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

so I'm standing on this mountain to tell you to ride in Colorado, it's a ski slope called SE forever, its elevation is only 12,470 feet and the vertical drop is 3,000 feet. I'm terrified, my heart is pounding, my stomach is in knots and even though I'm very cold, my hands are actually sweating. You see, it had been 12 years since I had been on a pair of skis. A back problem had kept me off the slopes and in a lot of pain. He had done everything he could to avoid surgery, but. The time came when I needed to go under the knife and after 10 years of waiting I went under the knife and woke up from that surgery with what I feared most: paralysis from the top of my left thigh down.

I felt something, I couldn't move, there was no pain, there was nothing after overcoming shock and a second surgery and after five long months of physical therapy, rest, healing and prayer I finally regained full use of my leg 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 maybe even my relationship because my fiancé was an expert skier and had I was just taught to ski downhill, I mean, the pressure was high, but at Despite the pressure and despite these circumstances, I had a tool I could use.

You see, I was aware of the chemical changes that were happening in my brain and the physiological changes that were happening in my body, I was aware of what was happening and the fact that if I didn't make it I wouldn't get down that hill safely. I knew what I had to do to access my skiing skills. I needed to focus, I needed to breathe and I needed to have gratitude and I knew that if I did that, it would get me down that hill in one piece and take me to where the same people are at the shelter drinking Bailey's and coffee, right?

I was practicing

emotional

intelligence

emotional

intelligence

is not an oxymoron. I promise you that it's this uniquely human skill set that most of us don't know that we've ever really used or valued Val and we understand that it's actually the balance of our heads and our hearts and it's this interesting intersection between our souls and science. And, as a consultant and corporate culture expert, my mission is to help people like you love their work and love their life. I have seen what emotional intelligence can do, it changes lives and it has changed mine. it can change yours it makes us happier it makes us healthier we are better leaders we are better in our relationships we make better decisions and we are more resilient and today I hope you will go on a journey with me to master your

emotions

and it is a journey, none of us are completely intelligent emotionally and I'm on that journey with you and today I want you to remember three things about emotional intelligence, one is that it's very important, it's more important than ever.

We realized that our emotional intelligence is important to the world. Second, it's actually a skill that can be learned, unlike IQ, which doesn't change much over time. We can improve our emotional quotient throughout our lives and throughout our careers. And third, it actually has its roots in neuroscience and biology. Emotions are

contagious

, aren't they? I mean, they're powerful and they're

contagious

. The entire energy in a room can change in about 3 seconds. When a dominant emotion or ideas that diffuse all the energy in a room can change. I mean, think. about this in your personal life mentors leaders family members we have family members who have great emotional energy and then we know those people who have pretty rotten emotional energy, right?

I mean, who do you like to hang out and be around and how do you do it? They make you feel when they walk in the door, some of the first studies on emotional intelligence were done by Harvard. Harvard was sending its best and brightest into the workforce and they were not succeeding, as any good university does. They looked into it and followed a representative sample of graduates from all types of disciplines for several years in their careers and what they found was very interesting. They discovered that there are three areas that are important for success.

The first is IQ, no surprise. The second is technical skills like being able to ski downhill or being an engineer or architect isn't too surprising either, but it was this third area that really surprised Harvard because it was a set of emotional skills that mattered for success and what was even more Surprising from the research is that IQ and technical skills each only accounted for about 8% of graduate success; actually they were more of a threshold skills that just got them in the door and once they got in the door it was their emotional intelligence or their emotional quotient that was double the success factor as their IQ and technical skills were combined. .

Our IQ sometimes matters more than our IQ and our technical talent and what we're finding in the current research if you're a formal leader in the room or if I want to be a leader someday. Between 80 and 90% of our effectiveness as a leader lies in emotional intelligence skills, but I don't think we are talking and teaching enough about emotional intelligence in our homes, our schools, or our businesses. It's important what emotional intelligence is exactly well, it can be learned, we absolutely can learn to be better with our

emotions

. I like to think of it as a proactive journey to develop and show those characteristics that are deep within us and that we know can change the world.

It is also a reactive or receptive tool that allows us to show ourselves better and manage moments better, such as time when you are at the top of a ski hill and you just had surgery, it is also a journey that Daniel Gman has researched for many years Daniel Gman is actually considered the father of emotional intelligence and he wrote one of the original popular books and in his Research analyzes emotional intelligence in two ways, two pillars, if it is about oneself and social and when it is about oneself. It is self-awareness of our own emotions, right, we have emotions that we are

spreading

to other people, being aware of those emotions, being present, having optimism, being confident, being able to manage your impulses, being flexible and adaptable and having a personal drive , recover first.

After all, airlines tell us to put on your oxygen mask first before trying to help anyone else. Now when it comes to social media, it's about getting out of your own bubble and now being aware of the people around you and being able to connect. social connection, you know, work is only done through others and we can't influence unless we connect first and it's such a rare quality in this world that when it happens it's quite magical, it's the ability to have empathy and care about what happens with others. work in life having compassion and caring are strong communication skills especially listening, listening today is very rare and so is being able to coach someone by telling them the honest answer and sometimes having that difficult conversation.

You know, I am a yogini, which means that I practice yoga and I teach yoga and as a yoga practitioner, we start each practice with the intention, the way we want to feel throughout our practice or the way we want to show up to the world. and, when I think about it, when we make the best of ourselves. and the truest self in yoga those are the traits of emotional intelligence, it is not surprising at all, it is within all of us and it is really being able to show what I call living in the gray zone, it is that delicate balance between the head, the heart, science and soul. present just the right amount of what we need each time, depending on the circumstances and the people I know.

When I measure my emotional intelligence, there's a particular competency called adaptability and flexibility, and when I look, I look at how my business partners rate. They give me a pretty high score, but when I look at my family and friends they give me a very low score, so I have to learn to present myself differently at the dinner table than at the board table and Believe 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 I always have the option to choose. Nobody and nothing can force me to do anything.

It's my decision and so am I. learn not to take things so personally people don't do things to us, they do them for themselves, so these characteristics of emotional intelligence are what matter for our world, so why don't more people with emotional intelligence appear? If you and I are more emotionally intelligent, it has to do with our emotions, especially negative ones, and the science and biology behind them. In reality, we are programmed as a species to seek negativity outside of threat and protection in order to remain. Alive and procreated, let me explain it this way. Right now in your heads there are two systems functioning simultaneously, so to speak, our cognitive system and our limit system.

Now both systems are in the front seat of your car, but only one of them can be. driving in a moment now our cognitive system this is really our executive function this is where we have creative thinking 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 It's from where good intentions come from and is primarily made up of an area called the neocortex, which is actually that red area on the screen that you see. Personally I like to call him the captain of our ship because he is the one you want driving your ship and navigating your world and humans are unique because no other species has a brain whose neocortex is as large as humans we are really the only species that can create our future with good intentions.

I mean, my dog ​​Harry doesn't get up every day. and we have a good intention of not dragging our cat toti on the floor, then our lyrical system, the second system that is happening in your head right now, has more to do with our feelings and our emotions, and this is also where our survival instinct lives specifically in a place. called The amygdala says that with me amygdala I promise you'll talk about it tomorrow and this is really kind of a green area on the screen and specifically the amygdala does two important things for us as human beings number one.

It contains all the emotional memory, especially negative and number two, it contains our fight or flight response system, that which puts us in protection when we have a physical threat or a threat of injury and this system is older than our cognitive system and it is faster than our cognitive system and it will always trump our executive system and it will always trump the captain of our ship and when this system is activated, it does so in less than a second. This is how it works when we feel threatened, the amydala goes into overdrive and does its job by sending out stress hormones. through the brain and that is the chemical reaction that is happening.

I noticed that on the ski slope those stress hormones like cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine and adrenaline, what they are doing is changing the physiological sensation of our bodies to put us in fight or flight. blood and oxygen travel south and that is a good thing when we need to protect ourselves, it is not so good when we need to stand in front of someone and have a conversation and when this happens, research from the Institute of Health and Human Rights Potential says that We lose up to 75% of our cognitive ability at that point, essentially our amydala 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 on that mountain.

I had a rational reason and I thought I could go down that mountain, but all I could visualize was myself falling on all the horrible things I could think of and I was aware of this chemical reaction that was happening in my brain and I had the tools to being able to be aware of that and impact that and I think most of us are aware of this physical response we almost missed a car accident we almost tripped down the stairs we got the phone call in the middle of the night we stepped on a Ted stage, but what about What we may not realize is how our emotions also play in this cycle.

You see us as humans with a heart and a soul. Each of us has a set of emotional needs that we must have met, perhaps that is the need to fit in. in the need to highlight our social norms and domestication our ego our sense of control ourneed to have freedom perhaps we need to protect a past trauma or our defenses from past wounds anyone recognizes themselves on that list and at any time those emotional needs are not being met When we meet ourselves or another person or we are afraid that they will not meet us receive, we enter into the same reaction that we have when we are chased by a saber-toothed tiger and we go through the same chemical reaction. our emotional intelligence and we are in a state of chemically induced nonsense and it doesn't take a ski slope to do that, it just takes feeling afraid, getting angry, feeling hurt or closed off, and here's something else that's very important to understand about our amydala. doesn't know the difference between perception and reality, if we are even thinking about the past at a time when we have been hurt, angry, or afraid of something in the future that we believe is going to happen, we will throw ourselves into this.

Amydala reaction I had the tools on that mountain to be able to overcome that and this is the reactive management tool I was talking about, it's not just about proactively developing the characteristics of emotional intelligence, it's also the responsive tool, it's practical and maybe easy. It's not that easy right now, but you can start today. Step number.By breathing, you see through this cycle that oxygen and blood have left the neocortex and gone south to protect our body and give us additional strength. By breathing deeply and slowly, we actually bring the fuel back to the captain of our ship and return it. where it belongs number two, focus, research shows that on average we have 60,000 thoughts on any given day, we now know that men have a thought 60,000 times and of those thoughts only 5% are in the present moment, friends, we are not where we are.

Most of the time learning to focus our thoughts is supposed to allow us to manage that back and forth cycle of negative thinking and how that affects our amydala and when we are focused we are in the best part of our brain. grateful since its inception, an organization called heartmath has been studying how gratitude and appreciation impacts heart health physiology and chemicals in the brain and what they have discovered is that no other thought process reduces our heart rate by Healthier rhythm and makes us feel so calm. like when we are grateful and grateful and when we think thoughts of gratitude and appreciation, we are actually reversing all those stress hormones that are released from the amydala, they are reversed into happiness hormones and anti-aging hormones and that's what I was consciously doing on that mountain grateful for the view grateful to be standing on those skis and grateful for my partner who helped me get down the hill in one piece and get to my coffee and to Bailey and he also eventually became my husband so he was a very good ski instructor, proved himself in that mountain breath, focus and gratitude, it can be that easy now, you may not be on a 12,000 foot ski slope anytime soon, but you will be in situations where that you will feel the same.

You will have your own mountains to conquer and when you do, you will know that you have a set of skills that can help you overcome the proactive characteristics of emotional intelligence that help us show up better to the world and a receptive tool that will help you. you breathe through the situation we can breathe through anything that's what we say in yoga just as the Good Witch and the Wizard of Oz told Dorothy Dorothy you had the power all along you just had to learn to use it by being a journalist by education, study and training on emotional intelligence I have never read a news headline the same way again.

I can tell that someone didn't have an emotional intelligence trait or that they had an amydala hijack. Now, the behaviors you show up with, hopefully, won. You won't be making news headlines anytime soon, but your emotional intelligence does create the headlines of your life. Imagine a world where each of us can appear with the character traits we need most in this world and imagine if each of us. We are equipped with the tool we need to be able to manage any moment, any mountain, any fear, any anxiety, not because we do not want to feel them, but because when we face them well we grow and learn that it is a world. of emotional intelligence and we can create that world starting with me starting with you and from today you will help me create a world and spread emotional intelligence thank you