of us are ever completely emotionally intelligent and I'm on that journey right there with you today I want you to remember three things about emotional intelligence one is that it's very important it's more important than we've ever realized our emotional intelligence matters for the world - it's actually a learner will skin and like IQ that doesn't change much over time we can improve our emotional quotient our entire lives in our entire career and three it's actually rooted in neuroscience and biology when you think about it emotions are contagious aren't they I mean they're powerful and they're infectious the entire energy of a room can change in about three seconds when a dominant emotion or ideas that spread the entire energy of a room can change I mean think about it in your own personal life mentors leaders family members we have family members that have great emotional energy and then we know those people that have some pretty rotten emotional energy right I mean who do you like to hang out with and be around and how do they make you feel when they walk in the door some of the first Studies on emotional intelligence was actually done by Harvard Harvard was sending their best and their brightest out into the work world and they weren't succeeding so like any good university does they studied it and researched it and they followed a cross-section of graduates from all kinds of disciplines for several years into their careers and what they found was very interesting they found that there are three areas that matter for success the first one is IQ no surprise there the second are technical skills like being able to ski down a hill or be an engineer or an architect also not too surprising but it was this third area that really surprised Harvard because it was an emotional skill set that mattered for success and what was even more surprising in the research is that IQ and technical skills only each accounted for about 8 to 9 percent of that graduate success they were really more like threshold skills that just bought them in the door and once they got into the door it was their emotional intelligence or their emotional quotient that was twice the factor of success as their IQ and technical skills combined our EQ sometimes matters more than our IQ and our technical talent and what we're finding in today's research if you're a formal leader in the room or if you want to be a leader someday 80 to 90% of our effectiveness as a leader lies in emotional intelligence skills but I don't think that we're talking and teaching enough about emotional intelligence in our homes our schools or our businesses okay so we know it's important what is emotional intelligence exactly well it is learn about leaking learn to be better with our emotions I like to think of it as a proactive journey to develop and show up with those characteristics that are deep inside of us that we know can change the world it's also a reactive or a responsive tool that allows us to show up better and manage the moments better perhaps maybe when you're at the top of a ski hill and you've just had surgery it's also a journey that Daniel Goleman has researched for many years Daniel Goleman is really considered to be the father of emotional intelligence and wrote one of the original popular books and in his research he looks at emotional intelligence two ways two pillars if you will self and social and when it comes to self it's the self-awareness of our own emotions i we have emotions that we're spreading to other people being aware of those emotions being present having optimism having confidence being able to manage your impulse being flexible and adaptable and having personal drive getting yourself together first after all the airline's tell us put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you try and help somebody else now when it comes to social this is about stepping out of your own bubble and now being aware of the people around you and being able to connect it's social connection you know work only gets done through others and we cannot influence unless we first connect and it's such a rare quality in this world that when it happens it's pretty magical it's the ability to have empathy and to care about what's going on with somebody else's work in life having compassion and caring it's strong communication skills especially listening listening nowadays is so rare and it's also being able to coach somebody telling them the honest answer and sometime having that tough conversation you know I'm a yogini which means I practice yoga and I teach yoga and as a yoga practitioner we start each practice with an intention a way that we want to feel throughout our practice or a way that we want to show up for the world and when I think about it when we tap into our highest best and truest selves in yoga those are the traits of emotional intelligence it's nothing surprising it's inside all of us and it's really being able to show up with what I call living in the gray zone it's that delicate balance of head and heart science and soul being able to show up with just the right amount of what we need each time depending on the circumstance and depending upon the people I know when I measure my emotional intelligence there's one particular competency called adaptability and flexibility and when I look at how my business associates score me they score me pretty high but when I look at my family and friends they score me really low and so I have to learn to show up differently at the dinner table than I do at the board table and believe you me I'm still learning I'm learning that I need to let go of the right to be right I'm learning that true empowerment means that I always have a choice no one and no thing can ever make me do anything it's my decision and I'm also learning not to take things so personally people don't do things to us they do things for themselves so these emotional intelligence characteristics they are what matter for our world so why is it that more people don't show up with emotional intelligence why don't you and I show up more intelligently emotionally well it has to do with our emotions especially negative ones and the science and the biology behind it actually we are hardwired as a species to look for negativity out of threat and protection so that we can stay alive and procreate let me explain it this way right now in your heads there are two systems working simultaneously if you will our cognitive system and our limbic system now both of these systems are in the front seat of your car but only one of them can be driving at a time now our cognitive system this is really our executive function this is where we have creative thought this is where we solve problems this is where we create and get new ideas this is where our technical skills our IQ and our emotional skills live this is where good intentions come from and this is mostly made up from an area called the neocortex which is really that red area on the screen that you see I personally like to call it the captain of our ship because this is who you want driving your boat and navigating your world and humans we are unique because no other species has a brain whose neocortex is large as human beings we truly are the only species that can create our future with good intention I mean my dog Harry does not get up every day and have a good intention not to drag our cat Tootie across the floor right within our limbic system the second system that's happening in your head right now that's more about our feelings and our emotions and this is also where our survival instinct lives specifically a place called the amygdala say that with me amigdala I promise you're going to be talking about it tomorrow and this is really kind of that green area up there on the screen and specifically the amygdala does two important things for us as human beings number one it holds all emotional memory especially negative and number two it holds our fight-or-flight response system that thing that puts us into protection when we have physical threat or threat of injury and this system is older than our cognitive system and it's faster than our cognitive system and it will always trump our executive system and always trump the captain of our ship and when this system is engaged it engages in less than a second this is how it works when we feel threatened the amygdala goes into overdrive and does its job by sending stress hormones through the brain and that's the chemical reaction that's happening I notice that up on the ski slope those stress hormones like cortisol and dopamine and epinephrine and adrenaline what those are doing are changing the physiological feel of our bodies in order to put us into fight-or-flight the blood and the oxygen travels south and that's a good thing when we need to go into protection it's not so good when we need to stand in front of somebody and have a conversation and when this cycle happens research from the Institute of the health and human potential says that we lose up to 75 percent of our cognitive ability in that moment essentially our amygdala has thrown the captain of our ship overboard and I like to call that an amygdala hijack and that's what was happening to me up on that mountain I knew I had rational reasonable reasonable thought that I could get down that mountain but all I could visualize was myself tumbling down on all the awful izing things that I can think of and I had awareness of this chemical reaction that was happening in my brain and I had the tool to be able to to not have knowledge of that and impact that and I think most of us are aware of this physical response we nearly miss a car accident we almost tripped downstairs we get the phone call in the middle of the night we step on a TED stage but what we might not realize is how our emotions also play into this cycle you see as humans with a heart and a soul each one of has a set of emotional needs that we need to have met maybe that's the need to fit in the need to stand out our social norms and domestication our ego our sense of control our need to have freedom maybe we need to protect to past trauma or our defenses that past hurts anybody recognize themselves in that list and anytime those emotional needs are not being met either from us or from somebody else or we're fearful they're not being met we go into the same reaction that we have when we're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger and we go through that same chemical reaction we lose our emotional intelligence and we are in a chemically induced state of dumb and it doesn't take a ski slope to do that it just takes feeling fearful feeling angry feeling hurt or feeling shut down and here's something else that's very important to understand about our amygdala it does not know the difference between perception and reality if we are even thinking back to the past at a time when we've been hurt or angry or fearful of something in the future that we think is going to happen we will throw ourselves into this amygdala reaction I had the tools on that mountain to be able to manage through that and this is the reactive management tool that I was talking about it's not just proactively building the characteristics of emotional intelligence it's also the responsive tool and it's practical and it's easy maybe not as easy in the moment but you've been started today step number one get breathing you see through this cycle the oxygen and the blood have left the neocortex and gone South to protect our body and give us extra strength by taking deep slow breaths we actually bring the fuel back up to the captain of our ship and back up to where it belongs number two get focused research shows that on average we have 60,000 thoughts on any given day now we know that men have one thought 60,000 times and of those thoughts only 5% are in the present moment folks we ain't where we're supposed to be most of the time learning to focus our thoughts allows us to manage that back and forth cycle of negative thinking and how that impacts our amygdala and when we're focused were in the best part of our brain third get grateful since its inception an organization called heart math has been studying how gratitude and appreciation impacts heart health physiology and chemicals in the brain and what they discovered is that no other thought process lowers our heart rhythms to the healthiest rhythm and makes us feel so calm as when we're grateful and appreciative and when we think thoughts of gratitude and appreciation we're actually reversing all of those stress hormones that were released from the amygdala they're reversed into happy hormones and anti-aging hormones and that's what I was consciously doing on that mountain grateful for the view grateful that I was standing on those skis at all and grateful for my significant other who did help me make it down the hill and one piece and get to my coffee and Bailey's and he also eventually became my husband so who is a really good ski instructor he proved himself on that mountain breath focus and gratitude it can be that easy now you may not be on a 12,000 foot ski slope any time soon but you will be in situations where you felt the same way I did you will have your own mountains to conquer and when you do you know that you have a skill set that can get you through that the proactive characteristics of emotional intelligence that help us show up better for the world and a responsive tool that will help you breathe through the situation we can breathe through anything that's what we say in yoga just like Dorothy was told from the Good Witch and Wizard of Oz Dorothy you had the power the whole time you just had to learn how to use it being a journalist by education and studying and coaching on emotional intelligence I never read a news headline the same way again I either can tell that somebody didn't have an emotional intelligence trait or they've had an amygdala hijack now the behaviors that you show up with hopefully won't make the news headlines any time soon but your emotional intelligence does create the headlines of your life imagine a world where every single one of us can show up with the character traits that we need more of in this world and imagine if every single one of us we're equipped with the tool that we need to be able to manage any moment any mountain any fear any anxiety not because we don't want to feel them but because when we deal with them well we grow and we learn that's a world of emotional intelligence and we can create that world starting with me starting with you and starting today will you help me create a world and spread emotional intelligence thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 157,092

Rating: 4.8186612 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Career, Communication, Compassion, Culture, Decision making, Emotions, Empathy, Happiness, Intelligence, Life, Mindfulness, Relationships, Self improvement, Society, Visualization, Work

Id: 5E-WzUmFJSA

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2016