From Navy SEALs to Reality TV: The Science of Peak Performance with Dr. Steven Stein

What does it really take to perform at your best under pressure? 

In this episode, Richard Reid sits down with Dr. Steven Stein - clinical psychologist, author, and globally recognised expert in emotional intelligence - to explore how EQ shapes leadership, decision-making, and resilience. Steven shares insights drawn from 40+ years of research and work with elite groups including Navy SEALs, the FBI, and professional athletes.

From managing anger constructively to trusting your gut in high-stakes moments, this conversation is packed with practical, research-backed strategies. As Steven puts it: "Find your purpose, and then find out how emotional intelligence can help you get there."

Key Takeaways

Emotional intelligence involves three core skills: awareness, management, and use of emotions. People tend to be either over-emotional or under-emotional, and both create problems. 

Hardiness - built on Commitment, Challenge, and Control - is a proven framework for resilience. Daily small wins matter more than big rewards for sustained motivation. 

In the age of AI, emotional intelligence will become even more critical for leadership.

Episode Highlights

EQ in elite military units - what Navy SEALs taught Steven about psychological safety and leadership. 

Anger as a tool - how to manage it constructively rather than suppress or explode. 

Gut instinct vs. analysis - when to trust your intuition and when to slow down. 

The Three C's of Hardiness - Commitment, Challenge, and Control explained with real-world examples. 

AI and the future of EQ - why human emotional skills will be the differentiator in an automated world.

Timestamps

03:37 — Common EQ challenges: over and under-emotion 

05:12 — Managing anger effectively 

07:46 — Working with Navy SEALs and elite military groups 

13:14 — Instinct vs. emotional intelligence in fast decisions 

16:24 — Practical EQ strategies for busy professionals 

20:00 — Managing back-to-back meetings and mental load

22:11 — The power of daily small wins and positive emotions 

25:30 — Hardiness: the three C's framework 

40:34 — Steven's next book: life lessons from reality TV 

43:44 — Final advice: find your purpose and use EQ to get there

🔗 Connect With Steven Stein

Website: 

LinkedIn: 

Instagram: 

Facebook: 

YouTube:

⭐️ Connect And Subscribe

Thank you for joining us on The Business of Thinking podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe and leave a rating! It helps us bring more insightful content on the psychology of high performance. Find more about Richard Reid's work at www.richard-reid.com.

Download the first two chapters of Richard's "Charisma Unlocked", audio or PDF version for free and begin your transformation towards authentic charisma:

https://richard-reid.com/master-authentic-charisma/

Production Credit: Edited and produced by @the32collective_ / https://www.the32collective.co/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Business of Thinking podcast. This is the place for high achievers who want more than motivation. They want mastering. Here we skip the surface level talk and go straight into the psychology of high performance.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hello and welcome to the business of thinking. My name is Richard Reed, and today I have the great pleasure of being joined by Stephen Stein. Stephen is a clinical psychologist. He's also an author and an expert on emotional intelligence. Stephen, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Great to be with you, Richard.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

So before we drill into a few things in a bit more detail, do you want to give us a brief overview of your work? And I can see one of your books in the background there, Emotional Intelligence for Dummies.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Yes, that's one of them. Yeah, so my background, I'm a clinical psychologist by profession or training. And I started a company a short while ago, 43 years ago, called MHS, which is involved in the research and publishing of psychological assessments. And one of the areas I've been working a lot in, at least for the last 25 years, is emotional intelligence and the area of hardiness, which is a form of resilience that fits along with emotional intelligence.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Okay. And you've worked with quite a few um significant organizations, haven't you? A lot in the military space and the government space. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that as far as you can?

SPEAKER_02 1:33

Sure. I've done a lot of work in uh with military intelligence agencies. We've worked with the FBI uh in terms of military, mainly uh US, US Air Force, US Navy, work with Navy SEALs, uh, Green Berets use some of our materials. Um a lot of that, some of the Canadian military, uh, and a few other militaries around the world in terms of again, a lot in the area of leadership and developing uh leaders within the organizations, government agencies again, all over uh internationally, different countries as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Fantastic. And that term emotional intelligence, it's it's a term that's used a lot, and and perhaps from your perspective, it's not always used in an accurate way to reflect what it is. What what do you mean when you talk about emotional intelligence?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

So the definition's been uh changing a lot since we started using it 25 years ago. So there's several different ones, but they all have at least three things in common. The first is uh the ability to be aware of emotions, whether it's your own emotions or other people around you. Uh the second important thing is the ability to manage emotions, whether you're managing your own or trying to sort of manage other people. You know, someone is maybe angry around you and you're trying to calm them down, the ability to sort of manage those emotions. And thirdly, the the ability to use emotions. Uh we we've worked a lot with professional athletes, for example, and and performers, and the ability to muster up the emotions you need to perform in a certain situation. There's an emotional component uh that we find is really important. So those those three aspects are probably uh included in all the different definitions of emotional intelligence. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

And what what are some of the obvious challenges that that get in the way of people being more emotionally intelligent? I immediately think of sort of a lot of our audience are going to be from a business context. And I'm guessing just the general pace of life often gets in the way of that as much as anything else.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

Yeah, that the pace of life, uh stress. I mean, generally people are are either over-emotional or underemotional. So you can be over-emotional when things just get to you too easily. You just lash out at people, your anger, uh, your impulse control is just not in control. So that's one thing that we find with people. And the other is under-emotion. Uh, when you uh don't use the right amount of emotion to sort of guide your thoughts, guide your thinking, help you make decisions. Uh, if you ignore your emotions, we find that people sometimes get into trouble for doing that as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

And and how we use our emotions, I'm assuming a lot of that is based upon sort of socialization as as we're growing up.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

A lot of it is socialized, but the great thing about emotional intelligence is that there's a training component. We can actually help people do better in terms of using their emotions. So whether you want to motivate yourself to get a project done or or uh present in front of a group of people, uh, you can learn how to better uh use your emotions in those particular situations. So some people are better at it naturally. They grow up uh interacting with a lot of people, learning what works, what doesn't work, and they they maximize that learning. Uh of course, we know some people that just never learn. They just yell at everybody no matter what's going on, right? And and they just wonder why aren't I getting things done or why don't my people follow what I want to do? Well, you know, you you you don't do a good job of managing them, basically.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Yeah, yeah. I i in the work that I do as a coach and therapist, I often find that the one that people struggle with the most is anger. And I and I think some of it is, you know, broad sort of cultural views of anger, but a lot of people tend to see anger as being a particularly bad thing. And what that often means is that behaviors come out indirectly or they come out in big explosions because they're not addressed on a on a little and often basis. Is that is that something you find?

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Absolutely. Uh anger is is we could do a whole day on anger. Uh anger is something that uh it really it really helps us get ahead if we learn how to sort of manage that anger. There's nothing wrong with being upset about someone or something that's gone on in your life. The question is, how do you manage all that emotion? And uh like you mentioned, some people just can't manage it well, they just lash out, and that causes even more problems. And other people have techniques in terms of managing. I may be really angry at something you said, but I can sort of take a quick time out, calm myself down, and then deal with what it is that upset me in the first place. So um we all get angry at times. It's a human emotion. We can't help doing that. But some of us are much better at managing that anger, at using it in a constructive way. Anger is usually, like most emotions, is a signal, right? It's a signal that something that you've done or said, I don't like. Uh so rather than just reacting to what you've done, I want to sort of calm down and strategize. Well, how can I change that? Or use what tactics can I use to sort of shift in a different direction? So uh so anger is kind of good and bad. Uh on the one hand, it alerts us to a situation that we want to change. But on the other hand, if we don't manage it well, it gets us into a lot of trouble.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

And you mentioned a moment ago that word reacting. I guess that plays a big part, isn't it? If you're self-aware, you're more likely to notice the buildup of these things and and effectively put a pause in place that allows you to think about what you want to do with that anger or whatever emotion it might be.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Absolutely. And as and as a good coach, I'm sure that's the kind of thing you do, right? You you alert people to start uh identifying those emotions before they get out of control. So if I feel myself sort of getting to the boiling point because of something you're doing, I learn to sort of stop my thoughts or change my thoughts or reinterpret what you're saying, or take a time out, count to 10, and then come back to it uh when I can be more calm in terms of dealing with what it is I don't like.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

And I'm intrigued by some of the the organizations that you you you mentioned earlier. I don't know how much you you're you're allowed to sort of share on a podcast without having to kill us, but people like the Navy SEALs, we always have a romantic view of the Navy SEAL, you know, always sort of alerts people when they when they hear the Navy SEALs mentioned. What kind of things do you do with with with people like that?

SPEAKER_02 8:07

Uh with them, the work was around emotional intelligence and it was really, again, about uh being more in tune, understanding your emotions, how they affect your performance, whether it's military or even uh dealing with your peers. You know, uh it's a very strong peer culture. Uh, you know, in order to be in one of those teams, uh, you're really dedicated to that team and to the people that you work with. It's a tight squad. I mean, your life depends on the people that you're with. And um and a lot of it is what you know, what makes a good leader. It's amazing. Uh I've discovered how progressive some of these military groups are. Uh, a lot of people just think of them as kind of uh, you know, old, like not with it in terms of modern uh management techniques and so on. We just think of the hierarchy, the old uh, you know, authoritarian types of rule. But that's not what I found at all. These people are extremely bright, well read. Uh to be a Navy SEAL, you have to go through a lot, both uh in terms of intelligence and in terms of physical strength. And some of them had just varied backgrounds. Some of them were into like art history or uh English literature. I mean, some of the backgrounds blew me away because you you see these guys and you just don't expect that they have this background knowing Shakespeare or some weird thing. Uh, but again, they're extremely bright, they can read quickly and assimilate information, uh see a situation and size it up really quickly and know how to react, what to do with it. Uh, and the interpersonal part is is extremely important as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

And I guess as much as anything, they're living on top of each other for for extended periods of time. And I guess that in itself, forget about sort of uh war zones or whatever else, that puts pressure on relationships, doesn't it? So being able to be emotionally intentional.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Yeah, it's it can be tight living quarters, whether they're uh out on a mission or not. Um but uh it I find them as an amazing group uh of people.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Yeah, yeah. And and it's it sounds like they're pretty receptive to to these things. Um you know, you kind of uh I guess a lot of sort of military organizations, you often sort of think about the macho element, but not necessarily the touchy feel, feely part, so to speak. It sounds like that's not not been your experience.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

Uh no, I found a lot of really I found them very willing to more than some business executives, actually. Uh, you know, I've worked uh I've spent time uh working on aircraft carrier with, you know, we have like 3,000 uh Navy people on an aircraft carrier and dealt with quite a number of different levels of uh of sailors um and pilots in those areas. And I've found them in many, many ages more eager to learn. You know, they're in a learning environment. If you're in a high performance military unit, it's all about learning. Every day is learning and rehearsal and practice on the aircraft carrier. Every day was routines and learning and practicing and uh, you know, and correcting mistakes and you know, just getting better and better. So the openness was pretty amazing. And in some of the work uh that we've done in terms of training in organizations using simulations, uh, a lot of what we've learned in those kinds of military situations, and the other area I work a lot, which we didn't get to yet, is reality TV. The element of surprise and going through uh pressure situations and how to manage those uh is something that we've done in organizational training, and it really uh makes a difference in terms of people's ability to cope uh with difficult situations. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

And and hearing you talk about the Navy and the Navy SEALs and organizations like that, it sounds like it makes a big difference when people put their egos to one side and are actually open to learning new things. And I guess you know, a lot of a lot of environments you don't get that. People like to be the smartest person or the person is right.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Yeah, and again, the situations I've been in, uh I've been in situations where I didn't know who the leader was. I mean, that's how it was because they all uniform. Yeah, in a good way. In a good way. I mean, they they do command respect or whatever and can give orders, but in an in a learning situation, uh you may not even know who the leader is. Uh everyone contributes equally, no one's afraid. Like we talk about psychological safety in the organizational world. Well, uh, some of that is built into some of the situations we've seen there where they're already have established that level of psychological safety where they can say what they want. And again, you're dealing with life and death situations where they may be encountering those situations. So uh the openness, the willingness to learn, to try new things. Uh I I really found it rewarding to work with these people. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

I've I've worked a little bit with sort of firearms police, um, and and then sort of the other end of the scale, uh, traders. And and and and often there's this tension that they these groups say, well, I want to be more emotionally intelligent, I want to be more effective in terms of how I use my emotions. But there's also an element of what I do which is based on instinct, and and it is about making quick decisions. How how how do you differentiate between those? What are the sort of skills that can help you to make those sort of decisions in that in a moment?

SPEAKER_02 13:38

So, instinct, you know, to me it's basically uh an accumulation of all your sort of life experience. When you have a quick emotion about something, it usually reflects a lot of learning squished into milliseconds or seconds. Um, so I think it's important to pay attention to those gut feelings that we have and help us. If you have the luxury of uh more time, obviously you're much better off uh exploring cognitively, like thinking what's what's the benefit of this versus that, and sort of going through that process. But uh, but always pay attention to your gut because your gut feel is telling you something, and it's usually for a reason. And especially if you're a person who has a history of good decisions. When I work with someone who's made a lot of good decisions, we know that their gut is kind of in the right direction. You do sometimes get people who've made bad decisions, a lot of bad decisions, which means you know, their gut is telling them the wrong thing. And it's a matter of seeing how their life experience or accumulated experience feeds into their brain, feeds into their thinking process. And what are they taking away from it? And maybe they're reading the wrong things from their gut. You know, sometimes you get uh you want to go one way, but you say, Oh, no, no, because that's the first thing I thought of, I'm gonna do the opposite, right? And you just blow it. Yeah, it's like we used to take multiple choice exams, and some people used to say, Oh, I just the first thing off that I see, I'm gonna check. And other people say, Well, the first thing off, whatever it is, I'm not gonna check. I'm gonna take the next thing because it was too impulsive. So it's how we manage those impulsive thoughts or those uh intuitive thoughts that we have.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yeah, and and and as you seem to be saying that, it's also specific to the individual. Yeah, have they got a track history of good decisions or not?

SPEAKER_02 15:24

Yeah, I like to see, you know, what their history has been, what are some of the major decisions they've made in their lives? What are some minor? We'll go over last week. What have you decided on? What decisions were you happy with? And are you a person who has a lot of uh, you know, second thoughts after you've decided you bought your car? Are you happy with it? No, I made a mistake. I, you know, I wanted that red convertible, but now it's impractical. It was the wrong, you know, it's eats too much gas. So it's, you know, what is your life experience like in terms of making these decisions? And there's some great research on emotional intelligence with traders that you mentioned, showing that uh having good emotional intelligence makes better decisions. You don't get uh you don't make them too quick, you don't get overly excited or anxious and and sell too quickly, and you don't wait too long, you don't get too cautious or tentative that by the time you make your decision it's too late, you've already lost the market. So uh really learning how to make that balance is an important skill.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

And you and you mentioned very early on in this conversation about channeling your emotions, recognizing them and then deciding what you what you do with them. A lot of our audience for for this podcast are from a business background, and one of the challenges that they often talk about is how you know it's the sheer volume of work that actually they know they could be more effective in terms of how they use their emotions, they know they could be more efficient. Um but often it it gets caught up in the the general pace and volume of of work. I guess it might be um useful for them to get some ideas from you on practical things they can do, things that are readily applicable, things that aren't going to take up too much, too much time or too much practice, other things like that that you could share with us.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Absolutely. Well, you know, volume, too much volume, overload, I mean that can lead to burnout. So uh there are things you can do to sort of navigate that. And one involves obviously setting priorities. There are obviously certain things that are much more important than other things. And the other problem tends to be with interruptions, whether it's email or phone calls or, you know, other things getting in the way. So one of the things I find important is to have those uh priorities set in advance. You know, you know what things you really have to get done. And it's not always just work things, it could be your personal life, exercise, uh, spending time with family. So sometimes we get people to sort of chart out those things. What are your life values? What are the most important things for you in your life? And then, you know, we've dealt with your home life, with your social life, uh, family. And then we get into work life. And then within your work life, what are the things that you really, really have to do? What are the things you can delegate? How do you get, you know, more bang for the buck in terms of focusing on those things that are going to mean the most to your career, to your organization, to you personally? Uh, and I think that's an exercise that we could all go through in terms of that priorization. Uh, you know, I have a lot of things on my plate, but uh I schedule them, right? And I try and give them the amount of time they need in terms of their significance. Some things have a timestamp on them, so you have to keep that in mind. And other things are like long-term goals, like just in terms of advancing your career. Uh, it may be learning more about a certain subject matter. And that can take time. That could take, you know, a week, uh a couple hours every week where you add to that. So it's really a plan of planning, managing, uh, and all through the uh through the spectrum of priorities, what's most important for you at this point in time where you're at in your career.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And I guess some of that as you recognize what's important to you, it's about putting the barangers around that to safeguard that, isn't it? Because so often we get drawn to this shiny thing.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Yeah, I mean, there are things that are gonna lose, right? I mean, there are things you're gonna have to sort of put aside or not deal with right now. And uh you have to deal with uh if you report to certain people in your organization, you have to discuss that and say, look, you want me to do a really good job on this? This is gonna bring us, you know, a lot of new clients. Let me focus on this for now, and I'll do the other thing in due time, you know, after whatever period of time you you work out. But you have to be able to, you know, really focus on the things that are most important, do a good job on those, and then move on to the next set of things.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

And and I guess the way in which we often conduct work today more than ever undermines our ability to be emotionally intelligent. If you think about how we are, we're often going from back-to-back meetings, aren't we, online, that lend themselves to being quite quick and quite transactional with very brief uh interludes or transitions in between. Any any pointer for people on how they can better manage those?

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Yeah, it's it's not a great thing. So uh one of the things I've been doing when you have a lot of those meetings, I've been using AI actually to sort of summarize those meetings for me. I have on my phone uh an app that will uh not, well, it does record the meeting, but it really summarizes it. We let the person know, hey, we're gonna summarize this. So I have that. So two hours or five hours from now, when I get back to what happened in that meeting, it brings me back. I got a good summary of it, I know what I'm dealing with and can move forward. But the other part of all that is building in rest time, building in time every day just to think. Uh, in the morning, uh, I like to sort of think through my day, what's coming up, what do I have to prepare for? And at the end of the day, uh, I like to think of what I have done today? I I feel that every day I have to have at least some accomplishment. And I don't even care if it's just a small thing. I clean my desk, you know. I want something I can feel good about. That's where the emotional intelligence also comes in. I want a positive emotion about my workday. If I come up at the end of the day and I said, damn it, I've done nothing today. What a waste. Uh, that can lead on into the evening, into your home life, and you just don't feel great. And I think it's really important uh by the end of the day that you have something that you can look back on and say, Wow, you know, I had a great conversation with Richard today. We did a great podcast, or uh, I'm writing a book and I've written a whole chapter, or whatever. I had a great meeting with my supervisor. And uh, you know, as a result of that, you know, I'm gonna get. More responsibilities or less responsibilities or whatever. So to me, it's really important to work your way through the day, have something that you can look back on that's a positive experience.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Yeah, totally agree. It's something I I do myself. And even on a day when uh there's not a lot that's obviously moved in terms of the dial, just even small, small things, or even if it's been a terrible day, learnings, learnings from the day. What can I learn in some ways moving me forward, even if it's not moving tasks and projects forward? Um, but it's almost like putting energy back into the tank, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And and it's interesting, there's been some really good research on this. Um, I think it's Teresa Amabiel at uh, I think she's at Harvard. Uh, they did these studies where people recorded every single day what they were doing, and then they tied that to certain uh certain uh experience, success, and failure experiences. And it was amazing the people who had these little, it's not like you throw a big party for all your staff and everyone it gets rewarded. That wasn't what motivated people or what got things done. It was more about every day's little things. People who reported positive emotions uh more frequently were usually better performers, we're usually more likely to get promoted, we're usually making more sales, like on all these different variables, that ability to feel good during the course of a day for small things was much more important than these big party type uh things or uh uh you know other ways that organizations spend a lot of money to try and get people motivated.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Yeah, I can believe that. And and I and I guess it's about making these almost sort of uh routine, isn't it? Because most of us are good at doing this now and again, particularly when it's a really obvious thing to celebrate, but we don't necessarily do it on a consistent basis and make that a natural part of how we think.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

Yes, and that's where we take our own responsibility, right? Each each of us is responsible for ourselves, right? We can't expect the organization to do that for us. There are things we do have expectations from the organization for, but uh, in terms of positive emotions, it's gonna be really our responsibility to find some way in the course of this day that I'm gonna feel good about something that happened to me today in my office or wherever I am. And uh and that should be one of your life missions, right? To find something good each day that you can celebrate that you've accomplished.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

So, so true. I definitely agree with that. And is it is it a case of just uh cognitively recognizing those things, or or do we need to also sort of experience the feelings that go with that to get the the full benefit?

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Well, it's both. Firstly, cognitively, you know, I I would I think back in my day, again, I say, well, what did I do today? Well, I started this, I did a workout, I spoke to Richard, uh, I did this project, I met with some of my staff, uh, you know, whatever. And as I'm going through that list, some of them make me excited. Some of them say, Oh, that was really good. That was a great experience. You know, I had a really good conversation with Richard, and and uh I feel good about that. So I feel I accomplished something. And not only did Richard and I have a good conversation, but other people are going to experience that, and and that may help some people along the way. So, you know, I build on that experience when I process it later on in the day, and uh and that just charges me up for the next day or the next time I have one of these experiences.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Yes, makes sense, makes sense. You mentioned something else at the start. So we we we obviously um spoke at the start about emotional intelligence, but you mentioned another word, hardiness.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

So intends a little bit of a lot of time.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

Yeah, so one of the areas I've been working on. Yeah, and and again, that comes out out of a lot of the military work. Uh my myself, my colleague, Paul Bartone, who's uh another psychologist who was actually the the senior psychologist and the U.S. Army and uh had spent quite a bit of time at West Point uh in research and training, and and has developed this concept of hardiness, which is three factors, three things that we found really differentiated people who succeeded. And we started with military life, but we moved on into organizations as well. And the three uh factors, and this is based over 25 years of research, the three factors, uh the first one is uh we call them the three C's. The first one is commitment, and that is really having a purpose or having something that you're uh you're really committed to in terms of the big picture, that you have a goal, the future, and so on. Um, the second area is challenge. So when things go wrong, when you have a tough time or things are are are you know uh problematic, we we step back and we look at it as a challenge. We think of it as a puzzle to be solved. And people who sort of can do that, who can step back and say, okay, uh this person's bothering me or I have this bad situation, let me just step back and see some possible ways I can handle that and treat it as a game or challenge to get through that. And the third one is control. And control means knowing exactly which things you can manage versus which things are beyond your ability to manage. You know, the organization makes some decision that may be on my ability to change or manage. However, I can manage how I react to that decision. Uh, whether I want to go along with it, whether I want to deal with it in a certain way or a different way, that's within my control. So the ability to uh to focus on those areas of control is really important. So we've looked at everything from people who successfully make it through West Point and become great leaders to people in organizations who are able to get through crises or difficult situations. And uh and these three factors that we call hardiness uh really differentiate those who deal with uh difficult situations well versus those who struggle or don't do as well with those situations. And in the book, which I don't know if you see it here, I guess you don't, I don't know if you see it behind me or not, but we wrote the book, Hardiness, that really not only goes into defining these and showing the research behind it, but also tells you what you can do. How do you build each of these areas? How do you build commitment? How do you build control and how do you build challenge? And there are concrete specific things that people can do to enhance those abilities.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Fascinating. Can you give us a few examples of the kind of things that people listening at home might be able to do in those areas to develop them?

SPEAKER_02 28:42

Sure. Well, in terms of commitment, you know, as I mentioned, that's around purpose. And uh and that helps with the decision making that we're talking about before. When we think about uh purpose, we think about what's important for me? What is sort of the big picture? You know, for some people, I don't know, they want to make a million dollars. We work with a professional tennis player uh as coach, and and she, her goal was to win the US Open, right? That was her picture from when she was 13, which she eventually did. Um, but her ability to visualize that and picture and work towards that was really an important step in terms of her getting there. So if we find out what our sort of our big hairy goal is and then break that into smaller goals beneath that, uh uh, we can build our commitment. It may be to have a certain type of career. You know, I want to be the CEO of a technology company or I want to do X, whatever it is. I think it's important for people to, with their coach or on their own, to really come up with what is it, you know, where do they want to be 10 years down the road? Where do they want to be five years down the road? And then the the question is, what do we have to do to get there? And and that leads into things like challenge and control, because challenge is what are the obstacles? What are the things that are preventing me from getting there? And how can I get around that and deal with that? And and then again, control. So I can manage this. You know, I if this isn't the right job for me to get to that ultimate goal, then it's within my power to redo my resume, to, you know, get more educated in the direction I want to be, to apply for a different position, to pick a company I want to work, whatever, you know. So you can see how it works. And and it's really important to have those three things in check and focus on those three things uh in a way that's gonna get you to where you want to be.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

And I I find with my clients and in my own world as well, that commitment allows everything else to align to that. Things naturally start to fall into place. And and those obstacles, they they you you often overlook those or don't place as much significance on them because you're always on the on the prize of what you want to achieve.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Yeah, I may have a job in an organization or industry, but my Bob's a bit of a jerk. My boss is a jerk, right? So uh I gotta deal with that. I really want to make it in this organization, you know. I'm in aerospace, I'm in something that I love that, but I got to deal with this jerk, you know, in the meantime. So the question is, how do I get beyond that? What are the techniques or tactics I can use so that I can eventually either move to a different department, a different boss, or whatever, and still get my ultimate goal. But if I spend all my time just focusing on what a jerk my boss is, uh I might lose out on a lot, right? I'll end up just quitting and not getting another good job or uh just being angry every day when I go to work.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Yeah, yeah. So some of some of it's about, I guess, being more efficient with your your energy and your emotions, isn't it? As you say, you know, if you're totally focused on your boss and everything's geared towards hatred for your boss, there's very little left over for the for the bigger price.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

Exactly. And you're not gonna be a happy person and you're not gonna be uh as successful in terms of getting your goals, the things that you want. So yeah, it's always a big step. What is my big goal? Where do I want to be? What am what am I looking for? And and sort of finding that purpose in your life.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

And I and I guess it's something that a lot of people struggle with, and and sometimes people have a purpose at one period of their life and and less so at other periods. Any advice for people if they're struggling to find their purpose?

SPEAKER_02 32:19

And it could change. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, when you're younger, the purpose may be uh to make a certain amount of money or to drive a certain car or to whatever. And then maybe you achieve that goal and you want to go to another one. I like kind of general goals because they they last longer. I mean, my goal, even from early days, I was always passionate about taking psychology research and making it available, you know, making it available to the public. So that's a very general goal. And that's guided me over the last 50 years in terms of the work that I've been doing. I've you know, I've written, I think it's six books, and and we've done a lot of work in terms of uh the assessments we developed going out into the public, whereas, you know, we've been able to affect millions of people's lives through these assessments or through the technology of emotional intelligence. Um, and so that's a it's a broad goal, but I don't just work in the organizational field, we work in the clinical field and we work in uh public safety. So I've been able to take that general goal and apply it to all these different areas. But and it goes beyond that because in our organization at MHS, we have over 200 people working here. And uh and that goal goes to everybody who works in our organization. Somehow they want to take the technology or the research that we have and and do good in the world, essentially. When you work at MHS, that's part of your mission, everybody's mission, uh, whether, and again, we have different divisions, but uh, if you're in the organizational division, it's to use emotional intelligence to improve people's lives, make them better leaders, to make them better individual contributors. In our public safety, it's it's to make the world a safer place. It's to, you know, that we evaluate, we do risk assessment. So to know uh which people are are at serious risk of causing harm and which ones aren't, and make sure the ones that are dangerous are not out in the streets and so on and so forth. So whatever we do, it's in its goal is to contribute to society in one way or another and make the world a better place. So it's a very broad goal, but you don't need such a broad goal. Uh, I've been lucky that I've been able to sort of live out my goal and and we're very successful at being able to apply it. But you could have smaller goals. It could be um, you know, a certain position you want at work, certain job spec. Uh, it could be uh family goals, it could be uh spiritual goals. You know, I've had people who really want to uh maximize their spirituality in terms of uh how they feel about themselves and the things they do uh to be more spiritual. And it's you know, it is a path, there's things that they can do uh to improve that. But you know, having that goal working towards something, uh, I find really makes a difference in one's life in terms of whether life is pleasant in spite of the setbacks or whether the setbacks are more important than life.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

So true. And obviously the two main things we talked about today emotional intelligence, hardiness. Do you get a sense um as a society? Are we become more more emotionally intelligent, more, more hardy, or or or less so, or is it too difficult to say?

SPEAKER_02 35:34

Well, things, things, the world isn't great right now, let's put it that way. We're very polarized, uh, whether it's in America, uh I'm here in Canada, you're in Great Britain. We see a lot of polarization. Uh, a lot of it stems from the politics of the places that we're in. Um so I think we we've been hurting a bit, you know, and then we had COVID, which didn't help us at all in terms of emotional intelligence. And and we've been following because we've been assessing, you know, thousands and thousands of people throughout the last 40 years. So we can see some of those rises and dips in how it affects us in very specific ways. Um, like people have become uh less uh less self-aware, emotionally self-aware over these periods of time. Uh they get when you get more argumentative or angry about someone else's point of view, you don't think about the triggers that you have inside of you and what what how that affects it. So unfortunately, the bad news and good news. The bad news is people are becoming less emotionally intelligent, less hardy, less able to deal with these challenges. But I guess the good news is if you're a coach, it gives you a lot more work to do, right? You're life easier out there.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

That's true. Um so so what's prompting us to become less of these things? Is it is it purely external factors or or is it you know, is it technology? Is it just general upbringing? What's contributing to this downturn in these in these areas?

SPEAKER_02 37:03

Yeah, I think it's a combination. Uh, and technology plays a role too. Uh, there's a lot of Jonathan Haidt and his group have done a lot of research on uh on smartphones and and the effect they've had on kids and the fact that kids have uh sort of lost their ability to relate socially in the ways that they did before. Uh COVID had a big effect. Uh we did some research uh throughout COVID testing kids uh anxiety and depression, and we found how the air how those went up uh significantly. Uh, and we started reporting on that early on in the early isolation days. We were saying there's gonna be long-term effects to this. Uh no one paid a lot of attention to that, but we can see that now where uh where kids are really aren't interacting the way they used to, and they're not learning the way they used to. Uh so uh technology contributes, the pandemic contributes to the uh the problems that we have, and uh uh people aren't doing the things that we did as kids. When I was growing up, you know, we'd be on the streets playing hockey, and you get into fights and you learn how to navigate those fights, and then you make up and you know, you learn how to negotiate your way through life. And we do much less of that now. Uh, kids aren't out there as much doing these things. Uh, and the whole uh the whole way of thinking about it has changed, not always in a good way, uh, in terms of parachuting, parachute parents and and over controlling some of the kids and not letting them experience some of these early things that helps shape them as they grow up over time.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

Yeah, yeah, definitely agree with that. And do you think the pendulum will will shift on that? Do you think uh there'll be a bit of a reset at some point? Or is it are we just a shame of things to come?

SPEAKER_02 38:47

I I I can't say, you know, we're doing a lot of work in the area of AI as well. And and you know what happens, like just like when you started using um calculators, right? Uh your math skills were kind of falling because uh I don't need to learn multiplication tables, I can just do it on this calculator. Now we're finding with AI, there's a lot of uh higher level skills, complex skills that, well, I don't have to do it. You know, I'm giving a paper this afternoon. Why don't I just ask co-pilot or Chad GPT about this? And Chad GPT writes the paper for me. So we're losing some of that critical thinking, some of the creativity. And I think that's gonna happen over time, that we're gonna be much more dependent and reliable. I see this as a major revolution, the the internet, like as you know, the internet was a major uh pivot in our in our world. I think AI is a major pivot in our world. It's gonna change everything because we're gonna become so reliant on it for so many different things that we do. And that's again why I think emotional intelligence is gonna be even more important. And it's gonna be up to people like us, I guess, to really get that message across. Because uh AI is not gonna be the leader in an organization. It's not gonna be the team builder, it's not gonna be the originator of where your organization should go, what's the best path for you? You need somebody with these emotional intelligence skills to be able to pull all that together, uh, know where everybody in the organization is at, what they're feeling, where the or where the customer is, what they're feeling, where they're going, and fill that gap. So there's always going to be a role for for the individual in there, but there are gonna be a lot of people who get sucked into the AI doing everything for them.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

Yeah. Yeah, something to watch out for for sure. Stephen, so you've written six books you mentioned. What's what's next on your agenda? What are you what are you working on at the moment?

SPEAKER_02 40:41

Well, right now we're doing some work on, as I mentioned, I worked a lot in the area of reality television, reality TV, things like uh Big Brother Canada, the Amazing Race Canada, all these different shows. And uh I've been talking to some colleagues and thinking about it. And when we talk about some of the things that uh we've learned from these shows, uh it's come up, people say, wow, you know, that's an important life lesson. I mean, you should write a book about that. So that's what I'm thinking about right now. Things like authenticity. You know, the great thing about reality TV is uh, you know, we we assess all these people, hundreds of people have assessed for these shows. They go on and they compete. And a competition may be like 10 weeks or four weeks, depending on the show. But we have a winner, right, within that period of time. In the real world, in the workplace, you assess people, you hire them. You may not know for six months or a year if they're any good, right? It takes you a while to really figure out are they wasting time, are they productive, blah, you know, whatever. Reality TV, we see that in a you know, really quick. So we've been able to pick up on well, why do these people succeed, or these people get hated, or these people get thrown out? And uh, so so part of that is authenticity, part of that is social skills. Um so we've identified a number of these factors that it's you know, we've dealt with everything from these social experiments like Big Brother to these cooking shows to talent shows, um, and notice a set of skills that are important in each of these situations. So I'm thinking about pulling that all together as life lessons from reality TV and seeing uh how we can apply those to real life.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

That's that sounds brilliant. I look forward to to reading that when you when you write that book. And I'm guessing some of it will overlap with the work you've done on emotional intelligence by the sound of things as much as anything else.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

Absolutely. Emotional intelligence seems to bubble up all the time in these things. And uh, unlike you know other sources, I mean, we've got the data, right? I've tested these people and put them on shows and watched hundreds of them, you know, fail or fall apart or do really well, succeed and win the prize. So um, so it's great to actually have real data, whether it's emotional intelligence or hardiness, even IQ, you know, how important is that in your success in these things? And you know, and how would that apply to real life? So um it's it's just a fun way of taking some of these experiences, these crazy experiences, and seeing what can we take away from those experiences? Like, what is it about putting someone in a pressure cooker, like scaring the heck out of them, right? And then they come out of that and and how do they feel about it? Um, you know, another part is what kind of person wants to be on reality TV? Yeah, that's another question we have to deal with.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

No, I love the concept, it sounds fascinating. We're just coming towards the end of uh our podcast today. Any any final thoughts that you want to leave with the audience uh around anything we've discussed today?

SPEAKER_02 43:44

Well, I think you know what's important is for people to to grow and to learn and to continue to uh to expand, you know, in terms of uh the things that they're interested in. So, number one, find your purpose. What what gets you really excited? What you know turns you on in terms of Where you want to be. And what can you do to learn more about it? To sort of get more information or data or read. Um, and and then find out how emotional intelligence can help you get there is you know part of the part of the way of greasing the wheel to get you further ahead in terms of where you want to get.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Brilliant. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting today, Steve. Love to have you back on at some point. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

Great. Thanks so much. Uh it's great to be with you, Richard. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

This is the business of thinking. Mastery doesn't end here. See you in the next episode.