Meet a Best Selling Author

What happens when a natural hustler swaps a clinical career for a bold gamble on emotional intelligence and wins? 

We sat down with bestselling author Travis Bradberry, Ph.D., who went from mowing lawns and running a middle-school gum hustle to building, scaling, and selling a training company rooted in EQ assessments, licensing, and repeatable programs. 

He shares the parts we rarely hear: maxed-out credit cards with crushing interest, family loans, living with in-laws, and the unshakable belief that a “hopeless entrepreneur” has no way but forward. 

From there, the conversation expands into a practical, story-filled guide to leadership and culture, touching on the most common executive blind spot, social awareness, and how leaders unintentionally set a toxic emotional tone. 

He explains why culture never changes by decree, only by design, through thoughtful training, live and AI-supported coaching, and daily habits that rewire behavior. We hear how EQ scores once tanked at the top and why targeted reinforcement is now leveling the curve, plus what real self-awareness demands. 

If you’ve ever wondered how “soft skills” become serious business, this is the playbook: build intellectual property, license what scales, keep the method simple yet deep. 

We peek behind the scenes at author myths, the grind of marketing without a big-studio push, and the guerrilla tactics that actually work. Along the way are sharp takeaways on authentic communication, focus-boosting self-care, and the bittersweet truth that the biggest breakthroughs often follow the toughest frustrations. Enjoy the stories, borrow the playbook, and if it shifts how you lead or create, pass it on.

Want to be interviewed? You can remain anonymous. Voice distortion now available. Email or Text us!

Transcript

Welcome And Format

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors. I'm Elsa Barbie. And I'm Don Andrews. We have been friends since sixth grade. Somewhere between a car wash job, a few questionable boy choices, and 40 years of friendship, we became the kind of people who always want to know what's really going on, including at work.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Don spent 25 years as an employment lawyer, digging into workplace drama from the inside out. I built a long career in the beauty industry as a brand educator with a few TV cameos sprinkled in for fun.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

We came up in very different industries, but we have the same passion, meeting new people and asking how they got their jobs, what they love, what they can't stand, and what happens behind closed doors.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Every episode, we talk to a new guest about their lived experience in the world of work. And because our guests stay anonymous, they can spill the truth without the fallout.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

We get into the choices they made, the tiny cruelties, the surprise kindnesses, and some of the moments that never make it into human resources reports.

First Jobs And Early Hustles

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Equal Parts Informative and titillating. This show serves up all the tea while honoring the incredible, complicated, often messy work people are doing across the industries and across the map. Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors. Let's get into it. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we'd like to start at the beginning and tell us about your first job.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Technically, my first job was cutting my neighbor's grass for money. Did that on my own. Also had a gum racket in middle school where we were a friend, his neighbor had this gum called Fresh Lamb. He had a crate of it that he brought a pallet from the Middle East. And so we would buy it wholesale from him and sell it at during class. And it was a hot ticket because you couldn't get it anywhere else. You couldn't get it in the store until the vice principal joined of it. That kind of shut that racket down. But honestly, I think those were my first jobs because they being entrepreneurial is something I've always had a really strong bent towards.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

What about your first W-2 job?

From Retail To Autism Interventions

SPEAKER_02 2:04

First W-2 job was did one shift at Taco Bell, and I was hired at Subway. So I gave them my shirt back and worked at Subway. So that was my first job.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

No two weeks' notice for them.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

You were like, I'm out of here.

Discovering Emotional Intelligence

SPEAKER_02 2:20

One shift of washing dishes at Taco Bell's made Subway look pretty attractive. My my next big job, I got hired at a surf shop that I frequented. The guy that owned it said I made a lot of eye contact and he thought that would make me good at customer service. I worked there for a few years. I really enjoyed it. I made a lot of friends. I really enjoyed it, I studied the business a lot. The small business was really intriguing to me. And I really haven't had that many jobs since. My next one was I was in college. I was part of the honors program at UCSD, and I was invited to do social skills therapy interventions with kids on the autism spectrum, mostly on the autism spectrum. So there's some different conditions that had social deficits. And I really enjoyed that. And I went really far by the time I was in, I started my last year of undergrad. By the time I was halfway through grad school, I was making really good money doing that, doing consulting. And my entry to the workplace professor in grad school convinced me that I had the skills to be a consultant. And she happened to be a consultant and I needed an internship. So I said, why not let me be your intern then? Get my industrial psychology internship out of the way. And I did that. And she and I ended up going to business together, which was basically my last job, which was running, we built a business together called that that was emotional intelligence training, predominantly. I ran that business, designed the training, designed emotional intelligence assessments, and wrote books about emotional intelligence, which is what I continue to do today. We sold that business in 2019, but I still write and I'm still involved as a strategic advisor with another emotional intelligence business called LEDX that's growing really fast and has a great emotional intelligence training program.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

When you started college, did you know what emotional intelligence was?

SPEAKER_02 4:09

I did because Peter Salive. So I started college in 95 or fall in 94. Peter Salivay had just published his the seminal academic study of emotional intelligence a couple of years prior. And one of my professors covered it. Daniel Goldman, who was writing a book, Emotional Awareness and Social Skills, got wind of that study and that term, and he changed the name of his book to Emotional Intelligence, which he published in 95. That book was huge. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. He was on Oprah twice. He sold millions of books. And I read that book and I was intrigued. And I was only an undergrad for three years. So by the time I graduated in 98 and started grad school, I was doing my own research in emotional intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Was there something else you thought you might be when you grow up other than what you are now?

Choosing Consulting Over Clinical Work

SPEAKER_02 4:57

Yeah. When I was, I remember when I was a teenager, I went to see the doctor, and he was coming back from a break to play tennis. I had to wait for him. I thought, oh, it seems like a pretty good job. That's the old. So maybe we're going to be up time to play to go play sports. I started as a pre-med at UCSD. Organic chemistry taught me that I wasn't fit to be a to go to medical school. But by that time, I was thinking of psychiatry as a specialty in medicine. And I said, I still really like psychology. So how about instead of becoming a psychiatrist, I'll become a psychologist? And that's being a psych major confirmed that for me. I really enjoyed it. I did really well. And so I joined a dual PhD program in clinical and industrial organizational psychology. And that was my graduate study.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Did you ever consider being a clinical psychologist?

Debt, Risk, And Building An EQ Business

Passive Income And Licensing IP

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Yes, because the work I was doing with the kids on the autism spectrum, that by the time I started school, I was already doing that. And I assumed that was going to be my career path. I was working for, you know, supervised by a really successful psychiatrist here in town. And there was a clear path laid out for me. Having it be a dual degree in clinical psychology and industrial psychology was a tough choice which field I was going to practice in. And originally when I was starting my business with my professor on the industrial side, I was still doing the clinical work. She was, we were making, I was making some money consulting. She was making the bulk of it. It was her business. So I was making money on the projects I was involved in, but she was taking equity out of her home to fund our new enterprise. And I didn't have any money to put in. So I would take my earnings from the consulting and from the clinical work, and I would put that into the business. And then I would put all our expenses except for rent on the credit card. And then I just wouldn't pay the credit card. So by the time we launched the business, I had$50,000 in credit card debt with 28%. And because that's I couldn't get money anywhere else. I think I think my aunt gave me a$30,000 loan at 8%. And my business partner's father gave us each an additional$30,000 loan at 0% interest. So I had my student loan debt, I had the credit card debt, I had the 8% loan. Needless to say, I was living with my in-laws at that point for a year while the business got established. But yeah, so I was doing the clinical work and I just wasn't really sure which it was a safety net. I was enjoying it, I was making good money, but the emotional intelligence business took off really quickly and was really successful. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed both. I just went that route. I wanted to build a business and building a business for doing work with autistic kids, social skills intervention. Obviously, you can build businesses. I know people that have done it since people I worked with back then have built really successful enterprises since then. But that's a bit of a tougher business to build than the EQ training business. To me, that was a lot more linear, straightforward. I said, I'm gonna go this route. And I built a much, probably a much bigger business that way than I would have with the autism stuff. A lot more passive income, which is something that I really wanted. We had intellectual property that we were licensing, right? We had an EQ assessment, which is ultimately software. Obviously, software is a very passive thing to sell. Our emotional intelligence training program, once it's built, it's your companies pay to license it and use it. So that was really important to me to have a business where I could generate passive revenue or passive income and not always be working physically for every dollar that I made.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah. But always it sounds like entrepreneurial ventures were your thing.

Author, Advisor, And Life After The Sale

SPEAKER_02 8:29

Yeah. People talk about being hopeless extroverts. They just can't help but be extroverted. I am a hopeless entrepreneur. There was no other path. I'm entering a guy right now who's 23 and he's has this really strong entrepreneurial bet. And I was talking to him about it, and I said, Look, I was just like you. There was no other path. It didn't matter. I realized with my$150,000 of student loan debt and the roughly$110K or so I took on to start the business. I realized either this works or I'm in bad shape and I didn't care. Okay, so it wasn't optional to me, hopeless. It was my that was my path. And it was a no-brainer for me, even though I I really didn't know for sure that it was going to be successful. I knew I would persist and I would push really hard, but people do that with bad ideas or ideas that were too soon or ideas that were too late. It happens for me. There was no other path.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Is there any part of the clinical work that you have with autistic children that or autism that you miss?

SPEAKER_02 9:31

Yeah, I miss it because those kids are really fun. I find people on the spectrum, a lot of them very endearing. Some of the some folks are aggressive, but the kids, especially the kids that aren't aggressive, are just little sweethearts. They're really fun. So yeah, I miss that. It's hard when there's multiple things you enjoy that are really different. Yeah, I couldn't really meld the feels. Emotional intelligence integrates clinical psychology and industrial psychology really nicely. I'm applying clinical concepts in an industrial setting, but it's it's not quite the same, other than the occasional question where I'll have someone who's I have someone who's certified in the LEDX program, the training program, and she says, Oh, we have some employees that are on spectrum. How can I translate this to them? Other than answering her questions about that, it's I don't touch on it a lot.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

Okay. So what would you say is your current quote unquote job or your quote your business that you're in now?

Missing The Grind And Starting Over

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Okay. Because I sold the business, my job is I am an emotional intelligence author. I am also a strategic advisor to Ledex. I'm on their board. I help them design and implement this business. They sell my emotional intelligence tests, they sell a training program that I was involved in the design of. And beyond that, I do some angel investing with different enterprises. That's it. I have it doesn't sound very retired. I'm supposed to be retired, but these are the things I do to keep myself busy and keep myself relevant. I did not like just walking away from the field of emotional intelligence and not putting another thought out there. I really have this new book called The New Emotional Intelligence, which I put out in May. I'm really proud of it. It's doing really well. I like that I'm still offering thoughts to the field and helping people. That book has new emotional intelligence assessment. It's the first one that I've built since 2001.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Would it be this one?

SPEAKER_02 11:24

That's the one right there. I've been an author since 2005. And I probably try to think when I started when I could make a living off my sale book sales, probably a few years in.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Maybe two years in, I could have just done that and earned a living. But I earned a much better living with the training business, the emotional intelligence trading business. So I never really thought of myself as just an author. And all my other than my first two, other than my first three books, the biggest book that I wrote was owned by my business. So I didn't walk around saying I'm an author, I'm really just an entrepreneur. Now obviously I could just live off what I sold the business for, but I do I live off the book sales too. So I guess I'm an author. It sounds cooler to say you're an author, I think.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

That's what I say. That's why I'm like, if somewhere to say, so who did you interview today? I'm like, an author.

Myths Of Authorship And Marketing Reality

SPEAKER_02 12:18

Yeah, I know. When I'm surfing and people ask me what I do, I tell them I'm an author. I don't, yeah, I don't do the long explanation.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Yeah, it's like I don't you don't tell them you're a professional surfer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

They can tell from watching that I'm not a professional surfer.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Is there any part of the journey that you had that led up to the freedom that you have now that you miss?

Guerrilla Tactics And Sales Flywheels

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Miss absolutely. The early days were hard and you don't know if it's gonna work. And it's there's all these milestones I wanted to hit. We're living with my in-laws, I wanted to buy my own place. My business started to succeed. We bought our own place. It was a townhouse. I wanted to buy a place near the beach. Three years later, I bought a house that I could walk to the water in five minutes. Oh, it was a new house, 2300 square feet. I was doing pretty well. I always wanted to wake up and check the surf out my window on my cereal. So by let's see, so four years later, we did that. I was doing really well. And next thing I knew, the house was paid off and I was making a lot of money. And I wasn't working nearly as hard as I was when I was building the business and scratching because it was running itself. We had almost 30 employees. So, other than managing those people, the business was running itself. But once I sold the business to private equity and I got that big check, then I thought I would just sail off into the sunset. And I missed the grind because there was no grind. Because even when I was making really good money and I had a lot of employees that were doing the bulk of the work, so to speak, running the business, I was still running my business. It was still there was a strategic direction that I was setting. We were still living and dying every day. Yeah, businesses fail, right? If they're not run well. That's why I got involved with Ledex. That's why I wrote another book. I just right now, my the new emotional intelligence is competing not just with every other self-help book and every other emotional intelligence book. It's competing with my books, including one that sold millions of copies that I don't own. I don't get anything from that book. So I it's it feels like a grind again. It's I don't I had a newsletter. Granted, I have a big following on LinkedIn. I have two and a half million followers there, but my business took with it a newsletter that had millions of subscribers. I would love to announce my new book to them. So it's a grind again that way. The consequences aren't as high, but it but I love that uphill battle. I did. I missed it a lot. And once I sunk my teeth into it again, I really enjoy it because it's every book I sell is hard earned, and that feels really good. And that's something that I was telling this 23-year-old guy. I said, Look, because I was telling him a story about he runs, he has a small hedge fund, he's a quantitative trader, and he's building software products around that for retail traders. Building a hedge fund is a business, it's a lot of work. And I was telling him about one of the families that I worked with, the Autistic Spectrum Kids. He was a hedge fund guy out in Rancho Santa Fe, and his he had this$150,000 dog house with heated floors.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

I want to be a dog.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

I told this 23-year-old, I said, You're really smart. You remind me of that guy. I have a feeling you're in 20 years you're gonna be like him, and he's oh yeah, and I want my dog to have cooled floors too. And I said, I have a feeling you're gonna get there, but just enjoy the journey because you will look back on this fondly, even though right now you're like you work. I think he got his first payment, you know, the fund he set up last May, he got his first payment nine months later. It's hard work and he's not getting paid. Like you're gonna think of this when you're rolling in it, you're gonna be thinking of this really fondly. Yeah, I think that's I do. I look back on it fondly. I enjoy it. I've got a taste of it right now, and I really like that.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

That's great. Yeah. What's a myth about entrepreneurship or authorship that really annoys you?

SPEAKER_02 15:56

I don't know, feed me a few. I don't want that.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

I think people think that all authors make a ton of money.

Industry Characters And Ego

Leaders’ Social Awareness Blind Spots

SPEAKER_02 16:02

Oh, that's definitely a myth. That's definitely a myth. You know, there's it's amazing. It's amazing for the people that capture lightning in a bottle, right? J.K. Rowling went from a$25,000 advance to an instant bestseller, right? Earning millions and ultimately billions of dollars. But that along the way, she built a lot, right? These franchises with the movie studios and okay, some authors catch lightning in a bottle. Some are more like me. I've sold five million books. It did not happen overnight. It was tooth and nail, building an audience, spending tremendous amounts of dollars on marketing to get a book out there. My first book deal was with Simon and Schuster. Guess who all the marketing dollars went to? They went to Stephen King. They didn't go to me. So I spent my own money flying around the country doing interviews for my book. I spent my own money advertising on Amazon when Amazon started to do advertising because you need books, very few books will do that lightning in a bottle thing and just catch on their own. Books that have value need eyeballs on them to gain that market share. And that's something that I think a lot of people don't realize. There's a gentleman in San Diego by the name of Ken Blanchard, who's been doing this for a very long time, since the 80s. And he told me about 20 years ago, I bumped into him in a trade show and I asked him for a piece of advice. And he said, when your book comes out, don't start writing your next book. He said, Your job is to sell that book, is to promote that book. He had this huge bestseller called the One Minute Manager. He said, when the One Minute Manager came out, Spencer and I, every single day, as co-author, our job was who are we going to put this book in front of every single day? And that's the truth. And maybe it's different with fiction. As a self-improvement author, that's the job is every single day, who are you going to put this book in front of? Because it needs word of mouth. And not a lot of them just get that buzz on their own.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

And how long on an average would you say it even takes you to write a book?

EQ Trends From Middle Managers To CEOs

SPEAKER_02 17:59

Oh, it takes a long time. And the writer's block thing is real and the twist Is it real? And the having to trap yourself and make yourself produce, that's real. Yeah, I don't think it depends how you write, but it's months and months of work, if not years, to produce a book. If I write every day, six, eight hours, ten hours a day, a book is a six-month project. But even then, it's not done, right? It's written, but it has to be edited, and you have to do cover design. And for me, I spend more time marketing a book than I do writing it. My my book came out in May. Here we are in February, and I haven't I haven't written another work. I'm not working on another book. I'm doing what Ken told me to do. I'm right, getting the eyeballs on it. There's a new show. I'm a big Vince Gilligan fan, the guy that created Breaking Bad, and he has a new show called Pluribus, and the main character is an author. And my kid watched the first episode before me, and he said, Dad, she's just the main character is an author, and she's just like you. Because she's this, she's a best-selling author, and she's in the airport, and she is with her partner, who's also her assistant, and she has her go over there and put her book on the top shelf. That's a total author thing. That's the thing that people don't realize. And that's something that I do is oh, I'm moving my book to the top shelf. I've watched other authors do it. It cracks me up. And that's the struggle that people don't realize. They just think they're gonna put a book out and then it's gonna succeed or fail. But I think a lot of authors create their own success by by getting eyeballs on what they produced and letting enough people that like it find it.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

What's the weirdest thing or craziest thing you've done to sell books?

Defining Emotional Intelligence

SPEAKER_02 19:30

Ordered books. So my book that I put out in 2009 that my business owned, right? We had a distribution company and they would warehouse the books and send them to Amazon. But we would also sell some direct to our customers a lot. At one point we had, I don't know, 30,000, 50,000 books in our warehouse, and we'd be pumping through those because we were running all these trainings, and people, when they were running the trainings, they'd get a book of them. I came to realize that Amazon was discounting the books so heavily that they were selling them for about the price they're paying to us for. So instead of ordering them from the warehouse, I would order my books from Amazon in bulk. That would spike my Amazon sales rank. And when you're top 10 on Amazon or number one or number two on Amazon, it creates a lot of visibility, a lot of eyeballs that sells a lot more books. So we were sending all our orders for our warehouse to ourselves to spike our sales rank on Amazon, which would sell more books on Amazon. It was like the flywheel type thing. Little ideas like that go a long way where you can like gorilla marketing. Gorilla marketing.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Very sketchy, but very shady, questionable at times, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

It's funny when I move my book on a shelf, I try not to move any other author's book. I'll just stick it next to it because I don't want to move somebody else down. Or if I do, it's like someone really rich, like Malcolm Gladwell. I'm like, ah, he's not gonna miss this one. Malcolm Gladwell can be bottom shelf in this one store. He's doing just fine. So yes.

Teaching Methods That Actually Stick

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Yeah. What's one lesson that you learned along the way?

Fan Mail, Feedback, And Thick Skin

SPEAKER_02 21:14

I mean, I've learned so many uh lessons. The biggest thing for me personally, and I got this question, I I had someone on LinkedIn write me and ask me what's the biggest advice I could give him as an entrepreneur. And the thing that I saw repeatedly is the biggest breakthroughs happen right after your greatest moments of frustration. Because there were times it's almost comical to look back. I remember I was starting, it was my last year of grad school. So I was doing my dissertation. It was a five my my program was a five year program. So during my fifth year of coursework, I was doing a clinical internship 30 hours a week. I was launching my business officially with my partner. We worked together, but we rebranded as the EQ business and launched it officially the website. And I was like six months into it, and I was so burnt out, just doing too much at once. And I was just like, I don't think maybe I just need to hang it up. I don't think the EQ business is working. I had all that debt. I felt just really frustrated. And it just took off right after that. And I saw that again and again. There's these moments where, man, I don't think this new training program is taking off with a new book. I remember when I sold the my biggest book, the one that did millions of copies, I published it in 2009. And we went from publishing with publishing houses to self-publishing. And it just was doing almost as well as the book that I did with Simon and Schuster right out the gate, but not quite. And it was very frustrating. And then it broke through. So over and over again, it's these moments where you just feel really frustrated and things aren't going how you expect. And you need to see it through.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Is that true in surfing too?

SPEAKER_02 22:55

I think it's true with aging.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

100%. Say more.

Culture Change: Training Over Taglines

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Like for especially with surfing. So I'm 49. I've been surfing my whole life. I probably surf at least like a good 20 hours a week in the water. I spent a lot of time surfing. And I'll tell you my latest breakthrough. This is nothing to do with career or anything, but I'm like gluten allergy kind of person. I've got a lot of inflammation. I have to be careful what I eat. And I just tried a new supplement regimen with my natural path and just like breakthrough, like my energy level on my inflammation, everything's so good. So it's like that, right? What relates to surfing and athleticism and just how I feel, just tinkering and being persistent. Because as you get older, your body doesn't quite work the same way as it used to. Sometimes you gotta put in some work to get there.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Yeah. Do you notice any changes in your cognitive functioning as you get older?

SPEAKER_02 23:45

Really?

unknown 23:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

That's good.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

I'm calmer. I'm um, yeah, I'm more patient. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

So improvements only. We'll take it. Let's ask you what is the craziest, wackiest, wildest, most upsetting, most hilarious thing you've ever seen, any place you've worked.

AI-Powered Personalized EQ Coaching

SPEAKER_02 24:09

For me, in this space that I work in, I've met a lot of very successful self-improvement authors that are selling millions and millions of books and making millions and millions of dollars. And some of these men and women are just really awesome, kind of salt-of-the-art people. They're just very interested and they have a lot of interesting things to say. And some of them are like movie characters, they're so narcissistic and full of themselves. It's just incredible. And I had one in particular that I was talking to that was just making, he was making a point that he said, Travis, we both love sports where we could die at any minute. Thinking about it, I'm like, You mean surfing? Yeah, you could get eaten by a shark. I'm like, oh, and I won't say what his sport was, but he was telling me how he's gonna hop on a plane and go home and do his sport before dark. And I knew where he lived and I knew where he was, and I just did the math, and I'm like, Yeah, he's not, there's no way he's making you're not home before dark. He's not doing his sport, it's not a it's not a nighttime sport. So here this guy was that's just you know, I'm just lucky to be talking to him. He's like so successful and he's making up lies to to pop himself up. I don't know that's that crazy, but it's a little insight into this world. I think some of the people whose books you read who feel like they're awesome, they really are, and you can feel good about that. And some of them are. I hope I'm the awesome ones.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Please tell me that wasn't Adam Grant. I will die.

Self-Awareness As EQ’s Foundation

SPEAKER_02 25:39

No, Adam's cool. I like Adam.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Also, please tell me that guy's sport wasn't pickleball. Yeah, that's what I thought of me pickleball.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

I don't know. It's pickleball, it would have been an obscure sport back then. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Okay. Other question is that person's name in the Epstein files? Oh my gosh, D.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

She's asking that question.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

So you've worked with leaders across industries. What's the most common emotional blind spot that leads to truly bizarre leadership decisions?

Career Arc, Breakthroughs, And Setbacks

SPEAKER_02 26:16

Well a lack of social awareness. That's a big one. Understanding how you're perceived by other people. That's a really tough one for leaders. They don't quite always understand how they come across. And they don't realize how they set as a leader, you set the emotional tone for your group, your organization, depending on how high up you are. And they don't realize that. So they engage in behavior that trickles down into everybody else, that creates a really negative or toxic culture, and they don't realize that they're producing it because of how they're perceived. And that's something that a lot of really capable, high-functioning, even sometimes self-aware leaders engage in. It's where they're lacking social awareness. That's something that that happens a lot. And you are, you're under a microscope, right? When you're high up, if you're not walking your talk, it matters. And people notice and it has an impact. So that's something I see a lot.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Do you think something like that gets lost along the way as someone's working up the ranks into a company?

Red Flags In “I Feel” Talk

SPEAKER_02 27:19

I'll tell you about the data that I discussed in the new emotional intelligence. So what I used to see was that emotional intelligence scores peaked for middle management. And that was because people would get promoted into middle management because they're good with people. Increasingly above middle management, it would just turn into this ski slope, director, VP, senior VP, the C all the way down to the CEO, which would have the lowest EQ scores on average in the workplace. And that's because organizations wouldn't reinforce these skills. So people would lose them. So they would make these hiring decisions based on tenure, based on industry knowledge, based on short-term financial gains at the top. And it's very short-sighted because your emotional intelligence matters. Even amongst those CEOs, the highest performing CEOs were those with the highest levels of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a distinguishing characteristic. So that's something we used to see a lot. Now it's very level. So it increases the middle management, it levels out because organizations are placing increasing emphasis on emotional intelligence, forcing your leadership. Some organizations I'll go into and run the assessment and they'll do the ski slope thing to it. They're not putting in the effort. But it's been a trend change where in most organizations you're seeing more emphasis on that, which is great.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Are you seeing lawyers' EQ skills, EQ scores rise?

SPEAKER_02 28:44

Because they I've told you this before.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Is there an industry where you see across the board whose emotional intelligence is high?

SPEAKER_02 29:08

There's professions where you have a little bit higher EQ. I'm trying to think the last time I ran the numbers. But and then whereas like someone who works in a more introverted profession, like engineers or finance, might be a little lower in those particular skills. But again, it's does your job reinforce the use of these skills? And then it becomes like sink or swim. If you don't have them in that profession, you don't really thrive. But other than that, it's fairly balanced. I there's a lot of individual variation when it comes to emotional intelligence. So it's not like there's pharmaceutical industry as high in EQ or something like that. I know I don't see that.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

What exactly is emotional intelligence?

Public Speaking, Bombs, And Big Stages

SPEAKER_02 30:03

Emotional intelligence, put simply, is how well you understand emotions in yourself and others. You see them, read them, respond to them, and what you do with that knowledge. So for yourself, it's how you self-manage, how you react and respond to your emotions to get productive outcomes. When it comes to other people, it's how well you're reading and responding to their in your own emotional state. You're altering the course of the interaction based on that to get effective outcomes. That is the emotional intelligence skill set.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

So can I also ask what would be the difference between all the other, like you stated, all the other self-help authors that are out there pushing emotional intelligence? Are there differences in emotional intelligence, or is this just one teaching, or does it depend on the author who's writing the book, on what their message is?

SPEAKER_02 30:53

To some degree, everybody's talking about the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Okay.

Global Demand For EQ And Closing

SPEAKER_02 30:57

Slicing the cake a little different, differently, but ultimately it's awareness and management of emotions. I find the biggest thing is the teaching method. And I think that's why I've been successful at it, is a method that anyone can pick up and use to their method. I think that's really important. That was something that I learned early on, again, going to trade shows and having people tell me to my face, look, this just it needs to be straightforward. Not everybody has a PhD in psychology. Make it accessible, leave the depth there for those that want to dig, but make the method accessible so someone can pick this up and get to work instead of reading a dissertation to try to understand what it is and how they can apply it.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

And that really turned into my niche.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Yeah, totally. Let's get it right. Do you get any fan mail?

SPEAKER_02 31:45

I do, I get a lot from the prisons, which is nice. I actually I did a podcast, I did a tube interview for this really popular channel called Soft White Underbelly. And a guy found me on Instagram and said, Hey, I read your book in prison, really liked it, helped me a lot. I just told my story. I'm out, I'm I'm working on building a business and doing this and that. I'm an entrepreneur and I told my story on Soft White Underbelly. You should go on there. So yeah, that's where I get my most fan mail and LinkedIn I get a lot of messages, but not the only the handwritten ones are coming from prison because that's something that's all I could use. But I'm not getting any handwritten fan mail out from elsewhere.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

I wonder if someday only people who've been in prison will know how to write by hand.

SPEAKER_02 32:31

Probably. I think we're headed there, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Impressive.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

What's one of the craziest messages you've received in your DMs from anybody?

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Yeah. I have had a lot of unwanted advances.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 32:53

Yeah, but I did have one stalker who luckily didn't live in the same country as me, but it turned into phone calls in my office and repeated lengthy voicemails. It was just, and the last one, she said, I think my my and this was a this person wasn't adult, but she said, My dad said I need to start taking my meds again. So I think that's what I'm gonna do. Click. And that was the second thing. I was like, thank God. It's a little when you're getting 17 voicemails a day, it's pretty intense. I'd never experienced that before.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Related question. I imagine you get some critical feedback, it's not all constructive or appreciative feedback. Have you ever received any criticism that you actually thought was spot on and it changed something for you?

SPEAKER_02 33:44

Oh, absolutely. I read all my Amazon reviews. Great customer feedback. I read every single one of them because I want to improve the product. I'm gonna write another book. So I want to know what I can do differently and what people like, you know, what people want more of. That's the what the I'm not gonna name this man because he's in the Epstein files, but it's a good it's all right, Bill Gates. He says, I hate quoting him now because it's so gross, but it's but the business side of it, I think the quote is your unhappiest customers are your greatest source of learning. Yeah, that's a valuable quote. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's important to do and have thick skin. Any author who's read their Amazon reviews, I hope has thick skin because it's it's there's a lot to learn in there sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Yeah, it's a little rough. People take out all kinds of frustrations on you. I have a question about businesses that you've worked with in the past to try to implement emotional intelligence training programs. It I've worked with companies that I think were really well intentioned and wanted to embark upon cultural transformation. And I worked with some that said they did, and maybe not so much, or they thought that they could make cultural change by fiat. And I'm wondering if you could tell when you were working with companies which was which.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Yeah. In two seconds. In two seconds. And the fiat is always they're so proud of their mission statement, and they passed it around to everybody, and you spend more than five minutes with the actual people running the business, and it means nothing to them. The devil is in the details when it comes to creating a high EQ culture, and it all starts with the training program. And that's why the bulk of my business all these years has been around emotional intelligence training, and it still is with Ledex. We're doing this really, this business is really taking off quickly because it is a well-thought-out emotional intelligence training program. When you get people in the room, if you take them through it in the right way, you don't just teach them about emotional intelligence, you plant a seed in your culture that grows. It affects people's behavior on a daily basis. And you need that constant feedback and interaction. That's why we include executive coaching for everyone who goes through the program, both with a live person and also with a virtual coach that sends you an AI coach that sends you feedback. These moments of practice are really important because that creates a culture, is a work in progress. It's something that you is achieved day to day, not just you go to the training program and you're done. So when it's done well, you actually change people's behavior over time. And then everybody's working towards this new solution, this improved culture. There's such a huge difference between that and the libservs that people provide to this.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

So true.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

Has artificial intelligence helped support your company?

SPEAKER_02 36:41

The way the AI is working great with what we're doing with EQ training, you can use the LeadX app that comes with the training to integrate all your assessments that you've taken. One of the things we talk about is that your personality is the vessel through which your emotional intelligence is expressed. So if you've taken the Myers Briggs, if you've taken the disk, if you've taken the Strengths Finder, you plug that all up into the app and it's going to provide recommendations for you that are integrating your EQ scores with your personality. Very cool. Personalized feedback. And that's so easy to do with AI. And it's in it because AI is dynamic, you can upload any new piece of data there and have it integrated to your feedback. So it really works well. It really works well. And it helps people keep doing that iterative process where they're changing and working on things, many aspects of themselves and connecting EQ to all of it.

SPEAKER_00 37:33

Wow. Great. So I know you're an avid listener of the podcast. And so you know that we've interviewed a civil engineer and a gastroenterologist and an executive coach and an ER nurse and a massage therapist and workplace investigator and political strategist and female dominatrix. And we've asked every one of them to tell us their wackiest story from all any place they've ever worked. And the number one issue underpinning every one of those incidences is a lack of self-awareness.

SPEAKER_02 38:08

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

So maybe tell us a little bit about why self-awareness is important, what it looks like, what it doesn't look like. And then if you have a tip that people could implement today to maybe uh enhance their self-awareness to prevent some of these incidences, and I can give you examples if you'd like. We work we're all ears.

SPEAKER_02 38:34

Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. You can't increase your EQ without increasing your self-awareness and seeing yourself diff differently, broadening the lens through how you see yourself. And self-awareness is a very difficult thing to achieve because you need objective feedback. So the reason you have people making these horrible self-awareness blunders is, and it's interesting because it's amazing how much suffering successful people are willing to put themselves through to get ahead. But when it comes to self-awareness, they put the blinders on. And that's because we're taught that how we are, we cannot change. And with a lot of characteristics, that's true. IQ, the not what you know, but the pace at which you assimilate new information is fixed at a very early age. They've done longitudinal studies, follow people age five to age 50, and relative to their peers, their IQ doesn't change. So I don't want to be self-aware about my IQ deficits because I can't change them. This is the mentality that people adopt. But when it comes to EQ, the opposite is true. The brain pathway for emotional intelligence is malleable and it's plastic. It's that's the term neurologists use to describe brain plasticity and how the brain can be flexible and adapt to new environments. So when you increase your self-awareness and you see yourself differently and what you need to work on, you can actually change brain pathways to reinforce new, more productive behaviors. Now, so one thing you have to see it the right way and you have to want it. Once you can do that, you need an objective understanding of your behaviors. Okay, so this new EQ test that I created, which has the really catchy name, the emotional intelligence test.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

You hired a marketing department for that, didn't you? At agency.

SPEAKER_02 40:26

It's something that we sell separately for$50. But I include it with my book for free because I have to provide that objective picture for people. No one's going to get the benefit out of my book without increasing their self-awareness. And you can't increase your self-awareness without an objective picture. So I do encourage readers to participate in some exercises where they go and seek feedback from people, but I can guarantee an objective picture of their EQ with that test. So that's why each copy of the book, New Emotional Intelligence, includes a passcode to get your EQ tested. And it shows you what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, and which sections of the book you should read first to fill these neat areas, to fill these gaps. That's really the only way to increase your self-awareness. And it's why it's such a neat area.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

It's huge. Is that the area that people's scores tend to be lowest in?

SPEAKER_02 41:16

And this is a finding that I've seen consistently since the very early days of my work. And that is just 36% of people are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen. It's just something people aren't particularly good at or really skilled at. There's a lot of room for improvement, and that is necessary for self-awareness.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

From your first job that you spoke about earlier to where you're at today, did you see this for your future?

SPEAKER_02 41:42

I definitely saw myself being a businessman, so to speak, an entrepreneur. I wasn't surprised by that. I think that when I was young, I had these grandiose ideas that I was going to be wildly successful. And then I got to work and I said, wow, this is really hard. And I don't know if I'm going to make it. And there was a long period of time where I was doing pretty well. And then I don't know that I had those crazy goals anymore of just doing something really wildly successful. I remember when my first book came out with Simon Schuster, I thought, oh, if I could do a hundred thousand hardcover copies, that would be great. So I wasn't anticipating doing five million, which I've done now. So in that way, I've some of those sort of big lofty goals have come have to fruition for me, which is really nice. So yeah, it's been a lot of different things. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

What's a behavior that on the surface seems strong or is often recommended, but it's a huge red flag from an emotional intelligence perspective?

SPEAKER_02 42:44

That's a good question. Probably this whole labeling your feelings thing that it somehow diminishes blaming other people for how you feel. It's gave this is a lot of relationship advice that where they say, I feel that you are being passive aggressive. Like somehow changes the fact that I just called you passive aggressive. And there's a lot more nuanced ways to talk about your feelings and express your feelings without being a robot. I think that people can see right through that. That's actually one of the things I talk about in my new book is being able to talk about your feelings without sounding like a robot because it falls flat and it makes people feel like you're trying to manipulate them or be conscious when usually your motivation is just won't talk about how you feel, which is that's an honest thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 43:28

Yeah. Do you think there's a correlation between people who are closed-minded, bigoted, racist, sexist, whatever, all the ists and isms, and their emotional intelligence?

SPEAKER_02 43:42

I don't know because I see so much individual variation. I can't say that's something that I've really looked at or studied carefully. I just I think having an open mind is there's about other people is a an aspect of emotional intelligence. Being able to see people for what they really are instead of. What you think they are. So there may be a connection there, but it's not something I've studied formally. So I couldn't say for sure.

SPEAKER_01 44:07

Yeah. What does your self-care routine look like? How do you stop the grind and how do you take care of yourself?

SPEAKER_02 44:13

Yeah. So for me, I I think vigorous exercise is a really good outlet. And for me, with surfing, it's something I'm really passionate about to the point that it's like I almost can't not do it. Like I really want to do it on like this. I started surfing when I was 12 and I'm still this grommet, this young kid that's like just dying to get out there. But I find that like right now, we have a really bad storm today and the wind is bad, so it's not a surfing day. And it looks like it's going to be that way for a few days, which we don't get very often, where the where you're just like you're not getting in the water for two or three or four days in a row. And what I tend to do those days is I start grinding, right? And I'm just working, and I don't find that it's my best flow. It's better when I get up and I work on something, and then I go out on the water for a couple hours and I'm invigorating my body, and then I get a lot of good ideas, and then I come back and I'm a little worn out enough that I'm calm and I finish my work. That's a good pace of a day. Hard to do when you work in if you're in an office all day, but there's different ways taking a walk at lunch or getting the gym at lunch or whatever. At least for me, if I get a little too wound up throughout the day, I don't find I'm as effective as if I move my body. Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Other than being an author now, have you ever thought about doing any other type of field of work? Anything else that interested you?

SPEAKER_02 45:36

I would I'd love to do stand-up comedy.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 45:39

Yeah. I think it's a really interesting art form. It's something I've always enjoyed. And then with podcasts, there's a lot of stand-up comics that have podcasts, and they spend a lot of time talking about their craft and how they do it and how they got there. It's just such a big, such a big thing to try to do. It's not something you just show up. It's like it's to do it bad is even like a huge hobby. So maybe someday I'll give it a try, put some bits together. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

I could see you directing your own reality show. I could see that in your future.

SPEAKER_02 46:10

I will say I've spoken to some pretty large audiences, and I am I don't think my talks are particularly humorous, but I've had some moments where I've gotten some really good laughs, even where things where I'm not really trying, and people just think it's funny, and they burst into laughter, and it feels so good to make a bunch of people laugh. It's pretty fun.

SPEAKER_01 46:27

You spent your earlier part of your career, like in clinical work and at school and everything. Did you take a public speaking class? How did you make the jump from being in an office working? And then now you have to present your information to a large audience. That's public speaking. Like, how did you make that jump, or do you still get nervous? Or what do you how do you handle that?

SPEAKER_02 46:49

I didn't take any courses. The only sort of speaking training I've had is when I got my first book deal, in order for the Simon and Schuster PR department to pitch us to TV shows, we had to get a TV coach. So we drove up to LA and we worked, spent an afternoon with these people that coach you on how to do sound bites and TV interviews and they prep you for how the sets, because the sets are really strange. You're practically touching legs, unless it's a morning show where you're on couches far apart. If it's a news desk, you're like touching legs with the people that are interviewing you. It doesn't look in person, it's not like it looks on TV. So I had a little training in that, no training in public speaking. So it's just trial by fire. It was literally just being at like a convention or something where I had the opportunity to speak about our products, speaking to groups that would listen. Then when I started selling books, being invited to speak at conferences, and it got to the point where the biggest event I did was that Willow Creek Leadership Summit. There were 14,000 people there live in their auditorium, and it was transmitted via satellite to churches across the nation. Quarter of a million people saw that talk live. So yeah, it's just something I practice and I got okay at it. Probably I there's other authors that are much better speakers than I am, but it's something I learned to enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 48:03

Was there ever an incident when you were on stage and you're like, this is just not going well? You just didn't.

SPEAKER_02 48:08

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

You're like, I'm reading their faces and they're just not having it.

SPEAKER_02 48:13

Oh, yeah, yeah. And that's something I can relate to the comics a little bit where they just I won't use the euphemism that they say, but it's just sometimes you just go on stage and you just eat it. There's just nothing you can do. And I felt that way with audiences where they're just not receptive to my to and there are, like I said, some of the jokes are spontaneous, but I do have a few jokes in my talk that I know hit and people laugh, and they just they're not laughing at the jokes. They're not into it. And then other times it's because you can't do anything wrong. It's it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

Do you think that the concepts of around emotional intelligence and the training and the books resonate just as well in other countries as they do in the United States?

SPEAKER_02 48:52

Yeah, I think they do by and large. Different countries, depending on how on how mono their culture is, might have some different takes on it. But by and large, emotional intelligence is it's fundamental to the human condition. So this idea that you want to be more self-aware and understand your emotions better and do something more productive with them translates really well. And we did you my my first big book did we sold that in 30 markets that we're in the process of doing that right now for the new emotional intelligence. I just signed deals for a Spanish publisher who's gonna publish it worldwide in Spanish, Portugal, Portuguese, French. It's just it's getting out there. And that's because there is, there's demand for this worldwide.

SPEAKER_00 49:33

Nice.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

Thank you for sharing your story with us. And you've officially joined the ranks of the brave and the bold. And thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

Thanks for having me. It was fun. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

That's it for this week's confession. We've laughed, cringed, and maybe questioned our own career choices.

SPEAKER_01 49:51

Big thanks to our anonymous guests for keeping it real and reminding us that behind every job title is a story worth telling. If you've got a workplace confession of your own, we're all ears. Hit us up at our email address. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Your support helps us keep the secrets flowing.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Until next time, keep your badge clipped, your coffee strong, and your stories wild. This is Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.