Emotional Intelligence of Future Leaders | Dr. Britt Andreata
📑 Chapters
00:00 - Introduction & Dr Britt introducing herself
01:53 - Emotional intelligence & wellness
03:23 - E.I. in the workplace
05:17 - Britt defines Emotional Intelligence
06:17 - Stories about leaders with high E.I.
10:41 - Key components of E.I.
14:53 - The role of childlike wonder for E.I leaders
16:21 - Psychological safety & its importance
17:17 - Giving guidance or feedback to leaders
19:36 - Emotional intelligence impact on the brain
23:40 - About Dr Britt’s book & courses
25:05 - The best possible future for E.I. for Dr Britt
28:28 - Thought leaders that Dr Britt recommends
30:24 - Jiani’s recap of the episode
33:20 - Dr. Britt at 11 years old
34:42 - The role of childlike wonder in Britt’s life
35:30 - Challenges that Dr Britt had to overcome
39:29 - Dr Britt’s magic
Watch the full episode here.
💕 Story Overview
On S5E5 of the @MAGICademy Podcast we welcome Dr. Britt Andreata to the show! She is a thought leader and expert in brain science, leadership, and education, with experience developing brain science-based training programs for organizational effectiveness and personal growth. We had a great conversation about emotional intelligence, neuroscience, and how those concepts positively influence the workplace environment, as emotionally skilled leaders can empower themselves and talents more efficiently and magically.
Dr Britt is the CEO of Brain Aware Training, which focuses on applying neuroscience to improve workplace learning and development. In this episode, we dive deeper into empathy and psychological safety, what happens in the brain while emotional intelligence works, and the huge impact it can have on organizations to train their workforce to be emotionally skilled.
🌼 Magical Insights
Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace: Emotional intelligence has four quadrants: self-awareness, which is related to how much the worker is tuned to their emotions; self-control, related to how they manage their emotions; awareness of others, related to how well they can read and process emotions in others; and building successful relationships, which is a mix of all of the above to perform properly in the workplace. It is key to spend the right amount of time in self-reflection (therapy can help) to avoid overrating ourselves on any quadrant and to be able to solve emotional challenges to build effective relations with others.
Empathy and Childlike Wonder: Empathy comes from being curious about what other people are feeling and being able to relate to that and react accordingly. As adults reconnect with their childlike wonder, they can cultivate a greater sense of empathy by adopting openness and curiosity about others.
Neuroscience behind emotional intelligence: The prefrontal cortex, which helps us make decisions and control our actions, becomes more active in people who are good at understanding emotions. This part of the brain helps us handle social situations and respond with empathy. The amygdala, which processes emotions like fear and happiness, communicates with the prefrontal cortex to help us manage our feelings. Other areas, like the insula and orbitofrontal cortex, also play a role in how we feel and react emotionally. The anterior cingulate cortex is involved in recognizing and regulating emotions. Together, these brain regions help us recognize our own emotions and understand how others are feeling, allowing us to respond appropriately in different situations. This ability to manage emotions is what we call emotional intelligence.
Breaking the Barrier of Power: As leaders have more power than their talents, we need to create psychological safety by breaking this barrier. It can be through admitting their fallibilities and seeking feedback from a more experienced underling, intentionally asking questions to foster conversation, or thanking and encouraging their subordinates when they come with some criticism or feedback. These actions are a great way to build a strong work environment where people feel safe to share their ideas and emotions.
⭐ What’s Dr Britt’s Magic?
Dr Britt is really good at taking complex concepts and synthesizing them into really easily digestible or understandable pieces, to give to people the actionable takeaway for them to be able to do something with it.
Conclusion
Emotional intelligence in the workplace is a sophisticated interplay of four key quadrants - self-awareness, self-control, awareness of others, and relationship building - all underpinned by complex neurological processes involving the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex. These brain regions work in concert to help us recognize and manage emotions in ourselves and others, enabling appropriate responses in various situations.
Success in developing emotional intelligence requires dedicated self-reflection (potentially aided by therapy) to avoid overconfidence in any quadrant, while maintaining a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity about others' emotional states. This becomes particularly crucial in leadership contexts, where power dynamics can create barriers to authentic emotional expression.
We as leaders can foster psychological safety by demonstrating vulnerability, actively seeking feedback from experienced talents, and creating an environment where open dialogue and emotional honesty are not just permitted but encouraged, ultimately building stronger workplace relationships and more effective teams.
If you would like to stay tuned with our future guests and their magical stories. Welcome to join us.
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Emotional Intelligence to Boost Workplace Happiness
Boost Workplace Success with Emotional Intelligence
Britt's Magic: Simplifying Complex Concepts
Effects of Toxic Workplace Culture Today
Expanding Your Mind with Challenging Perspectives
Unlocking Team Peak Performance with Psychological Safety
Unlocking Empathy- The Power of Wonder and Curiosity
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Andreatta, B. (2017). Wired to Resist. Santa Barbara, 2017, 33.;
Andreatta, B. (2018). Wired to Connect. 7th Mind Publishing.
Andreatta, B. (2019). Wired to grow: Harness the power of brain science to master any skill. 7th Mind Publishing.
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Dr. Britt Andreatta is a prominent thought leader in the fields of leadership, neuroscience, psychology, and education. She serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Brain Aware Training, where she focuses on developing science-based training programs aimed at enhancing organizational performance and individual potential. Under her leadership, Brain Aware Training has become a key provider of innovative learning solutions that leverage insights from neuroscience to address contemporary workplace challenges.
Dr. Britt is also an accomplished author, known for her influential books such as Wired to Grow, Wired to Resist, Wired to Connect, and Wired to Become, which explore the intersection of brain science and success.
Website: www.BrittAndreatta.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/brittandreatta
Book: www.brittandreatta.com/book
X: x.com/BrittAndreatta
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Welcome to MAGICademy Podcast. Today with us is Dr Britt and she has been in a learning development and leadership development space for almost 25 plus years and she has a tremendously impressive history working across a lot of major organizations to do this. Just to name a few, she has been at the chief learning officer for linda.com. She's also a senior consultant helping LinkedIn to lead global leadership development cohorts and programs as well. She has served multiple organizations such as. Comcast and LinkedIn, we mentioned that and a lot of other organizations who want her expertise like crazy to help them guide the leadership development programs for their own talents and their own organization.
And today our conversation will be focused mainly on the emotional intelligence. For our future and current leaders, and it's going to be a very important theme. So welcome Dr.Britt to come to our podcast and share your wisdom and magic with us.
I'm excited to be here and to connect with your listeners.
Beautiful. So the first question. Bee, bee, bee in front of you lands a spaceship, out walks a very friendly alien. If you were to use one word, one sound, or one movement to introduce yourself, what would that be?
I'd probably just do a simple smile with a bow. I think that would work. Showing kind of deference or respect is a great way to start an opening.
I can definitely feel that energy coming just by talking with you like an underlining tone of your personality. That's beautiful. So why emotional intelligence and wellness as the key priorities for the time now?
Yeah, it really came out of the pandemic when folks had a lot of time to reflect on their priorities.
When you're faced with your mortality, it tends to affect your values and what you what you find meaning in. And employee well being employee wellness has become a top priority that workers are looking for, and they're particularly wanting to feel that someone genuinely cares about them in the workplace, whether that's their boss or the senior leaders.
And so we're seeing this research topic crop up in a lot of the the global researchers, like McKenzie Deloitte, Gartner Accenture, a lot of them are doing some research in this space. And we also know that employee well being really is aligned with increased productivity, increased retention, decreased stress all the decreased burnout.
So we know that when folks feel like they can focus on their wellness or well being, it leads to great things for the organization too.
That's great. And I heard from some Folks saying that the organization, even though it's like a highly structured, it's actually an emotional organization, so it hurts all the emotions for individuals and leaders and talents.
And so having the ability to tap into the emotional intelligence of the whole nation, our team is very critical. Very great. So also, according to the data that you've shared we probably need to relocate kind of locate where the data is in the data you mentioned. It's 95 percent of people say that they're actually emotionally aware.
They have good emotional intelligence. However, actually, 15 or even 10 percent actually. are truly aware of their emotions. And why is that?
So emotional intelligence kind of has four quadrants to it. One is self awareness. So how much you're tuned in and you're aware of your emotions, your self perception aligns with how people perceive you and your confidence in yourself.
And then another quadrant is self control. Can you manage those emotions? And then there's awareness of others. Can we read emotions correctly in others? Can we extend empathy? And then finally, there's building successful relationships. So when we look at this quadrant of self awareness, that's the one where a lot of people overrate their self awareness based on when they're objectively assessed.
And it comes down to, a lot of people don't spend time in self reflection. If you ask someone, what are your top five core values, they might not have really thought about it. They're living by them every day, but they may not be able to articulate it, for example. And some people have a perception of themselves.
that doesn't align with how other people see them. This oftentimes happens like in performance reviews where you're assessing how great you think you did, and then the organization is reflecting back how they see you. And so if there's a big disconnect between how you see yourself and how others see you, that's another indication that there's some work to do to close that gap.
That doesn't mean we're trying to please everyone, but it does mean that we're not. We're not widely out of alignment with how other people experience us. So that's the self awareness piece.
I appreciate that. And so how do you define emotional intelligence then?
Yeah the definition is emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately gather emotional data and effectively use it to solve emotional challenges and build effective relationships with others. And then Daniel Goldman is the researcher who identified the four quadrants. And within those four quadrants are a total of 20 competencies.
And the research is very clear that 80 to 90 percent of the competencies that make someone successful are a hallmark of emotional intelligence. When people derail their careers, 75 percent of the time, it's due to A lack of emotional intelligence and companies that roll out emotional intelligence training because it is a skill you can learn, see really great return on investments in all kinds of ways.
It's the mother skill that unlocks all kinds of things for us.
That's beautiful. And can you share with us some stories where when a leader does actually have and very high level of emotional intelligence? What kind of impact that they would have in the teams that they lead or the people that they collaborate with.
I'm all we're all in for stories.
Yeah absolutely. Typically, when we think of like toxic workplaces, and a lot of people experience toxic workplaces, we've seen some recent data. 87 percent of employees say they have been under a toxic manager sometime in their career, and 30 percent say they've experienced a toxic manager more than once.
Toxic behavior can range from undermining someone, micromanaging them, being, Truly aggressive or abusive. It's really a continuum, right? And so toxicity in the workplace is really a sign that there's a lack of emotional intelligence, because typically when people behave not nicely to others, it's because they've got some emotional wounds that they have not yet done the healing work around.
They may or may not be aware of those wounds. They may have a trigger and they're responding and getting heated in a moment. But typically, The things that lead to toxic behavior in the workplace come from a wound that someone has not yet done the healing work around.
That is self deserve a different topic.
It
does. So you
said 80 percent a 80, 80 percent of people,
87 percent of employees under one, at least one toxic manager and a toxic corporate culture is 10 and a half times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate, meaning how many times their employees leave. So obviously these things, if you fix them, you're going to have a happier, healthier workplace.
You're going to keep your best people. But in addition the data is clear that when organizations roll out emotional intelligence training meaning they're giving this skill, they're investing in this skill and people changes from the top leaders. It's down to the individual workers and how they engage with each other.
So teams are more successful. People are more productive. There's less conflict. There's more productive innovation. All kinds of things are impacted by our ability to manage our emotions and communicate effectively with others.
Beautiful. Are there particular stories that, that you can share with folks who are leading with two emotional intelligence?
Yeah, I work with executives all the time. And so when I have the ability to work with emotionally intelligent leaders, I saw this a lot during the pandemic. Emotionally intelligent executives were really leaning into making sure that they were providing a lot of information. They were listening to what employees needed.
They were adding additional support and resources to help employees thrive through that difficult time. They had a lot of empathy for what was going on. So when you have leaders at the top like that, it filters down into the values and the norms of how people treat each other. I also have some data on some specific.
Business cases. So here's some stories. A global makeup company did emotional intelligence training with their salespeople, and they brought in 2.5 million dollars more in sales and international hotel chain used an EQ initiative, and it increased their market share by 24%. A national military organization saved 190 million by using emotional intelligence to screen their para rescue jumpers and a major pharmaceutical company saw double digit profit growth following an increase in team emotional intelligence.
So there's a lot of clear business case reasons that. Focusing on emotional intelligence creates a healthier, better workplace, and that's going to lead to all these other all these other results. And in fact, Harvard found a company that prioritizes emotional intelligence is 22 times more likely to perform higher than companies that do not focus on emotional intelligence.
That's beautiful. And for emotional intelligence, what are some key components of the emotional intelligence? And when you're talking about those case studies, was that one of the reasons Because people have those high level of emotional intelligence, people feel safe. So there's a level of like psychological safety around the space.
Yeah. So if we think about the quadrants is the journey you have to take. Self awareness is the first place. So you can teach that as a skill. You give people opportunities to do some self reflection, maybe do exploration of their core values or their life experiences. Maybe you give them a 360 or some kind of assessment where they can see how they perceive themselves versus others.
So that's how you can help people with self awareness. In the self control category, which is the second quadrant. This is about the ability to identify your emotions and then also control those emotions. So you can teach people, first of all, you can show them the emotions wheel. There's hundreds of emotions we could be having.
And so helping people get better at home, what is this feeling I'm having and learning how to identify it. And then also finding healthy ways to express it. Like anger is a perfectly appropriate emotion, but there's some good and some not so good ways to express it. So how do we express our anger in ways that are productive and appropriate?
I like to teach people the amygdala hijack, which is when our body goes into fight or flight mode. But we're not in a life threatening situation because when that happens, our brain shuts down our logic and our self awareness. And this is why people that are normally really great people do things that they later regret.
They act in a moment where their logic or their self awareness is not helping them make a better decision. And then, of course, our triggers. We all get to adulthood with some kind of wounds. You can't make it to adulthood without some kind of harm that's happened to you psychologically or physically.
And so understanding what those wounds are and what your particular triggers are, you then can be more self empowered around anticipating them having a plan. If someone kind of pushes that button in you, you can do the healing work through therapy. There's a lot of research on the benefits of certain therapy types for healing trauma.
So people can do that work and then that makes that button less active. or maybe even heals the button altogether so that no one can push it. But if people do push it, learning how to control. So you don't have that outburst and do something you later regret. So that's the second quadrant.
The third is where we start to look at others. Can I recognize in you that you're having an amygdala hijack or that you're starting to go into a pretty distressed place? And how do I have empathy? How do I, especially if I'm a manager, how do I support you? Instead of just pushing on you and making it worse, right?
This also includes appreciating diversity and realizing that we're all different. And all of those life experiences and identities are important and contribute to the health of the organization and the work that we're doing together. And then the last quadrant is building relationships. And it's got things in it like how to communicate effectively, how to facilitate team performance.
How to deal with conflict. Conflict is natural and normal, but some people don't have great conflict management skills. And then if you're in a leadership role, how to influence others or develop others. So the four quadrants give us a pretty nice, robust set of skills. And you can't really be great at leading others if you can't manage yourself.
So you have to go through them in order.
That's great. And I think having our own pie ce of self awareness and leadership is the number one kind of starting point for any great leaders and they all go through that process. It's very calm thoughts and happy to hear coming from you as an expert in a space that everyone go through certain process.
There's no skipping around. What role do you think childlike wonder can play for a highly emotionally intelligent leaders and also the people that they lead and they work with in modern organizations?
Yeah. If we think about the core tenet of empathy is to be really curious about what other people are feeling. It's not about saying, oh, in that situation, how would I feel? It's looking at, oh, they're feeling this. Huh? When's the time I felt that? So empathy is grounded in curiosity and wonder.
I also think that when we can enter a state of wonder, it naturally puts us in that place of. Not knowing, but being open to discovering as opposed to walking around thinking you have all the answers. So I think wonder is a great place. And then I think wonder is also a great place of self care.
Like, when we give ourselves permission to go explore or do things that bring us joy or bring, that we intentionally seek out opportunities for wonder. I think that's a real important form of self care that sometimes we get too busy to do, but it's really important.
That's great. And also, if the environment is safe, then people have more opportunities to display that side of the results, interrupting the work is actually helping them to do better of what they're doing as a
group was a team as an organization.
Psychological safety study after study has shown that's really the cornerstone of great work is that people feel safe enough and they don't believe they will be ridiculed, rejected or embarrassed. Think about what a low bar that is. But it's just knowing that if I make a mistake or if I ask a question or if I challenge an assumption, I'm not going to be ridiculed or rejected by the team. My input's going to be valued, right? Doesn't mean that I'm right, but I'm listened to my input matters. So psychological safety is a pretty low bar, and yet it turns out that it really drives.
Peak performance in teams and organizations over and over again, to the point where it's like the number one thing you should teach people what it is and how to create it is creating the safe space for people to take risks and make mistakes and to learn. And all of that's going to be tied to emotional intelligence, right?
They're all connected.
That's great. So if someone is working in a team as a talent, is there ways for the talent to help the leaders to be more emotionally aware without all the risks?
Yeah, it's a great question. Psychological safety, we have it in two spheres, right? If we're on a team, we have it with our peers, our teammates, and then there's psychological safety with the leader.
So with each other, it's really about listening, caring about each other, checking in with each other, seeking out each other's input. There's behaviors that we do, but with the leader, it's really the leader's job because they are in a position of power and power naturally creates a barrier because I have the ability to hire, fire and evaluate you.
So it's the leader's job to pierce that barrier of power. By intentionally doing actions that create psychological safety. One of them is acknowledging your own fallibility. So you pull yourself off the pedestal and say, Hey, I might be the leader, but I really need your input because you have more expertise or an experience than I have with this.
A second thing is to intentionally ask questions so that you broaden and deepen the conversation. You play devil's advocate. You open the door for people to share. Probably the hardest one is when people do come to you with a challenge or a critique or a mistake, the first words out of your mouth have to be thank you.
Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for the courage. It took you to tell me that instead of freaking out or shutting people down, right? Because you can say, oh, I want to be psychologically safe, but if you don't act that way, then people won't come forward again. And then finally, is really looking at learning, that mistakes are learning and humans.
Get better by learning. And so really looking at how do you harvest the learning that comes from making mistakes? Make sure you don't make those mistakes again in the future, but you want to do it in a way that emboldens taking more risks in the future as opposed to shutting down risk taking because you're going to get sidelined.
So it's really about. Turning learning into the core outcome and that's how we get to better performance.
That's beautiful. That also got me curious. When people are really emotionally intelligent as a lead or as a collaborate, what happens in the neural pathways or the brain, you mentioned about the amygdala hijacking. So I would have safely assume that when we are not emotionally intelligent, the
amygdala would be the one who's like lighting up much of the kind of the activities versus the other one. So I'm curious to hear in terms of like neuroscience wise, what's really going on?
I've got a few answers to this. So one is that, our emotions, do create a biological response.
For example, when we feel anger more blood flow is triggered to the hands, preparing us for some kind of confrontation. When we feel fear, blood flow is directed to the legs so that we can run away. When we're surprised our eyes literally widen and our whole optical nerve does something different so that we can process things visually faster.
Okay. And when we feel happiness or love we get a whole parasympathetic response. Our body releases oxytocin, which is the calming chemical, the love chemical, and it really fosters calmness and cooperation with each other. So biologically emotions are data and there's a whole chemical response that happens.
And then we have patterns that humans have. So the amygdala, If we're truly in a life saving situation, all the things that it does to prepare your body to survive are really important. So if you think about shutting down self awareness, if I'm in a car accident, that is a great thing, because then I'm not aware of how injured I am, so I won't go into shock as fast.
But if I'm in a staff meeting and Bob is triggering me losing my self awareness is going to lead to me Maybe saying you're doing something that I'll regret later. So the biology of all of it is really interesting. And then if we think about wellbeing, there's two types of wellbeing. One is happiness.
The ancient Greeks called it hedonic wellbeing. It's pleasure. It's that sense of joy it's usually fleeting and it's very self focused. What feels good to me. So chocolate cake. Awesome. I love it. That's hedonic being. And then eudaimonic wellbeing is that deeper sense of purpose or meaning where we're contributing to others.
So it's not self focused. It's other focused. It's not always happy. Sometimes it's hard work. Sometimes there's effort or distress in that, but it creates that deeper sense of satisfaction that you're contributing to something more meaningful. Science is really clear. We need both. If we're out of balance, we don't feel good.
And one is not better than the other. We need a balance of both of them. So those are some of the neuroscience goodies that I've learned that I think really help us understand ourselves and each other better.
Yeah, so I would safely assume when the leaders are really Attuned to their own emotions and others emotions that they will tend to get into that eudaimonic kind of well being state more often.
Yeah, and the eudaimonic and hedonic register in different parts of the brain, so we know that we experience them biologically differently. But if you have a leader who's super passionate about, Their sense of purpose, there is a dark side to our purpose, which is, and you see this sometimes in health care workers or people who work with, populations that are going through tragic events think about military or geopolitical stuff or social work.
We can be so focused on our purpose that then we're not good at. Managing boundaries. So we tend to overwork and burn out, for example. If you have a leader who's overdriven with their purpose, they can be overworking their team and not tuned into it. Cause they're so focused on making a change around this issue.
That also deserve another in depth topic.
I know you, you have one book coming. Are you publicated more courses?
I'm sure you can tell I'm a curious person. I love learning. Yeah. You
are
And that has led, I've written four books on the brain Science of Success.
So it started with Wire to Grow, which is helped wire
to learn, wire to connect, wire to resist wire to change.
Almost. The Wired to Grow is the one about learning. Wired to Resist is about change. Wired to Connect is about teams and collaboration. And then the most recent book that I wrote is Wired to Become, which is all about purpose and meaningful work.
You almost had all of them.
I almost had
them all. So I write the books and people can read them and they're filled with lots of stories and examples. I've also built training around all these topics. And so there's video courses that are available on LinkedIn Learning. or cornerstone. I deliver training and my team delivers training and organizations.
So we get to give people some really actionable tools they can use around all these topics. And I just love it. I think it's really fun to work in this space.
Yes. Very important and so much more insight that we need to bring and translate that from very, Sophisticated research and bring that into the public and application and actually benefit everyone working together.
All right. And if we like moving to the future. What would be the best, most ideal future you can envision with all the advancements of technologies? What would that look like in terms of like emotional intelligence and emotional well being?
Yeah, I believe our best future is when we, Realize how connected we all are, as humans around the globe with other living, species with our environment.
It is all connected. When we take an emotional intelligence approach, what we want to do is create choices where we can. Everyone can thrive and not one group is thriving while another group is suffering, right? We want to do that. And it's absolutely doable. We have the technology.
We have the resources. We literally have the ability to have no one be hungry on the planet. But then you've got. Corporations and governments and tyrannical leaders. And there's all kinds of other forces that maybe don't want that to happen, but we have the technology. So I would love to see technology continue to move us forward to a more caring, kind world.
I think the pandemic did that a lot and that's why so many workers are now hungering for well being and a sense of purpose and meaning at work, and then where technology fits in, there's some amazing applications of technology to help people become more emotionally intelligent.
You can use avatars and headsets and VR experiences. to become better at reading emotions and others or practicing managing a situation. I work with an international hotel chain and they do a VR situation where you have a series of very angry and upset customers coming to the front desk.
And how do you manage that? Especially if they're saying or do things that Push your buttons and might trigger you so we can practice this in a safe environment like a VR setting. There's VR and AR and all kinds of ways. We can use technology. I think those are great when we can practice and also get feedback.
You can interact with avatars, and then you get feedback on the screen and you get to try it again. And so you get to practice and develop the habit. I think what's really cool is our brain codes. What we see in a virtual reality experience as real, even though we cognitively know that it's not our brain experiences
it's real. So you can now like film a top performer doing something. And if you look down and hands and legs doing stuff, even though, they're not yours, it helps the brain wire. So they're using this technology to help. People who are injured learn to walk again. You can use it in a training environment.
You can look down and see your body doing a skill and your brain is taking that in as if you're doing it. So there's really exciting applications of how technology can help us develop a whole range of skills and do it in a psychologically safe way, right? A chance to make mistakes and learn and improve.
Beautiful. It feels as if we lived many, many lifetimes within one life in that simulation.
Absolutely.
Great. All right. So as we move into the magic portion of our conversation, are there any particular thought leaders or innovators that you would want to Recommend our audience to follow and to continuously learn from?
Yeah, so I follow a lot of scientists and they are specialists in their fields. So I would encourage you to look at who are the thought leaders, the researchers. I love Daniel Goleman's research on emotional intelligence. Brene Brown's work on courage and vulnerability.
Date Richard Davidson. He's the researcher out of the university of Wisconsin studying mindfulness and how it literally changes the brain, even with a short practice every day. There's all kinds of folks. So I follow my interests, but I like to. I like to lean towards science as opposed to opinion.
I think that, looking at what the data shows us is important. And then I keep an eye out for who's doing new, interesting stuff too. I really like disruptors in the space. Someone who comes along with a whole new way of thinking about something and checking that out. So I like to look at some futurists.
I don't know. It depends on the topic, but I have a lot of folks that I think are really fascinating.
That's beautiful. That's where the diversity comes in.
Absolutely. And I think it's important to expose yourself to stuff that challenges you too, right? That doesn't align with your belief for your world view.
If nothing else, it's a great exercise for your brain to have to contemplate different perspectives. But oftentimes you'll find some really great nuggets in there and realize that diversity of thought gives us a richer understanding of things.
Yeah, it helps us to expand our current box of thinking models and rebuild new ones and expanding to a wider space.
So it's expanding in terms of our thinking and our tolerance.
Absolutely.
Beautiful. All right. So let me try my best to give a recap for our audience before we move into the magic portion of it. So we've talked about the story of Dr.Britts and her passion about digging deeper into the research and neuroscience about emotional intelligence among many, many other topics that she explores.
And in terms of emotional intelligence, there is a clear connection between emotional intelligence and emotional wellness. And also according to research even though 80 or 90 percent of folks say that they are emotionally aware, actually only 10 to 15 percent actually are. And there are ways to actually deliberately and consciously develop and enhance the emotional intelligence within each one of us.
And she shared about four steps of processes that people usually go through. The most important one is coming from our own. Sometimes when we are not being emotionally aware, it's usually when the amygdala is hijacking our senses and our cognitive functions and trapping us in the flight or kind of escape
state. And not be able to take in the data objectively from everywhere else and not be able to manage and control what to say or how to react. So so called the button. So everyone has all those kind of buttons and those buttons are formed usually when we were little Consciously or unconsciously.
So the 1st step is always to be aware of where are our buttons. And then once we are aware of it, we can potentially through meditation through reflection or through what Dr.Britt mentioned about virtual reality, all sorts of Good technologies to help us unravel the sense of stockiness and the, and remove the buttons, or maybe at least mitigate the buttons.
And then once we have that, we will be able to lead and work within an environment where everybody feels safe, where everybody is able to potentially explore and be curious and activate their sense of wonder, a bigger purpose within the team and. Be childlike in a adult and in a productive and in a mission driven way.
And we also mentioned about there's two types of wellness. One is more of hedonic wellness. It's when Dr.Britt was saying drinking, eating a chocolate cake versus a monic wellness. It's where mission driven. And that's where we're able to. Go beyond our little self and see the bigger world.
So they, they're all interconnected in terms of emotional intelligence and wellness. All right, so I hope I did a good job with that and let's move into the magic part of Dr.Britt. So curious if we can trace all the way back when you were 11 years old, what did you enjoy creating or playing so much that time disappeared for you?
As a little kid, I was really into two things, time and nature. I would, I grew up in the mountains of Colorado, so I would find a stream and I could just spend hours looking at the water and floating twigs down it and looking at the bugs and the birds and all of that. So nature.
And then I was an avid reader. I still am. So I would grab a book and get in this fuzzy green bean bag that I had and just hours and hours would pass in a book. So those would probably be the two ways that time disappeared. And for me, I wasn't creating so much as a kid. I think I was taking in my environment more.
But I do create now as an adult. And when I do that, time disappears for me.
I love that. Researching, taking all the data.
Yeah. And that presentation deck. I love it. Finding the right imagery and the data points. I, the next thing I know, six hours have passed and I didn't even, Realize it.
No drinking water.
No.
I do
drink
water.
I'm good. Okay. That's good. That's good. I sometimes set a timer. So every one hour I will have this like Tibetan bow ringing in the background to help me to reorient and re represent. What role does childlike wonder play in your own life?
For me, it's when I travel when I'm a discovering a new place and I don't know and so I'm taking it all in and I love the newness of discovery.
My husband and I try to make a point of, every a couple weekends a month going and just trying a new coffee shop or just trying to find something new, even in our own town if we're not traveling. And then, of course, I love travel. And I think when I'm researching, I definitely get Oh my gosh, I can't believe that.
Check this out. Like I definitely get really geeky about the things I'm discovering and I then want to tell everyone about them.
That's beautiful. I resonate. I resonate with that also. Yeah, I can see that about you. And were there any particular challenges that you feel like unheard and you would like to bring that to the awareness of the collective?
Yeah, I grew up in a pretty abusive situation as a child, so I was very much in survival mode.
As a kid and as an adult that showed up as repressed memories coming out as panic attacks. So at the age of 30, I started having massive panic attacks and became almost agoraphobic. I couldn't go anywhere. So that pushed me into therapy. And that's where I learned about the amygdala hijack and triggers.
And one of my favorite books is the body keeps the score and how our body stores trauma. So as I overcame that challenge and I did the healing work, I learned so much about. Myself, but also just humanity. And so I think it's why I weave so many of these themes into my work is I feel like a lot of this is the manual for being human that none of us were given.
And then if we do our healing work, we can go on to parent in a more intentional way. And so each generation can get healthier and healthier, which I think is really important. I think we all have challenges to overcome. I think it's how we take that experience and honor it and validate those feelings and yet also then lean into how do we heal?
But that is our true journey toward wholeness.
It's evolution in a lifetime. , yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I believe that's kinda wonder of our purpose in addition to everything that we do, we contribute to the world, to the society. At the same time, maybe the work is healing us maybe because we're healing through the process, we're able to produce better work for the world and benefit more people.
So it's a very benign kind of loop.
Yes, it's wonderful.
So what is your magic as of now,
I think my magic is, and I think it's been my superpower for a long time. I'm really good at taking complex concepts and synthesizing them into really easily digestible or understandable pieces and then give people the actionable takeaway, like here's some things to go do with it.
And so I think. That's my superpowers. I can take stuff that's really convoluted or confusing and then find a way to make it easier for people to understand. And I enjoy that work very much.
I love that. And I think we, we need this talent because a lot of times the world is moving faster and faster and we get exposed to as, Diverse of the information as possible and AI is generating information and noises.
And so the ability for us to evaluate what information to take in and how to understand a very complex kind of information and still them down into applicable insights and suggestions and ideas and steps is very helpful that helps everybody else to evolve on their own path, too, because information are powerful when they're being leveraged and implemented.
Beautiful. Yes, appreciate. Thank you. I appreciate you. For folks who wanted to learn more about Dr.Britt and her work and her upcoming book and all the books that she's written so far, which is a lot you will have fun reading all of them and over all of her courses across lynda. com and other platforms and LinkedIn, I believe.
So great to have you, Dr.Britt, to join us in our conversation, and I hope you had a great time sharing your stories, and I definitely had a good time listening to your stories and all the evidence based stories and data and insights. Thank you very much.
Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me and having this conversation.
So thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Disclaimer:
The content shared is to highlight the passion and wonder of our guests. It is not professional advice. Please read our evidence-based research to help you develop your unique understandingAI technologies have been utilized to assist in creating content derived from genuine conversations. All generated material undergoes thorough human review to ensure accuracy, relevance, and quality.
