The Life Challenges Podcast
Modern-day issues from a Biblical perspective.
The Life Challenges Podcast
Transform Your Spiritual Life by Increasing Your Emotional Awareness with Scott Mittelstadt
What if the key to deeper spiritual growth isn't more knowledge, but better emotional awareness? Scott Mittelstadt, a former law enforcement officer turned emotional intelligence consultant, reveals how understanding your emotions transforms every relationship—including your relationship with God.
Ever sit down to read scripture only to realize minutes later you can't remember what you just read? You're not alone. Scott shares how journaling revolutionized his Bible study, creating "a night and day difference" in his comprehension and retention. This simple practice helped him "dig deeper to look for meaning" rather than merely checking off a spiritual discipline.
The science is clear: our brains are constantly being rewired by our thoughts. With negative stimuli overwhelming positive ones in our daily lives, intentional practices like gratitude journaling become essential for maintaining emotional health. Scott explains how writing down three good things daily helped him maintain a positive outlook even after years in a profession saturated with society's darker elements.
Perhaps most surprising is the revelation that only 7% of communication meaning comes from our actual words—the remaining 93% derives from body language, tone, and inflection. This explains why text messages and emails so frequently lead to misunderstandings. For Christians seeking to love others well, developing face-to-face communication skills grounded in emotional intelligence becomes a spiritual necessity.
Whether you're struggling with distractibility during prayer, finding it difficult to have tough conversations with loved ones, or simply wanting to experience more meaningful connections, this episode offers practical strategies to increase your emotional awareness. From active listening techniques to mindfulness practices, discover tools that will deepen both your human relationships and your walk with God.
Join us for an illuminating conversation that bridges psychology and faith, revealing how emotional intelligence might be the missing piece in your spiritual journey.
The ministry of Christian Life Resources promotes the sanctity of life and reaches hearts with the Gospel. We invite you to learn more about the work we're doing: https://christianliferesources.com/
On today's episode.
Scott Middlestadt:One of the tools that I started doing earlier this year is journaling, and I started doing it with my Bible reading, and it was a night and day difference the very first time I did it and it's still sticking with me, which is why I'm continuing to do it where I could sit down and I'd read a couple chapters in whatever book of the Bible for that morning and you could ask me five minutes later what did I read? And most of the time I'd have been like, yeah, what was that again? Whereas now just the practice of having to, knowing I was going to journal about it afterwards, sharpened my focus. It helped me dig deeper to look for meaning. But journaling is an excellent tool, whether it's tied to scripture study or just trying to understand your emotions.
Scott Middlestadt:Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Our world today presents people with complicated issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. It can be a struggle to understand or deal with them. We're here to help by bringing good information and a fresh biblical perspective to these matters and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.
Christa Potratz:Hi and welcome back. I'm Krista Potratz and I'm here today with Pastor Jeff Samuelson. Hi and welcome back. I'm Krista Potratz and I'm here today with Pastor Jeff Samuelson, and we also have a very special guest with us today we have Scott Middlestadt. Welcome to the podcast, scott.
Scott Middlestadt:Good morning, happy to be here.
Christa Potratz:We're excited to have you here. I am very interested in the topic we're going to be talking about today. Today we're going to be talking about emotional intelligence, and I mean, I'm not very super familiar with that, and so I am really excited to be exploring this topic with you today too. But before we get into the topic at hand, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your connection to this topic?
Scott Middlestadt:Sure, I'm actually originally from Dodge County, close to where we're recording this here. I grew up on a family dairy farm, attended Christian grade school in high school, went off to secular college and eventually came back. Did not get a job long-term in the degree that I sought, but eventually kind of felt a calling into law enforcement. I spent a little over three-quarters of my career working for the Sheboygan law enforcement. I spent a little over three quarters of my career working for the Sheboygan Police Department. I've been very blessed with a lot of the opportunities I'd had, both situational as well as good mentors at certain times that led me to a lot of success there. I eventually moved back down to Dodge County and finished out my career with the Dodge County Sheriff's Office with the last five years as the chief deputy had a total of 21 years in formal leadership positions.
Scott Middlestadt:Probably one of the best things that happened to me during my career was I had the opportunity to attend a three-week human behavioral science-based leadership course for law enforcement and then shortly thereafter I had the opportunity to become an instructor in that which.
Scott Middlestadt:That course really changed my career and had a huge impact on my life, and so I've been an instructor for that for over 12 years.
Scott Middlestadt:Well, shortly after becoming an instructor, they added a half day block on the concept of emotional intelligence and it very quickly became a favorite of all the students as well as the instructors, and I think you'll see as we go through it, a big part of it it just really resonates with people as to how they've been influenced by others, and it's not necessarily just connected to leadership.
Scott Middlestadt:It really impacts every aspect of our life. So when I had the opportunity to retire back in January of 2023 from law enforcement, I stepped off into my second career, just basically as a self-employed, as a consultant and trainer, and I chose last year to become certified in an emotional intelligence assessment specifically because I saw how intricately it connected with every aspect of our lives. It's a rather deep concept, as you'll see when we start digging into it, and I really wanted to get down to understand it at a lot better level, and I also utilize that now, as well as some other tools, in assisting others in whether it's leadership development. I'm helping with peer support training for law enforcement in the state of Wisconsin, which is deeply connected to emotional intelligence, as well as employee wellness training. So I kind of involved in a variety of those, as well as using emotional intelligence for some, work with a consulting firm for recruitments and also executive coaching.
Christa Potratz:Okay, wow, sounds like you got a lot going on there.
Scott Middlestadt:It's continued to branch out and a lot of the branches are really stemming from the emotional intelligence.
Christa Potratz:Well, you know you said, emotional intelligence is a very deep and intricate subject, but how would you describe it in simple terms?
Scott Middlestadt:Probably the easiest explanation is it's our ability to both understand our current emotions and manage them, as well as being able to understand the emotions of others and react appropriately to those and I emphasize the appropriately part, because that's, I think, where we tend to fail the most as human beings.
Christa Potratz:And specifically as we talk today, what should Christians really know or understand about emotional intelligence? I mean, how does that really intersect with the Christian life?
Scott Middlestadt:Well, I believe God made us to be emotional creatures. I'll share with you an example.
Scott Middlestadt:When we're teaching leadership and we talk about emotional intelligence, we'll do an exercise a lot of times with a classroom of adults, professionals. We'll ask them to think of someone in their life that has been extremely influential to them and think the top three traits at, what made them such. And then we'll uh ask, we'll explain what IQ is, uh versus what EQ or emotional intelligence is, and we'll ask them then to put the. We'll give them sticky notes. They write the different traits, uh, one on each sticky note, and we'll ask them to put them on a grease board or a flip chart that has is divided by a line, with IQ on one side and EQ on the other side, and every time we do it, you get anywhere from 70 to 90% of those traits land on the EQ side Extremely imbalanced, and I think it's a really good visual for how crucial these skills are to human beings in general.
Scott Middlestadt:And it's it's just what, it's really what drives us and it's what, when we connect with people, it's generally from uh, that emotional connection. Uh. There's a phrase we'll use oftentimes in leadership training that you you may not remember what someone did as in a leader, what they did or what they said, but you'll always remember how they made you feel, and it really again speaks to how we're.
Scott Middlestadt:I think we're created as emotional beings and we are at our best when we are effectively connected to our emotions and those around us and we're managing those well those well, for a certain type of person and I will humbly admit that I'm one of them when you think about leadership or you think about just success in any kind of field, you think in terms of okay, what do I need to learn? What's the knowledge that's necessary here? Okay, I've got this leadership problem in the organization that I'm a part of. Okay, what do I need to know? What skills do I need to acquire, and how do I manipulate this situation? And hearing what you're talking about with the emotional intelligence is frightening in a way, because it's like oh yeah, that's important too, isn't it? You know that's not my comfort zone necessarily, and you know I'm just. I guess the point of my response here is just like, that's really important. I'm glad you're doing this work.
Scott Middlestadt:Well, and I would love to say that the reason I got into it is because I recognized I was extremely high in all areas of emotional intelligence and I thought I could teach other people to do that.
Scott Middlestadt:But the reality is that I, just like everyone else we have because there's actually multiple facets to it we all have our areas that are our strengths and we have our areas that we really need to grow in. And unless you recognize what those are and you're conscious enough and willing to put the work in and often uncomfortable work to try to grow in those areas, then you're not going to grow in those, and so that's where being someone that has to grow myself in certain areas, that's. That's one of the reasons and I've seen the benefits of doing, of practicing different techniques, uh, for my emotional intelligence, and I look at those that mentored me and the areas that they had and, like you said, you're kind of touching on everyone. God made us all unique, including our emotional intelligence and how we're put together, and that's understanding how he made you and then trying to make the best of that. This just fits right in with that concept.
Scott Middlestadt:If this is too personal you don't have to answer. But as you personally learned these things about the importance of intelligence with your emotions and such, how did that affect or change your spiritual life, how you lived as a Christian?
Scott Middlestadt:That's a great question. So unfortunately, relating it back to law enforcement, it's a very difficult field but there's a lot of other similar ones pastors, nursing field things where you're overwhelmed with negative interactions with people and those are all driven by emotions that can have a negative impact on you, and that's one of the things we see in those professions, for example, law enforcement. Most people don't understand that generally, about twice as many law enforcement professionals die every year by suicide than are feloniously killed and it's kind of one of those dirty little secrets that's kind of kept in the background and a lot of that has to do because of being constantly surrounded with the negativity of society. It has a negative impact on your thinking, which is again all connected to our emotions, and so I went through that too, and it was only about two years into the profession where I really started realizing I'm not the same person I believed I was thinking.
Scott Middlestadt:The things that I heard myself saying were not what I believed my core values were from having been raised in a Christian family and Christian grade school and high school still attending church and that was a pivotal point, and my wife noticed it at the same time and that really it was a punch in the gut at the time, but it really that drove me back to God and spending a tremendous amount of time going forward then making sure I was helping balance out all the negativity you deal with in whatever your profession is with the positives that can come out of being involved and regularly staying connected to God's word and working in serving God's people in church or whatever that would be. So that really made a big difference for me.
Christa Potratz:I, just as you were talking, and then Jeff was talking about how he was maybe more knowledge-based, I was just kind of then wondering okay, are women better at this emotional intelligence? Or maybe a better question is how are men and women different at responding to some of these techniques and things that you talk about?
Scott Middlestadt:So it's interesting you bring that up. So the assessment that I decided to get certified in is called the EQI 2.0. I went through a company called MultiHealth Systems and they've got tons of research into what you're talking about and in general men and women don't have a significant difference in overall emotional intelligence but there's certain subscales, like empathy, where women do tend to be a little higher in. But it's just like and we might talk a little bit about some of the things that influence where you are with your emotional intelligence or challenges to it, and certainly your upbringing, gender can have some impact. There's a lot of different things that might, but in general there's not a huge difference. But there are certain differences, minor differences in some of the subscales, which I don't think would be a shock that women tend to be a little more open with their emotions or better able to connect. But even that is, those are generalizations because you'll have examples of the opposite in both genders.
Christa Potratz:Right, right, I guess another one too. Does age play into some of those differences as well?
Scott Middlestadt:So interesting. Again you brought it up and I want to tie this together. So, like, our personality traits are set by the time we're about five or six years old and those do not change throughout your life outside of some sort of psychological harm to your brain or physical harm to your brain, our IQ, which is kind of our learning processes, those kind of peak at about age 17 or how you learn, and that stays stable and then decreases a little bit towards the end of life. Emotional intelligence is a little different in that it, uh, it, it can, even without any manipulation, intentional manipulation it generally increases slightly over life, which, the more you understand, it, uh, it makes sense as you go through life experiences, if you're learning from them, you, you're growing uh in in your emotional intelligence as well. Um, and that does also fade a little bit in our later years.
Scott Middlestadt:Um, just be again because you're I think you're you become a little less cognitively able to recognize how you're feeling or how other people are feeling that's pretty much everything kind of declines as you get older, including emotional intelligence, but you can still continue to grow in it pretty much at any time you know be later in life. That would first be hearing about this concept wherever they're at right now at a baseline. If they were to intentionally try to focus on some of the techniques to try to improve that, I think they can still see improvement.
Christa Potratz:so how can emotional self-awareness shape the way that we pray or worship or read scripture?
Scott Middlestadt:Emotional self-awareness is really kind of like the base or the foundation of emotional intelligence.
Scott Middlestadt:If you are not self-aware and by that just basically meaning that you're in the moment, you're currently aware of what your emotions are, how they might be impacting you internally, as well as the environment around you, the people you're interacting with If you do not have that, that, it makes it difficult to live in general.
Scott Middlestadt:But so there's a variety of areas that that would impact in your life. First of all, if I'm, for example, if I'm, if I'm angry about something but it's more at the subconscious level, I'm not really thinking about it outwardly or recognizing the narrative going on in my mind, which would show lack of self-awareness, that I don't realize I'm stewing on something and what it's doing to me physiologically, versus also how I'm interacting with, let's say, my spouse or my children or my co-workers or the congregation when I'm at church, that's going to have a negative impact on those relationships. On a more personal level, if I'm sitting down to read God's word or I'm really happy about something, but I'm it's taking me, you know my mind away from what I'm really trying to do. It just makes it again. You're very ineffective at whatever it is you're trying to do Study God's word, pray, worship, interact in a Christian way with letting your light shine to the world around you, so to speak. All of that becomes almost impossible, or at least you're very diminished in your effectiveness in doing that.
Scott Middlestadt:So so if someone listening here is saying, yeah, I, I, I think I, I need more emotional intelligence, you know, it sounds like I can work on it, so so maybe I can. What would be some of the specific things that, um, you know, you would recommend to somebody say, oh, okay, well, this is a way that you can increase your awareness, your, you know, increase your ability to interpret emotions and know what to do with them.
Scott Middlestadt:The best approach is going to kind of stem on what is it that's leading you away from that learned over the last few years they've done a lot of research that the average adult human being about 47% of the time they're focused on something other than what they're doing, in other words, so about half the time. Well, I know that I'm one of those people that pulls that average up because I'm probably in the 80 to 90% of the time.
Scott Middlestadt:And that could be something as simple as ADHD or whether I think. You know whether I actually had that and just never diagnosed, but I've always. I was really good at my job because I was able to quickly shift my attention to other things, but, in other words, distractibility can be a big problem and it is a big problem in our society.
Scott Middlestadt:So if, meaning if, if I'm not focusing on what I'm doing, you're not mindful or present in the moment, it's hard to again worship or anything. So I'll give the example of prayer. I do my prayers when I'm walking my dog in the morning and I walk for about a half an hour. Sometimes I can crank them out in five minutes because I'm able to really focus, like this morning trying to get ready for this. Other times it takes most of that half hour because I keep getting distracted. The dog's chasing squirrels, but my brain is chasing squirrels too. You?
Christa Potratz:know it's just.
Scott Middlestadt:You're in the middle of my prayers. You know my mind's wandering off. Same thing happens when you're in church. Familiar with the concept.
Scott Middlestadt:Yep and.
Scott Middlestadt:I can imagine, you know, especially if a pastor's up in front of their church and your brain, you know, chases a squirrel. But the same thing for, again, sitting, sitting in worship. So distractibility and being mindful is a is a big problem, uh, for a lot of us. And there. So there's actual, if you, if you would research mindfulness, uh, especially mindful prayer, um, and that's really there's. There's specific practices mindful breathing, which kind of brings you back into the present, but you have to notice that your mind is, and the more you focus on that, the more you notice how bad you are at it, like I am. But then you can also focus on bringing it back, and the more you do that, the better you're going to be at it.
Scott Middlestadt:A lot of what we're going to talk about with emotional intelligence is tied into the science of neuroplasticity, which is that our brains are constantly being rewired based on what we're going through and what we're thinking, what's flowing through our minds, and that predicts how we're going to think going forward, whether it's and whether it's being distractible. But more importantly, are those positive thoughts? Are they negative thoughts? Just, in society in general, we're deluged with far more negative stimuli every day than we are positive ones, and so if you're not doing things to try to counterbalance that or minimize the negatives, that's what's rewiring your brain, including your conscious and subconscious thought patterns, so becoming aware of what those thought patterns are as well. One of the tools that I started doing earlier this year is journaling, and I started doing it with my Bible reading, and it was a night and day difference the very first time I did it and it's still sticking with me, which is why I'm continuing to do it where I could sit down and I'd read a couple chapters in whatever book of the Bible for that morning and you could ask me five minutes later what did I read? And most of the time it would have been like, um, yeah, what was that again, whereas now just the just the practice of having to, knowing I was going to journal about it afterwards, sharpened my focus. It it helped me dig deeper to look for meaning, partly because I knew I was then going to write it down afterwards. But journaling is an excellent tool, whether it's tied to scripture study or just trying to understand your emotions, uh, better, and that's that's we.
Scott Middlestadt:We tend to be very closed off to our emotions Uh, some of us anyways, and you know some of that. Like I said, we'll maybe talk about where some of that comes from. But if you're one of those people, um, that practices emotional suppression meaning you're not really in tune with your truly, what your emotions are um, then you journaling is something that can really help you with that, where you you really try to think about, okay, what, what truly is driving, uh, my emotions right now, cause we know that our thoughts, and often subconscious, drive our emotions and our emotions drive our behaviors. So that's where you can see where emotional understanding, emotional intelligence, um, understanding what, what are my current thought patterns? Is that appropriate for my situation? Whether I'm sitting in church I'm interacting with a loved one sitting trying to read God's word, whatever it is, what are your emotions? And journaling can help you get those out of your head and onto paper and it makes them more real and now you can start to handle that and manage that, recognize it.
Christa Potratz:You touched on, too, interacting with other people too, and that was one of the areas I wanted to talk about too. Just points that when you start practicing some of these things, you're more aware of how other people respond, or is it still about how you respond to other people?
Scott Middlestadt:There's been research around for decades and I can't remember the researcher's name, but it was into how communication actually occurs and they found that only about 7% of meaning comes from the actual words we use. The rest comes from body language and tone and inflection. So in other words and it speaks again to how emotional beings we really are so anytime I'm involved in some sort of interaction with another person, if I'm not self-aware enough to recognize what my emotions are and manage to make sure I'm sending the right body language and tone and inflection which is 93% of how they're going to take the meaning how effective am I going to be at even starting effective communication with that person?
Scott Middlestadt:Plus then, trying to recognize and this is another big part of emotional intelligence is being able to recognize the signs of emotions from others and accurately read them. And because we all have our own ways of coding and decoding what we're trying to say and do, and that's where that works against true, effective communication. Generally, you want authentic. You want people to be comfortable sharing emotions with each other. Vulnerability is a big part of that. Being comfortable with vulnerability, which a lot of us are not, for a variety of reasons. I'm okay, it's okay that I express certain emotions because you trust me and you're. You feel comfortable then expressing emotions back, knowing I'm going to hopefully put the best construction on it.
Scott Middlestadt:You know, take and and rephrasing to that other person in a loving way, did I? If I'm understanding you correctly, you know that that all takes your ability to again, in the moment, manage your emotions as well as, uh, the the emotions of the other person, and that is it's a, it's a process, and because every person, even if you, you, two people that know each other for long periods of time, spouse is a good example. Every day we're still different people because of whatever we've been experiencing and what our hormones are doing or whatever. So that's. That's where there's. It's so complex that um learning how to just manage, understand your emotions in the moment and and try to open that up to to the person you're communicating with, is so crucial times. I mean people get upset what somebody says.
Christa Potratz:And I mean text message or maybe even online social media comments, because we don't have that face to face with a person to read all the other things. That kind of think too about the role that social media plays too in all of this and how we are able to connect with other people.
Scott Middlestadt:You brought up text messages, text message, email, any written format that you use for communicating, communicating again, you're 93 percent. You're losing 93 percent of how effective communication would occur, and which then leaves it up to all of us. In our subconscious mind, our attributional processes are called to interpret those words and we've all had those examples of and you, you misinterpret it. Uh, we're often misinterpreting them or putting in the meaning that we think it is and that leads to such ineffective communication.
Scott Middlestadt:But imagine someone then who is, let's say, they're low in self-regard, meaning they don't have a lot of inner confidence, have a difficult conversation with someone face-to-face.
Scott Middlestadt:So what they're, they may be more prone to wanting to use email in the work environment or text messages with friends or family that they don't.
Scott Middlestadt:They don't feel comfortable having that face-to-face conversation and that's just wrought with problems because you're there's, it's, it's so less effective, it's so likely that it's going to be misinterpreted and it's likely just going to lead to bigger problems.
Scott Middlestadt:So that's a good example of how someone like using that as an example of someone who's maybe lower in their self-confidence, to have that built, being able to build that self-confidence build it might be tied with anxiety that they have when they're you know, in confrontations or just not just a lack of confidence, but being able to build that skill where you're, you feel more confident and you that you'll be able to control your emotions in those face-to-face conversations. That's where really focusing on building your emotional intelligence. That's just one of many examples of how it could really be beneficial to your life in general, how happy you are, the types of relationships you have in every aspect of your life, including with God, as you're talking to God through prayer. Oftentimes we may not even be aware of the emotions that you know, or we're hiding them because that's what we think we can do. But can we really hide our emotions from God?
Scott Middlestadt:No, obviously not, no, we can't. No, obviously not, no, you can't.
Scott Middlestadt:Just on that topic of people who are close to you and such, if you assume that you know, okay, I'm in tune to this stuff, you know, I've come to appreciate, or I naturally have this high emotional intelligence what if someone close to you, a loved one you know, somebody you work with, or something like that I mean you recognize really doesn't have the EQ that they just are not in tune to these things? I mean, maybe it's an attachment disorder, maybe it's just the way they're wired, or you know what they have and haven't experienced in life. How can you be helpful to that loved one? Or is it more just something that you personally have to adjust for?
Scott Middlestadt:Well, those types of situations it depends a little bit on the context. So you mentioned like work environment. Some of that depends on your relationship with that person. Are you a peer, are you a subordinate to that person? Are you a supervisor for that person? And one of the reasons I chose my business name in my second career here as Cultural Reconstruction LLC is I really forming culture in organizations is a very difficult concept to understand as well and process to do, but you can create emotionally intelligent cultures.
Scott Middlestadt:Just talking about your situation from a peer-to-peer example, just being that loving hey, you know I can tell something's bothering you. You know, try trying to open up those conversations. Sometimes you can be effective with that, but you can. Sometimes you can only control what you control. You can only control what you control. No-transcript authority, but also a lot more responsibility, meaning you can demand people in the work environment to behave to certain standards, and that might include being willing to talk openly about difficult situations. But that that requires you as the leader and the leaders above you to be in like mind and set the example is the bigger heart the harder part making sure that we, as leaders are are setting that example.
Scott Middlestadt:And then there's there's official ways uh, you know, organization to uh develop, try to develop the culture in in a variety of ways, including, uh it through the helping develop people, helping people develop their emotional intelligence, uh, as well as. But again it ties into what are we setting as acceptable norms in our work environment? Same thing at home, you know, in your home environment. But then it's even more crucial because it's a loved one, most likely, and you can't go away from them at the end of the workday or you can't switch jobs to get away from them. There are certainly ways to end the relationships, but you're the goal is to maintain those.
Scott Middlestadt:That's where lovingly having difficult conversations with people Um, there is a book called Crucial Conversations that is really good at uh describing that, and it really it came out before, a lot of the emotional intelligence, uh information has over the last couple of decades, um, but it it's very much connected to that concept of and it helps guide people as to how to have those real difficult conversations, and it connects really well from a Christian perspective in that you really want to focus on what do I really want out of this relationship. Just use spouses as an example. You're flustered with your spouse over something and you don't feel they're wanting to communicate and you want to sit down and have this difficult conversation. This is just overloaded with the importance of emotional intelligence to be part of it. It is to focus on, well, what do I really want out of this relationship? And the answer should hopefully be that I want us to grow as individuals and stay together until death, do us part and you know, and and and be able to develop our ability to have these difficult conversations. Cause then, if you keep that in the back of your mind, uh, as you're having the conversation, when that other person reacts in ways that you don't particularly like you, you kind of drown out those emotions that that drives up with.
Scott Middlestadt:What do I really want here? What do I really want? You just kind of keep repeating that in your head and controlling that. But there again, this is where emotional intelligence comes in. You're having to control your emotions in the moment of that difficult conversation that wants you to react with anger or leave the conversation and you're thinking of how do I get to where I need to go? And you've, you've thought this through and you, you know, and that allows you to continue to proceed in that difficult conversation, assuming the other party does it as well. That's a resource. If you've never heard of it, it's an excellent book that really has a nice process. That's it out. That, I think, is very. It's not designed as scriptural based I don't believe but it certainly follows the same concepts you were walking your dog and everything.
Christa Potratz:Are there other practices or habits that we could kind of give our listeners that maybe they could start thinking about or start doing that might increase emotional intelligence?
Scott Middlestadt:So one of the big ones that I want to mention is our gratitude practices. That's something that I had been hearing about for a while, anyways, and that's something I also, uh, recently started and I've I'm really enjoying it. And particularly go back to what we talked about as far as that overwhelming negative stimuli to compare it to positive and just our most of us in our general day-to-day life. Um and so, when you're trying to rewire your brain to be more positive, that means you need to change your focus a lot of times within your brain than, uh, as well as mindfulness more effective than than medications in most circumstances in the longterm, because you are actually re rewiring your brain. One of the common ones is just, it's called three good things, and so and I utilizing that right now is every morning, I, and I made it part of my morning ritual, along with my Bible study, uh that I, after my journaling for the Bible, I also journal three good things going, and so you know, most days it's not that difficult to find three positive things that have happened the last 24 hours. Sometimes it might even require reframing how you were looking at something, that you were looking at it through a negative lens, but you can turn it around and start to see the silver lining, so to speak, and the more you do that, the better you're going to get at maintaining a more positive outlook and finding more positive things. So gratitude practices is a really big one, focusing on developing your active listening skills, and it ties into a lot to what we were talking about earlier with that self-awareness, um, but empathy is one of those things that is so crucial to effective, uh, relationships period, um, and that's being able to put yourself in another person's shoes. Well, if you're, whether you're distracted like I talked about a lot of us tend to be or you're caught, just caught up in your own emotions, you, you, you're not actively listening to the other person you're interacting with, and which a lot of those, whether it's your again, your coworkers, uh, members of your congregation, your, your loved ones and I that's another area where I recognized I had been failing. So really focusing on, especially when you're having interactions with those important people in your life, that, as soon as you that conversation starts, you put down phones, stop looking at the computer, whatever anything that could distract you, and really focus on actively listening and actively trying to put yourself in that person's situation, whether we're talking about, whether we're talking about something great that happened to them at work or something uh bad you know, know that happened or just generally talking about their day, but just really focusing in. Because that's again if we're present in the moment and then we're truly interacting with that person. If you're actively listening, you and they're saying things, you're, it should be natural that you're you're giving the right body language again and, uh, rephrasing things that they're saying to you, showing your understanding and listening, and it significantly can improve that relationship.
Scott Middlestadt:There are formal processes out there. There's lots of books on emotional intelligence and there's a whole bunch of different assessments. There's a handful that kind of float to the top from a scientific perspective that they're scientifically proven, valid and reliable. Valid, meaning they actually test for what they say they are, and reliable, meaning that it's consistent over time. The EQI 2.0 is one of those.
Scott Middlestadt:There's also a great program that and that's where I just that's where I've been started the three good things and a variety of other skills that it skills that it teaches.
Scott Middlestadt:That's called my grow all one word and it's a online um. Every it's considered drip learning, which is helps rewire your brain over time, and it's just small bite size chunks, um and it's. I found it to be phenomenal to the point where I wanted to be involved with the company, and so that's where I was introduced to me at the Christian Leadership Experience back in June. I attended that with my daughter out in La Crosse. I liked it so much I decided to try it and that has been really effective for me so far on deepening my knowledge and understanding of emotional intelligence and all the human behavioral science and psychology that is behind it, but also introducing good habits to build stronger, emotionally intelligent practices in my life. As we close out the episode, is there anything else you'd like to share at all with our listeners around me, and that this is an area that I think anyone can learn and grow in and improve. You know their own lives and including their faith life.
Christa Potratz:And if people want to get in contact with you, what's the best way?
Scott Middlestadt:Email at culturalreconstructionllc at gmailcom.
Christa Potratz:All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on today, and we thank all of our listeners, too, for joining us, and if you have any questions for us, you can reach us at lifechallengesus.
Scott Middlestadt:Thanks a lot, and we'll see you back next time. Bye, Thank you for joining us for the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it and sharing it with friends. We're here to help, so if you have questions on today's topic or other life issues, you can submit them, as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes at lifechallengesus, or email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. You can find past episodes and other valuable information at LifeChallengesus, so please check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit ChristianLifeResourcescom. May God give you wisdom, love, strength and peace in Christ for every life challenge.
