Helping Teens Build Emotional IQ - Awareness, Regulation, and Self-Confidence

What if your teen could stop being “managed by the world” and start managing themselves? That is the heart of this Turning Winds Podcast episode, where host Kevin Zundl sits down with Carl Baisden to tackle one of the biggest game changers in adolescent treatment: emotional IQ.

Carl pulls back the curtain on what emotional intelligence really is and why it matters more than grades, discipline, or even motivation. For many teens, powerful emotions arrive like tidal waves. They react, they lash out, they shut down, and the cycle repeats. What they do not realize is that their lack of emotional awareness is running the show. At Turning Winds, the goal is not to fix broken kids, but to help them see and repair the broken processes that hold them back.

In this conversation, you will hear how emotional IQ training transforms reactivity into regulation and shame into curiosity. Carl explains why curiosity is the secret weapon. Instead of beating themselves up, teens learn to get curious about their own patterns. That curiosity builds confidence, because when they can map cause and effect in their own emotional lives, they realize they have control. With control comes real self-worth.

Parents will recognize the power of this shift. Think about the difference between a teen who shouts, “You make me so mad!” and one who pauses to ask, “Why did that hit me so hard?” That is emotional intelligence in action, and it is exactly what Turning Winds staff teach in the moment every single day.

Carl also gives a behind-the-scenes look at the stages of change most students go through. In the beginning, they need constant management and structure. Three months in, they start owning their language, behaviors, and coping skills. By six months, many are managing half their challenges on their own. By the time they are ready to transition home, the goal is clear: a self-managing young person who knows when they are off track and has the tools to intervene before things spiral.

This episode is not just for families in treatment. It is for any parent who has watched their child be overwhelmed by emotions, or who has struggled with their own. Emotional IQ is a skill set that changes everything from anger to self-confidence, from impulsivity to resilience. As Carl reminds us, it is not just about teens. It is something every parent can practice too.

If you are ready to understand what drives your teen’s behavior beneath the surface, and how awareness, regulation, and confidence can reshape their future, this is the conversation you cannot afford to miss.

Subscribe to the podcast for more powerful insights on helping teens grow, thrive, and find their way.

To learn more about Turning Winds, visit turningwinds.com or call 800-845-1380.

Transcript

 This is what it sounds like when you understand the turnarounds that happened when you were able to develop a teen's emotional iq. And so that's what we're hoping for, is somebody that the world no longer has to manage because that's every one of those kids when they came through our doors. Welcome to the Turning Winds Podcast.

My name is Kevin Zundl. Turning Winds has a full continuum of care for teens that could use some critical support clinically and academically. Today I speak with Carl Baisden to better understand what emotional IQ is and why it is so important for teens to better navigate the world successfully. So Carl, what I wanted to ask you today was the topic of emotional iq and I think really for many of the families in the audience, I think we should just start with the basics.

What is emotional iq? For me, it's an awareness. That you can help an adolescent develop around their emotional processes. Kids are on autopilot as teenagers, so where they're at with their brain development and their life experiences, they just float and they react to the world as life happens to them, but they really cannot intellectualize what's really happening for them, like they get stuck on a behavior.

They can't understand that it was because of this feeling that I had that wasn't dealt with appropriately. And so this thing happens. This is a pattern that I have, and so I, we have this belief here at Turning Winds that the purpose of treatment is not to fix broken people, but to evaluate broken processes.

Things that just aren't working well. And one of the things that all of these kids have in common is they have a very minimalistic view of themselves. They have such a little amount of awareness, self-awareness around what makes them tick, what makes life easy, what makes it hard, what emotions are really difficult to deal with.

And so instead, these kids, they experience powerful emotions and they just react. To the emotion. Our hope is to educate them, to help them develop awareness around their emotional processes, that it is actually their emotional processes that dictates the quality of their life. And so when they're reactive, they lose control and they lose control of the quality of their life.

And so for us, we're all. Increasing awareness or emotional iq. So they have an awareness around what these emotions mean and, and then help them develop plans on how they can address those and develop their emotional regulation further. And so that's the big one for me. It's just around awareness.

Somebody that's got a high emotional IQ knows what they're feeling and why, and they know the power of those feelings and they know what they need to do with them. Right. And I think the word that you used, regulation, I think is what we all know that we're working towards, but you almost have to map it out to, to get to that space and say, okay, what if you are self-serving?

Why do I behave in this way? I behave in a certain situation. Yeah, I'm acting impulsively because something happened, but why is this 'cause something that happened to me in the past and I have to be self-aware of it or when I'm confronted with it? No. Hey, stop yourself, give yourself a pause and then reenter that situation.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's one of the primary benefits of treatment is you're in a setting that has time and space to really pause. When I have those experiences where I actually have access. To resources and qualified professionals that actually can help me make sense of what's happening because at 15, 16, 17, they don't make sense of it.

They just feel it and they feel it so powerfully. And so anytime a kid at Turning Wind experiences, emotional dysregulation is an opportunity for us. And that's why when kids get into. Hard spots, or they're struggling or they're making some poor decisions. Yeah, there's risk in that, but I choose to get excited about those opportunities to help those kids become more aware of these processes that hurt them in life.

And so if they don't possess the emotional maturity than they need to develop the emotional awareness. So they can bridge the gap in the interim as their brains are continuing to develop. As we know for males and females, both our frontal lobes don't fully develop until late into our twenties, and so we help them create an awareness and implement processes and tools to help bridge that gap so they don't have to walk around at the mercy of their emotions all day long.

That would be brutal. I know. It is. For me, if I live an emotional life, that's a scary life and uh, yeah. It is. And even as a parent, yeah, it's sometimes we're acting at our worst when it's not about that one situation that we're in right now, but it's about the other 50 situations that led up to this or that were similar to this, and you act out in frustration.

So I think sometimes we can't just look at. The child, in this case, the teen, and say, let's look at them and examine them. I think something that we can all continue to develop and work on with ourselves, be kinder to that them in that moment, give them that grace that they really deserve. Because again, in in theory, our frontal lobes as adults are more developed and we have an advantage.

So I think it's up to us to do that. But I wonder, are there other facets of emotional iq? I think it's easy to focus in on. The response of anger. But what about things like self-confidence? I know that personally if I'm in a place where I'm, one thing happened that was bad and now that's all I can think about, and you can sometimes be frozen completely in that and doubt everything in the world.

Are there things like that that you focus on or others? Yeah. Kids do go through a panic mode when they struggle. Through emotional processes that they feel like it's quite a failure at Turning Winds. We quickly try to capitalize on that and we try to shift the kids' brains into curiosity, like the empowerment that can come to you if you stop beating yourself up over the weird consequences that you perceive are gonna happen, and you start just getting curious about this process that you went through, you'll learn so much when they understand that's where confidence comes from.

When I know that A and B equals C for me, and I change the equation for myself, that's where real self-worth and confidence comes from, is knowing that I have ownership, that I have some control, and that I actually have the ability to do something different. My favorite way to get curious with kids is that, and any parent listening to this podcast will be able to relate and understand this.

This point, kids will often say to staff and peers, they will say things like, you make me so mad. You always do this, you always piss me off when you do this. They're giving ownership to that other person. They're saying, you do this to me, and in a way enough to talk about a symptom of low emotional iq.

That's it. When I lack the understanding that no, I, and I alone am, are and responsible for my emotions. Nobody can make me feel anything. I'm reacting to what these words were that this person just said. And so there's a a real time training that happens with kids when they're having those moments and that narrative in their head says, this person makes me mad.

Hold on, pause. No one can do that. So what's the real takeaway that can be offered if someone can't actually make me mad? But this situation is what triggered this anger response in me. What isn't? And so for the kids to be able to fall back on and land on the answer of it's me, it's actually not. My brain wants to instinctively say, what's the matter with Kevin?

He always does this, and it pisses me off so much. And when we're in curiosity, we get to say, what's wrong with my brain right now? Like, why is this thing with Kevin? Why does it got me the way that it's got me? Why has it impacted me in that way? If I can get curious and operate in that space, I can become more emotionally aware.

I can be smarter with my emotional process, and I just love that word so much. The word of awareness, like we're just trying to help. Okay, this thing happened, you became angry. What's this really about? Because I know it's not about those four words. Kids say I read worse words than on the internet. Every time I open my web browser.

Like it's not the words. What is it? And so in that space, magical discovery can happen and kids become aware. And so for me, that's what it's all about. It's helping them to know, once I become aware of what things are uniquely challenging for me emotionally and what emotional pro processes give me. I now am armed with the knowledge that I need to do something about it.

But most of these kids when they come here, lack not some in its entirety. They lack awareness that, that their emotions are theirs and they belong to them. They actually think the world gives them their emotions, that if they're mad, they should be mad because of my parents and because school's not going well.

And my parents said no about this, and so they're reacting. Using anger as a coping defense mechanism and it's not serving them well in an UN with it's ending with all of 'em in treatment. And yeah, it's a tricky one. It's not, they're the, they're a tough group of people to raise their emotional IQ significantly because of where their brain development is, but increasing their awareness around it.

And if they lack capability. Increasing tools, resources, and even people to bridge the gap of where they're at versus where they should be is really important. The word that you used that's really sticking with me is the curiosity part of why one is, um, behaving emotionally in the way that. They, they are.

Because I think if uni use language like I think I did of sort of introspection and self-awareness and things like that. Okay. But it's so much more approachable when you say curious in my head, it's okay. That's something I can do, which I really love. And then going back into the confidence. Idea in there, it's, I can really see a spectrum where they have to find their spot in the middle.

It's easily you, it's very easy to think of, okay, there situations where you have no confidence at all. But I think of a sign my parents had in, in their basement when I was growing up that said, hire a teen. While they still know everything, when you can see how overconfident they can be, they'll jump off the roof.

They'll, I think they can, they're right when they know experience in something. How do you look at spectrums like that and have them think of it in that way? Yeah, I like that because everyone's in different places with different situations, and so a kid that's really good in a situation, there's not much that needs to be addressed there.

We're really trying to meet each individual client where they're at with their emotional IQ and their emotional maturity, so we will deal with. Quite a broad spectrum, but the formula is going to be the same each time. Can we create time and space to pause and afford to have the ability to look at this a little more in depth with qualified people and resources available to me?

And so those are our thousands of teaching moments and opportunities a day with these kids. And so we always just try to meet them where they're at. So when we look at the emotional iq, that's, even though everyone's a little different, I think there's certain things that are a common thread when they come in and what are the sort of changes.

I always hear certain things change at three months and then four months, and when they're finally ready to take on the world by themselves out there with some support through the alumni program. But what are the stories you think of or what are those? Things that you typically see in the beginning that by the end completely different.

Yeah, I like that question a lot. They do progress, uh, throughout their stay with this one is what I'm looking for in the end game, and then we can look at kind of points what we're really hopeful of at the end of their stay. When they come in, they're dysregulated and they need a significant amount of micromanagement.

They're so bad at the management of their world that they need a lot of oversight and a lot of management. What we try to replicate throughout the treatment process is as they become skillful, as they get good at tools, that we start stepping down the management of that person at the end of their stay at turning wins.

We would really love to have what appears to be a self-managing human. Like I now have this management. I'm aware of the problems I'm aware of where I'm a little loose, where I need a little extra help, but they're going to be able to self-manage, to self intervene, to recognize I'm not doing well. I need more of this.

That's the ideal situation. I just got done sending a kiddo home on Tuesday and he is, he got to the point where he is a good self-manager, and so a lot of his transition work was done by him. Oh, I foresee this being a challenge with these kind of peers. I don't do good because of that. I need to put this structure in place and this structure in place and this structure in place that'll keep me safe and it'll keep me moving forward.

And so he's a kid that didn't need prompting on that, that didn't need us to manage that process. He could see the problems and he could see what he needed to be there as a resource to help him with it. I think that's what we're trying to get to three months into their stay. They're slightly better, right?

They're starting to manage some of the repetitive things that we've had to hit over and over again are starting to stick, and now they're starting to manage those things. A good example might be language I might get, have a kid coming in. You're cussing like a sailor, and through a repetitive process of redirection and correction, hundreds of times over three months in, this kid might have a better self.

Awareness and ownership and discipline around that, that he or she has developed six months in 50 50, and again, right up to the end where it's now, you don't even need 50% management. Now we're sending you home as a person that says, Hey, if you have basic structure and discipline and rules and expectation, you're good at managing yourself If the roadmap's ahead of you.

So that's what we're hoping for, is somebody that the world no longer has to manage because that's, every one of those kids when they came through our doors were chaotic and unmanageable and needed a fairly intense setting to, to get ownership, to get back in the driver's seat of their process. If this helps you understand why emotional IQ development is a priority at Turning Winds, I highly encourage you to give them a call to discuss your situation at 800 845 1380.

And don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to help you understand how to help your team. There's also a wealth of resources available to you on their website at turningwinds.com.