# Emotional wisdom explained

- **Episode:** [113](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/113.md) (2024-07-09)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** emotional-wisdom, leadership, pillar
- **Time:** 31:20–35:11 (start 1880s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/113?t=1880](https://truthliesandwork.com/113?t=1880)

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[31:20] Al Elliott: So let's talk about emotional wisdom. So you've, you've mentioned Emotional wisdom is the second pillar. And I really get that. You said your example was just see how you react if you are pushing down your own, your own feelings. If someone says, what do you want, Mexican, Italian? You're not sure. I don't care. We've all met those kinds of people who are always, honestly, it's fine. I'll stay late. Don't worry, I'll do it. How does that improving that make you a better leader? I know altogether it makes you a better leader, but how that specific one, how's that feed in?
[31:51] Alexis Zahner: It's a really, really good question. And the answer is for a few reasons it makes you a better leader. Firstly, As an individual, it's not until we attune to our own emotional settings— so what's going on inside of us— that we can actually recognize that in other people and take that discerning action. So becoming EQ— and I mean, this is very rooted in some of Daniel Goleman's work around emotional intelligence, obviously, and his work that was first written, I think it was in the— I want to say 1995. Yeah. Book Emotional Intelligence, seminal work in this space, that we are standing on the shoulders of giants in our work now to speak to this. So that really looks at the idea of firstly understanding our emotions and then managing our emotions. And to quote Viktor Frankl, when it comes to the managing emotions side of things, we have to be able to create space between what we're feeling and how we're reacting as a leader. So again, Something we can never take back in the workplace is how we make people feel. So as a leader, if we're not tuning into our emotions, understanding what they're trying to tell us, and taking that perhaps opportunity to pause before we're reactive in the relationships we have in the workplace, we can actually really damage trust, reliability, our consistency as a leader with the team around us. So becoming aware of our emotions and understanding how to use them effectively actually helps us to cultivate connection in a team setting. Now, whether that be personal or professional, building those interpersonal relationships, it just stems from understanding our emotions and how to use them effectively. I guess the only thing I'd like to add as an endpoint to that is when it comes to topics like empathy, which is all the buzz in leadership development and things like that right now, again, we can't actually offer things like compassion and empathy to others if we aren't attuned to our emotional our emotional landscape within ourselves and actually understand what these sort of things feel like. And again, just to speak to my own leadership sort of tendencies, especially as a younger person, I was just all frantic and all reactivity. And there is a concept called emotional contagion, and that is, as a leader, if we're not monitoring and using our emotions effectively, we are just spewing that into the environment around us. So if we're constantly stressed, constantly reactive, everything's urgent, or perhaps everything's negative doom and gloom, that's exactly what we can expect to reflect back to us in the culture around us. So how we are and how we show up will directly impact the sort of team culture that we're able to cultivate as a leader
[34:37] Leanne Elliott: Do you know what is funny? A lot of guests that we have on the pod are sports people or former sports people that have competed at very high levels. So, it's natural for them to be very familiar with the idea of a coach and the rounded, full view of a coach. Someone who, yeah, is going to pump them up in the changing room, but is also going to give them the push that they need to get that personal best. In business, often a coach can be seen as someone who's a bit softer, perhaps someone whose job is it to listen and gently guide people towards their goal. But as Alexis explains, this isn't the case