Laura Werbner: Hello, and welcome to this Compass Podcast. I'm Laura Werbner, Manager of Marketing and Communications. I also get to serve our organization as a member of the Frontline Leadership Steering Committee. And today, I come to you as part of that committee to talk about emotional intelligence. It is one of the topics that I have the privilege of discussing in one of our Frontline Leadership classes. I think it is just really so fascinating and really applies to everybody at some level. So, I wanted to talk to you about it today.

So, what is emotional intelligence and why is it important? Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions and recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others. It is really important. It's actually a leading indicator to predict success. And I have some statistics that I brought with me today to back that up. So, here are some emotional intelligence facts that you should know.

A 40-year study at UC Berkeley reported that emotional intelligence is nearly four times more powerful than IQ in predicting success. An internal study by PepsiCo revealed that managers with high emotional intelligence levels outperformed annual targets by 15-20%. And according to a study by Motorola, 93% of employees at a Motorola plant became more productive after adopting different emotional intelligence programs for stress relief.

So, here we are talking about predictor of success, outperforming targets, becoming more productive. Those are all things I think most of us strive to do. So, it's pretty important to have emotional intelligence if you want to become a better version of yourself. And that could be any version of yourself, a better person in general, maybe a better caregiver at work, maybe a better parent to your children, maybe a better child to your parents or a better leader. There's so many ways we all strive every day to be better versions of ourselves and emotional intelligence can help in all of those areas.

There are five components of emotional intelligence that we're going to go over today, and those are self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills. I'd like to take a little bit more time talking about each of these and what they are. We're going to start with self-awareness and that's understanding yourself, right? We're going to look at understanding ourselves in three areas: cognitive, physical, and emotional.

So, self-awareness is the ability to recognize your own feelings, behaviors, and characteristics, and their effect on others. Being self-aware can help you take better care of yourself, have deeper relationships and live a more fulfilling life. It's actually pretty eye-opening when you start practicing some of this and seeing yourself in a different light, how others are seeing you, and really focusing on self-awareness. So, I will just say, I have noticed that for myself going through training about emotional intelligence and teaching others about emotional intelligence.

The next one is self-regulation. That's the ability to control or direct disruptive impulses. Can you think before you act? Can you give it a couple minutes before you shoot off that text or that email that you're writing in the heat of the moment? What about thinking before you speak? This can be really hard. This is actually an area I found myself struggling with with lower self-regulation scores. And it's very hard because sometimes those emotions just take over and we really have to regulate that and come at it from a different perspective so that we just do better.

Let's talk about motivation. Motivation is a passion to work with energy and persistence for reasons beyond money or status. When you think about motivation, think of your why. And here at San Juan Regional Medical Center, we have asked you what your why is several times. We've had several My Why campaigns where we've talked to different caregivers and said, "What's your passion? What's your purpose? Why do you do what you do every day?" You might need to dig deep and peel back some layers and think about this for a while, but it's really important. Think about why you're doing what you're doing, why you started in the first place, and that really can help with your motivation.

Empathy. Empathy is another big one. The ability to understand the emotional needs of others. If you recall the What Matters to You training that you've gone through, it's not the same as sympathy. Sympathy is understanding from your own perspective, where empathy invites you to put yourself in someone else's shoes. We have a really great video that we share during our What Matters To You training on the difference between sympathy and empathy. And if any of you would like to see it, I'd be happy to share that with you.

And then, our fifth dimension of emotional intelligence is social skill. The proficiency in managing relationships, developing networks, building rapport, finding common ground. Your social skills can make you more persuasive and can help you create change. And when we talk about influence as part of emotional intelligence, being able to understand and influence the emotions of others, I want you to think of this in a positive light because some people think, "Oh, you're trying to tell others what to do." You're trying to create change, but it's coming from a positive place. It's working together to meet the goals that you have together, your shared goals. So, social skills are really important in this because it can really help you gain that buy-in and have other people want to come along with you and what you're trying to do.

When you work on yourself in any of these five areas, you're actually going to increase your emotional intelligence. And because all of these five components are interconnected, if you improve in one area, it can also help you do better in another. So if you are working really hard on self-regulation, you may see yourself improving in social skill. Vice versa, motivation might help you with your empathy, or your self-awareness might help you with your empathy or your self-regulation. Basically, everything here is connected. So, the better you're able to do in one area, the better you'll see yourself doing in more areas.

What do we do with this information? So, the first thing I encourage you to do is take stock of where you are now in your emotional intelligence journey. There are free emotional intelligence self-awareness checklists online, or you can reach out to me and I can send you one because we do this in frontline leadership. And we give everybody a piece of paper that's got a little test on it. Everyone takes the test, see where their scores are, and see where they have the higher scores in the dimensions, and maybe where they have lower scores in the dimensions they need to work on.

Once you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, you can determine what you should work on. Once you start improving in one area, you'll likely see that crossover that will reflect improvements in other areas as well. Increasing emotional intelligence can lead to many positive changes in your life. Think of your team performance, your leadership ability, your productivity, your wellbeing. Those are all things that could be positively influenced by your emotional intelligence. Decreasing occupational stress, decreasing staff turnover, those are also some great things that we'd like to see less of, right? So, you really have nothing to lose when it comes to working on your emotional intelligence.

I appreciate you listening to this Compass Podcast today. Feel free to reach out to me if you would like the self-assessment or any tips that we share in class on increasing emotional intelligence in any of the five areas. Better is our mission, and I think it's within all of us to want to strive towards better and be better. And what better way to start than with your own emotional intelligence? Thanks.